Transcription downloaded from https://yetanothersermon.host/_/bbcsylmar/sermons/21495/the-pure-words-of-the-king-james-bible-pt-6-verb-endings/. Disclaimer: this is an automatically generated machine transcription - there may be small errors or mistranscriptions. Please refer to the original audio if you are in any doubt. [0:00] analyzing the syllables, the length of words, the length of sentences, the structures, the kinds of words, the origin of words, and finding out that, nope, you lied, the King James Bible is actually easier to read according to their computer analysis. [0:16] Here's where we are, and this is where I'm going to catch, there we go. Oh, it got crooked on me. I'm sorry. It's going to bother somebody, I know. [0:30] We are in this spot here about, well, it uses these and vows, and we don't talk like that anymore, and that's a big problem. We need to update that and change that in all the new versions. Of course, they do. [0:41] Every one of them gets rid of every thee and every thou and every thy and thine and ye. It's like it's a bad word or something. They got rid of it. And the truth is, I don't care who you are, if you can speak English and read English at any grade level, the word thou does not blow your mind. [1:00] When the Bible says, thou shalt not commit adultery, you're not just standing there like, I can't understand it. That's not true. [1:10] And everybody knows that's not true. Nobody has a problem with the words, actually. They're just not familiar with the Bible language. And I showed you last week the reason why the these and vows are in the text and why they should stay in the text. [1:23] And let me take you to a place here. Go to Matthew 26. Let's go there to start. Matthew 26. [1:36] I ended last week by giving you some examples of why these words ought to be retained in the text. And so let me run you through what we did last week real quickly, just to brush up on this and brace yourself. [1:53] This is taking you back to grammar school a little bit. And I feel like I need to apologize to you all for that. But at the same time, if you have a love for your Bible, then you should care about these things. [2:05] And so, man, that screen's crooked. Here's the way you learn English today with pronouns anyway. The I, you, he, she, it. [2:15] We, you, they. And the you are identical in the second person. And I pointed that out last week. In the objective case, the same thing's true. Use the identical the way you learned it. [2:27] Your identical, singular and plural. Yours, your, again. I'm sorry if this is going too fast, if you are part of this. But the King James Bible, though, doesn't use the word you. [2:38] And you, repetitively, generically, it uses a different pronoun, thou, for the singular, and uses a ye for the plural. It does it here in the objective case where it says thee instead of you. [2:53] And thy as an adjective instead of your. And what you have here is in your King James Bible, you notice that all the singulars have the same beginning and all the plurals have the same beginning. [3:06] And there's a clear distinction in this Bible in regards to these pronouns. Whereas when we just update it to the way we talk today, all of that distinction disappears. [3:16] And I showed you a few cases where it's not just the water gets muddied, but it actually introduces some things where there's some truth that's not coming through anymore because we can't identify certain things. [3:32] Quickly, here's the three reasons for these pronouns and for the keeping them, retaining those distinctions, singular and plural, instead of just being generic. [3:44] And you can translate accurately because Hebrew has distinctions and Greek has distinctions in their pronouns. I was even looking for a good chart to put up there, not to blow your minds with Hebrew and Greek, but to show you the pronouns that they are different in singular and plural in the parent languages, that meaning the text they're translating from. [4:06] So if you're going to have it in one language and you're going to bring it into another, it would make sense to retain it as best as you can. If you can't retain it, you can't retain it. But you could retain it, and they did retain it, and the New Bibles eliminated it. [4:21] And again, clarity for interpretation that here comes the Son. All right, we're going to move forward into something else. But before we do, let's go to Matthew 26. Let me show you an example in your King James Bible. [4:35] And before we get to it, I want to read it here out of the New King James and not picking on this one particularly. It's just the one I grabbed. They're all the same in this way. [4:47] So listen as I read from Matthew 26, and we'll get to your Bible in a second here. This is Jesus Christ, and he's in front of the high priest before his crucifixion. [5:00] And the Bible says this. They're trying to get him to find him guilty, and they can't find him guilty. And so when Christ, he's asked him if he's the Son of God, Jesus said to him, It is as you said, speaking directly to the high priest, It is as you said, Nevertheless, I say unto you, Hereafter you will see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of power and coming on the clouds of heaven. [5:27] So who's