Page 106 - Doctrine and History of the Preservation of the Bible revised

repentance. Yet, the Bible also says that before the foundation of the world God elected people to be
saved according to His foreknowledge. One aspect involves the free will of man; the other the
sovereignty of God. We may not be able to put both of those thoughts together to become totally
consistent, but needless to say, both are true.

One of God’s good gifts to the Church throughout the centuries has been commentaries on Scripture,
written by learned, wise theologians who love God and his Word. We should always try to interpret
what we’re reading with the help of the Spirit and other Scriptures before reading other interpretations
since they can influence our thinking. But listening to or reading these Bible scholars can shed a lot of
light on a passage of Scripture and help us put it into perspective with other passages of the Bible.

Try to examine the passages using a lexicon which gives you the meanings of each word in a verse and
its part of speech or gender in the original language. Take time to study the basic of original languages
and then use your knowledge to examine the verse in light of what you have learned about those
languages. Here is an example:

I John 3:6 Whoever abides in Him does not sin, and whoever sins has not seen Him, neither does He
know Him.

This is a confusing verse. It sounds like NO PERSON cannot abide in Christ, since everyone sins. Is this
verse saying no person can really know God or can abide in Him? Let’s look at the verse through an
interlinear translation which will break down all the Greek for us.

An interlinear translation will show you the Greek Words for the verse in Greek order, the English words
below, and the tenses and voices of all verbs, the case of all the nouns, the objects of each noun, and so
on. If you understand what these tenses, voices, and cases mean, you will easily be able to find out
what the author of the verse is clearly saying. So, let’s do that with I John 3:6:

Notice that below the English words are some abbreviations. They tell you the information you are
looking for in showing you the use of tense, voice, or case of various words. The question is, how can a
person say He abides in Christ if he sins? So, we need to look at the information about the verb “sins.”
Notice under the word is the abbreviations, V-PIA-3S. What that stands for is V =(verb), P= (Present), I=
(Indicative), A = Active, then there is a dash, 3S = third person singular. So, what does all that mean?

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