I agree with you Brother. It comes down to man, in his darkness, tries to apply carnal thinking and understanding to interpretation of God's word...and scripture tell us that this is not possible!!
I used to have a nice NIV Bible. My friend bought it for me so we could bible study over the phone, with the same translation, and that's what he had is an NIV. Then a different friend came over and noticed my NIV...and told me about all the missing verses from it, and we looked a bunch of them up! So there's three people, including myself, which can attest that I did have an NIV bible at one time.
Then one day a year or three back, they had a thread started by someone here, about translations and someone mentioned that supposedly the NIV translation has a lot of missing verses in it. So I chimed in and said, there are missing verses and I have looked them up.
Then a fellow member says hey Edward, would you mind listing some of those missing verses? I said sure...and (couldn't remember the exact verses, so phoned my Brother which promptly gave me the scripture references)...I began to look them up, and...the verse was in there. SO was the other one. In fact, all of them were in there and not missing. Thinking my buddy made a memory error and not wanting to bug him at work (Lol), I went ahead a googled it to get the verses and double check...I found out that there are a lot more missing verses in the NIV than what my buddy had showed me.
Nevertheless, I set about looking some up so I could post them for my Brother in Christ here on the board like he asked...and these verses that I looked up were in my bible! My head was spinning, I saw that they were not there before! I opened up my mouth and said, yes I have references da da da, so I better be able to back that up! ...and I couldn't.
I sat back in my easy chair and said, Lord what's going on here? I know there's missing verses, or were...? Then my eyes were drawn to the side of my NIV bible and it says in big gold letters, NKJV. I almost fell out of my chair! What's going here? That Bible was an NIV bible, I know it was. The only NIV in the house. The biggest best (constructed) bible that I had, that made it impossible to have confused it with another bible or something like that. So I had to conclude that the Lord changed my bible from an NIV translation to an NKJV translation! So I opened it and looked through it. All of my underlining was still there, my bookmarks and stuff, all He did was change the translation!
I called both my friends before posting about it here, to confirm that I really did have an NIV bible before! My friends thought I was nuts, of course it was an NIV bible...so I had my confirmation. Out the mouths of two or three witnesses shall the truth be established...so I posted the truth to my request here on the board. (It's all I could do! LOL!!)
I don't bad mouth the NIV...but I don't use it anymore. I do endorse the NKJV alongside the KJV though, lol.