Christ talking to? He's talking to the high priest. It is as you said. Nevertheless, I say to you, Hereafter you will see the Son of Man coming. So all you get out of that is that he's talking to the high priest. [5:39] Now come to your Bible, King James Bible, if you've got one, and look what it says. Matthew 26, verse 64. Jesus saith unto him, Thou, singular, hast said, Nevertheless I say unto you, Plural, Hereafter shall ye, plural, See the Son of Man sitting on the right hand of power and coming in the clouds of heaven. [6:03] Who's he talking about? He's talking about the entire, Back to verse 57. The scribes, the elders, the high priest, all of them are assembled. And he's speaking to the high priest, saying, Thou hast said, And agreeing with what he, or this thing about him being the Son of God, Thou hast said, Nevertheless I say unto you, Now he's talking to the entire assembly. [6:30] You don't see that clarity. You don't see that interpretation. You don't understand any of that in your other versions when you eliminate the distinctions. And I gave you examples of that last week that come a little more doctrinally, like John chapter 3 with the new birth, and marvel not that I said unto thee, ye, all of you, ye must be born again. [6:52] All right, so there's a lot of that going through the pages of this Bible. There are literally hundreds of verses where there are both singular and plural pronouns, the you, the these in the same verse. [7:03] And when you just take a clean wipe of all the these and thous, you've completely removed all of that clarity of your King James Bible and distinctions that some cases, you dig and dig and dig and dig, you'll find where there's cases where something's lost in the new versions there. [7:21] All right, we're going to move forward with a whole new section here, and this has to do with the verb endings. And this is kind of a similar assault, I'd say, as to complaining about the these and thous. [7:33] And in this case, it's complaining about those verb endings, saying we don't talk like that. It has E-T-Hs and E-S-T's, and he maketh me to lie down in green pastures. [7:44] I don't talk like that. Why does my Bible have to talk like that? And all of the new versions said we've cleaned that up for you, we've eliminated all of that, yet I keep this book right here, and I don't change it, and I don't want to change it. [7:57] And I'm not just being stubborn with that, and it's not pride that says I'm not going to change. I'm setting my ways. No, I want to, with the belief of this book, I want to offer you the explanation for why those verb endings are there in the first place. [8:15] And if your mind's already going to the place that says, well, that's how they used to talk, then you're wrong. Somebody lied to you about that. Somebody fed you that line, just like the these and thous, they said all these years, that's how they used to talk, we don't talk like that anymore. [8:30] And I taught you last week, that's not, or two weeks ago, that's not how they talked back then. Remember, it's a mistake to presume that Shakespeare's language was the standard of the era. [8:41] That's never been the case. And remember, you know, there are two works that have survived that era. Shakespeare and the King James Bible. [8:53] What else do you know of that is from that era? There may be some novels, but most, they're not even from that era, the ones that you most likely know or have heard of. They've come after that and many of them influenced by the King James Bible, the popular ones, Moby Dick, one of them, but that's years later. [9:09] What has survived that era is some literature, classics, masterpieces, people would say, and then this monument, the King James Bible. [9:21] That's about it. Now, to presume that this is the way people talked, that's ignorant. That's just foolish. These are elevated material that we're talking about here, the Word of God and then Shakespeare. [9:36] I mean, the man, as I said, was a literary genius. He wrote plays. He wrote poetry that's not the way people talked. And so just presuming that is an error. It's a mistake. [9:47] And so when somebody says, well, we got rid of the these and those because we don't talk like that, neither did they. That's not how they spoke in their everyday. It's not a representation of the common man or woman that made up society. [9:59] So that's a mistake to presume that. And it's a mistake to presume that these ETHs is the way they talked back then and that we need to reproduce that. I was reading, a woman was trying to write a book and trying to use a fiction novel and put it in the setting of this early 1600s. [10:19] And so she was trying to understand. She was putting out on the internet asking these questions. How did they speak? And I'm trying to understand the these and those and the verb endings. And she's trying to write her novel like that. [10:32] And the only way that it's going to make any sense is if the setting is like some ultra proper setting because the common man that's kicking a rock down the street did not speak with those verb endings. [10:45] And it just it's just not the case. And so when you got that image in your mind that that's the way it was back then, somebody misled you to think that. And that's not the reason that these things are in here. One more note I want to make here, another mistake that's commonly presumed about these verb endings is some have declared that these endings signify continual action. [11:07] as in the verb would just have an S like rejoices or rejoice. But to say rejoiceeth implies it continues on and on and on. [11:18] And that's not true at all. That's just I don't know why that's even that's just a myth. It's just you know why people you ever read in your King James Bible you see the italicized words. [11:29] Do you ever think that you're supposed to emphasize those and read them with some force like I'm looking at Matthew 26 then released he Barabbas unto them and when he had scourged Jesus he delivered him to be crucified? [11:44] That's not why they're there. It's not italicized to put emphasis on the way we might write today. It's italicized for a different reason. It's italicized because the translators supplied that word as they translated into English because it was lacking but it was necessary for clarity and for readability and all of that. [12:03] And so but that's just a presumption a foolish elementary kind of presumption that oh I'm supposed to emphasize the italicized words. It's the same deal with suggesting that the ETHs or the EST endings is some continuous action that never ends. [12:19] It's just not true. And you could on your own do a real brief study look through any page of your Bible and pull out a few of these verb endings and determine if it's actually a continuous kind of thing there. [12:32] It's very easy to dismiss that idea. It's unsupported. It's only assumed. All right now I'm going to go through some stuff here on the screen. And man look at that. [12:42] It came up there so quickly. Hopefully you'll get as much of this as you can here. This is the grammar of our day. The way we learned. You notice the verbs on the right. [12:53] That's what I'm pointing out. The I know, you know, he, she, it knows. The only difference in all of these singular and plural is that third person singular with the S. He knows. [13:05] Otherwise the verb, the way we talk and write today, all of them are the same. Okay, now the King James Bible, however, has something different. Different than the way we are today. [13:16] There's the thou, as you can see, and you can't see in the bottom, there's a ye in the middle there. But in the singular, all three of the present tense verbs are different. They have a different ending. [13:27] The one has no ending. The other has the E-S-T for the second person. And then the third person has the E-T-H. She knoweth. He knoweth. Or thou knowest. [13:39] And now there's a distinction that you don't have, that the distinction is on the page. The page tells you, the verb ending tells you what case, or what, what's the word I want? [13:53] It's part of its, not declension, conjugation. It tells you if it's second person. It tells you the subject's going to be a second person or a third person. [14:04] And we'll see some more of this. So here's the, here's what they did in, you can't even see that, can you? [14:16] So they took the word and added the E-S-T for the second person. And every time a third person present tense verb, notice it's present tense, it's not past tense, it's not future tense. [14:30] If you see a will with it, it's not going to be done. Or shall, it's not going to be done for the most part, except for the second person past tense, that does happen. [14:42] But there's different endings. I'm going to give you quickly three reasons, similar to the other pronouns, why this happened. Don't be alarmed at that. That was just a great man doing a great job. [14:56] Praise the Lord. We can go all night now. All right, reason number one, to remain true. [15:10] This is why they put these endings on. And I could show you the Greek language to show you all the endings. They have their own endings. If you studied any other languages, most likely, there's different endings on the verbs, and it shows you if it's first person, second person, or third person. [15:23] And I know this isn't stuff you like to think about or care about, but I'm showing you some things of why this Bible reads the way it reads. So to remain true to the underlying languages of Hebrew and Greek, these parent languages, as I've said, they contain unique verb endings. [15:42] things. And if it's possible, then you ought to retain that in translation. If it's not possible, then we're out of luck, but it was possible. [15:53] Someone suggested, well, the King James translators made up this very unique system, and no, they didn't make it up. It existed, and they used it. They utilized what existed in English when translating these very same things from other languages. [16:10] That's why they're there. Number two, they display a distinction. This is one that's going to be the most important, I guess, between the first, second, and third person, subjects, and the corresponding verbs. [16:21] If you're just doing an exercise of a sentence of see, spot, run, it's not going to be complicated. But if you're looking at a text that involves multiple people or persons or individuals within a story or within even a passage or paragraph, and things just get jumbled around, it helps you to be able to pick the verb and see who is, or what the subject, which subject it corresponds to. [16:50] And when you're developing doctrine and truth and certainty that is flawless and should live forever, then you're going to want something that's going to be flawless and that can speak and teach itself without being subject to man. [17:05] The third thing is to allow, this is again, clarity in interpretation and that's why they use those. So I'll show you some examples of this. Go to Psalm 50. [17:17] On a personal note, I don't talk like this and if ever I do, it's just a joke and it sometimes trips me up when I'm reading my Bible as it probably does you too, especially as much as I read in front of a microphone or in public and read through all these verses and it trips me up sometimes, these endings, because it's just not my normal speech as is yours. [17:45] You understand that. But the reason I'm studying this with you is to offer you this reasonable and this clear and honest explanation for why they exist in your Bible. [17:57] So Psalm 50 and I'll show you a verse where there's two different ones and you can try to just gather for what you've learned already. [18:09] Oh no, Andrew, it fell over. Verse 19. Verse 19. Thou givest, see the EST and it's connected to the thou, thou givest thy mouth to evil and thy tongue frameth deceit. [18:31] Why did the ending change? Because the second person, thou, is the subject to begin the verse. Thou givest, has the EST connected to it, thy mouth and then the second part of the sentence which actually is a compound sentence here, and thy tongue subject frameth, so it's a third person, the tongue is the third person, the it, of the he, she, or it. [18:55] Thy tongue frameth deceit. And so now you see, there it is, it completely, it matches this little system here that's in place every time, everywhere. [19:08] All right, now let's look at a place where there's a little bit more involved. 146. Psalm 146. Psalm 146, and let's start reading. [19:34] You're going to notice some endings here. And when it switches, recognize when and why it switches. 146, let's start at verse 13. Thy kingdom is an everlasting kingdom, and thy dominion endureth throughout all generations. [19:52] The Lord upholdeth all that fall, and raiseth up all those that be bowed down. The eyes of all wait upon thee. [20:03] Now why, in verse 15, doesn't it have, why doesn't wait have waiteth or waitest, or why isn't there any ending on that one? It's because the subject is eyes. [20:14] The subject's plural, and it doesn't happen there. But when it's singular, like the Lord, verse 14, then the ETH comes on because it's the third person, ETH. [20:25] ETH, upholdeth, raiseth. All right, moving past that, then verse 15, the eyes of all wait upon thee, and thou, second person, subject, singular, givest them their meat in due season. [20:38] Thou openest thine hand and satisfiest the desire of every living thing. And so there's just kind of back and forth, switching between these endings, but every time the ETH or the EST, it indicates and it's always accurately connected to whether it's a second person subject or a third person singular subject. [21:03] So that's the way it's always done. And I gave you these examples, it backs up this. Now there's some places where there's distinction that needs to be made. Let me show you 1 Corinthians 16. [21:14] And I did not have any resources here or anybody that I have on my bookshelf or that I could find that was giving me a list of check these verses. [21:27] These all, I just dove in a little bit today and found these within a matter of minutes and compared them with some of the new versions and even compared them with the Greek text that it was translated from and did that for a reason. [21:43] I'll show you here. 1 Corinthians 16 and look at verses 15 and 16. Now the majority of verse 15 is in parentheses so we'll read it but when we look at it and analyze it we're going to skip the parentheses as the sentence would read. [21:58] But verse 15 says I beseech you brethren ye know the house of Stephanas that it is the first fruits of Achaia and that they have addicted themselves to the ministry of the saints that ye submit yourselves unto such and to everyone that helpeth with us and laboreth. [22:14] Now the verse 15 skipping the parentheses for just that for clarity's sake here in the teaching I beseech you brethren that ye submit yourselves unto such and to everyone that helpeth with us and laboreth. [22:28] Now because your King James Bible has the ETH ending and the last it's the last two words that we're pointing out you could read it two different ways if it didn't have that. [22:40] you could say that ye submit yourselves unto such and to everyone that helpeth with us and laboreth. The laboreth could be referring back to ye that ye submit yourselves unto such you submit and you labor. [22:59] Or it could be reading that ye submit yourselves unto such and to everyone there's a singular subject that helpeth so I know that that's the subject that helpeth with us and laboreth. [23:14] If you see the ETH and you know right away oh the helpeth and laboreth they go together and they both go back to the everyone to everyone that helpeth and laboreth. But when you change it into the new versions I'm going to well I don't want to take the time here but what they have to do is in order to make sure that those verbs go together the way they are in the original and the way they are here is they have to reorder the structure of the sentence and now they've changed the sentence and it doesn't read like the way it did in the Greek and I have an interlinear here which means it has the Greek text here and then it has the King James translation and it has a word for word underneath it and you can see each word how it's translated and how the King James translators used it and put it into their text and the King James Bible follows by word order and layout and structure it follows the Greek and so it reads like the Greek now [24:14] I don't want to read like the Greek except that God gave the word of God through the apostle Paul to the church at Corinth and is given by inspiration of God and when the translators kept that structure and kept that order of words and as best as possible it reads like the way God gave it now if I want to change it and I don't like even just deciding I don't want to do that with those verbs now I have to restructure the sentence and it's not going to read like the way God gave it and that's kind of the biggest point I can make here first of all the distinctions there with the endings I know which subject that last two those last two words go to because of the ETH I know it doesn't go to the plural it goes to the singular and I also have a Bible that reads the way God intended it to read and sound like scripture versus oh it sounds like a novel or it's updated to the way we talk today they sound completely different come back to chapter 12 let me show you another one 1 Corinthians chapter 12 and this verse on first read might trip you up verse 11 now context of course verse 4 diversity of gifts gifts of the spirit and there's a list of them in verse 8, 9, 10 miracles, prophecy discerning of spirits, tongues and then verse 11 says but all these worketh that one in the self same spirit dividing to every man severally as he will when you begin the sentence as you're familiar with in English you think subject verb direct object and it starts off by making you say but all these worketh or the new versions would say work these work these work what and it gets confusing until you realize that these is plural worketh is our singular third person so it doesn't go with these these is not the subject but rather that one and self same spirit is the subject but we could if we switch the order it would say that the spirit worketh all these meaning the gifts he's the one doing the work the truth is in there the eth ending helps us with that distinction of the subject is singular and it goes to spirit and it is a little bit confusing in the wording so I thought well I wonder what that actual Greek text says there and of course the King James translators were following the layout of the Greek [27:06] New Testament in their translation and in their rendering into English they were following the way it read and the new versions twist it and completely reorder the words and make it read in their opinion easier to read easier to understand they'll say but they've also messed up and changed and altered the way God gave his book when he gave it so that's something worth noticing now that's just two I picked out in not a long time I'm sure there's a thousand more that I could go through and point out some things but here's I want to get to one more thing and this one's I feel like maybe you've never seen this or heard this before in your life and I want you to hear it I want you to see it so there's all these words in our Bible that are these little words canst ditst and nobody talks like that nobody knows what these words what they they just get accused of being archaic words they're old words and I want to show you they're not exactly old words at all they just have the endings on them that we learned their contractions is what they are and so take a look at this here's here's again the reminding you of the est and the eth endings onto verbs the first person there's nothing added to it so when we go to the second person singular verb like the word are which we say quite frequently and it's all over this Bible when it's in the second person for thou we add the est and we don't say arest it's contracted to a r t from everlasting to everlasting thou art god it's saying you are god all the new versions would say you are god but that word art they say is an archaic word no it's just are with the est ending contracted and there it is here's another one was not an archaic word is it add the est there's the combination and it would say wasest if we wanted to put it out there and they decided no that's not wise so they contracted it no apostrophes here but they contracted it to a word wasst and you've seen that word in your Bible and maybe you felt like that's an old word it's actually not an old word at all it's a contraction with a suffix on it here's a list more you can kind of think in your head what that third one might be have and when it's contracted what do you think it is it's not harvest hast and shout thou shalt not kill shalts not a original word necessarily it's a contraction of the est ending go through [30:01] Exodus 20 and look at the 10 commandments it's thou second person singular subject and then it's shall and so the new versions say you shall not kill whereas your King James Bible even sounds so much holier saying thou shalt not kill sounds like there's some power behind that like there's a judge saying it so there's wilt ditst canst you see these words that just you've never really understood why that's why it's a contraction and the the est and the eth endings was a a solution that was decided upon in translation and it has to be uniform it has to be from cover to cover and so the solution and the this is the outcome of handling some of these individual situations there's a few more here go to the third person which will be the eth h ending and so there's the word do and it sounds like doeth but when it is a auxiliary verb or a helping verb then it's doth when it is the main verb of the sentence referring to can't come up with a verb or a verse off the top of my head it comes out doeth thou doest well that's a case of thou believest that there is one [31:34] God thou doest well and that's a case of where it doesn't say dust thou dost well but if it was I'm trying to think of one with doth now as a helping verb and doth deliver that's 1st Corinthians chapter 1 in whom we trust that he or he hath delivered us and doth hath deliver us shall deliver us and doth deliver that's something in there the sun's creeping back in so the difference between doeth and doth one is a helping verb the when there's a helping verb like there's a thousand of them the eth or the est will go on the helping verb and you'll see that all the time there's another one hath and the way that comes out is has not an archaic word with the eth haseth we wouldn't dare say that so they brought it to hath and then sometimes just the e drops on words like make or make or love [32:42] Simon son of Jonas lovest thou me Lord he says thou knowest all things thou knowest know that I love thee so you'll see that's all over your bible and that's there's reasons for those words and why they're there now there's a few things I'll close with this here verb endings there is no concrete rule of grammar for these I'm showing you right here these contractions there therefore there exists flexibility and what's important to the translator is readability as well as pronunciation and so they're not going to put a word in that Bible it's terrible and so the contraction flows and works and arest thou art God thou arest God it's just it's terrible and so there is there was liberty in translating and contraction like there's no perfect rule and you won't see in all of those every time it's the same letter missing or the same contraction sometimes it's different where the th is on sometimes it's just the smaller like the t on the art and it's not arst so there's different ways there there's no concrete rule of grammar for that another thing verbs do not contract if there's two if there's a helping verb with a primary verb it's always going to go to the helping verb and one more thing [34:20] I've said it a few times these are not archaic words they are only contractions of common helping verbs or auxiliary verbs in English that have added endings that correspond always with the subject in the Bible so I know that was kind of a heavy grammatical lesson tonight and we had to get through some of that there's probably one more that's a little bit on this side of the grammar issues that will deal with some adverbs that you're not ultra familiar with but they're all over this book and I do want to at least bring it to light to you to teach you what they are and help you understand what they are and not just say well it's in there so I have to believe it I want you to get it I want you to care about it and not necessarily be like a grammar geek or anything but still I think you deserve an explanation for the words of your Bible and why they are the way they are and that's what they are so we'll end a little early tonight for a [35:28] Bible and for truth and for having something that you can place your faith in and don't be intimidated when somebody says it's old because chances are if you get a little bit of teaching on it and care about a little bit you could shut them down pretty quickly because they don't know what they're talking about they don't know the truth about what they're saying they're just repeating what somebody put in their head or what their teacher told them or what even their preacher told them because they've never looked into it and studied it out or cared about it so let's close in prayer and then we'll be dismissed tonight and we can go warm up that ping pong table father thank you for this word this book thank you for the truth of the word of God and it's sometimes laborious and kind of intricate to get into some of these details and to study them out but God I believe it's worth it I believe it's worth defending your book and I believe it's true and right to illuminate the minds of Christians to the truth and so [36:29] Lord I pray that we take this and use it for your glory Lord may we never flinch when somebody attacks until the day you call us home in Jesus name I ask amen amen you're dismissed tonight