It’s incredibly telling that God chose to end the Bible with John warning in the last chapter of the Book of Revelation that “if any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the book of life, and out of the holy city, and from the things which are written in this book.”

Jordan explains, “Brother, you better not miss it, the words in that Book are exact and you better not mess with them, as John says.”

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In Jeremiah 15:16, Jeremiah tells us, “Thy words were found, and I did eat them; and thy word was unto me the joy and rejoicing of mine heart.”

Obviously Jeremiah knew the Book was made up of the w-or-d-s written on the page.

Jordan says, “The whole is made up of the sum of its parts. In Scripture, the Bible writers will make a point—a whole argument of a passage will depend sometimes on one word, or two words, or one phrase. The Bible’s not afraid to hang a whole argument and a whole doctrine on just one or two words in the text. The w-o-r-d-s are that important! Not just the thought or the concept, because the w-or-d-s have meaning.”

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Jesus Christ hung the whole doctrine of His deity on the tense of one verb in John 8:58. He says, “Verily, verily, I say unto you, Before Abraham was, I am.”

Jordan explains, “Jesus says, ‘There stands the doctrine of who I am.’ Jesus Christ is the Jehovah God of the Old Testament; Jesus actually means ‘Jehovah Savior.’

“Now, the Jehovah Witnesses come along and say that should be ‘I have been.’ They invent a tense—the perfect indefinite tense—which is not a tense in ANY Greek grammar that’s ever existed; it’s a figment of their imagination.

“What Christ does (in John 8:58) is He takes that present tense—‘I am’—and He says, ‘That shows you who I am.’ He bases the doctrine of His deity on the tense of a verb. What I’m saying is, that’s how important the w-or-d-s in your Bible are!

“Look at John 10:34 and watch Him do it again. He answered the Jews saying, ‘Is it not written in your law, I said, Ye are gods? If he called them gods, unto whom the word of God came, and the scripture cannot be broken; Say ye of him, whom the Father hath sanctified, and sent into the world, Thou blasphemest; because I said, I am the Son of God?’

“In this passage, He bases the doctrine on one single word. If He called them ‘gods unto whom the word of God came, and the scripture cannot be broken,’ and then He goes on . . . You see He’s going to hinge an argument on how they don’t have any right to argue with Him calling Himself the Son of God if the Scripture called them ‘gods.’

“He takes that one word out of Psalm 82 and builds His case on it. That’s how carefully the Lord Jesus Christ considered the authority of that Book!

“The Bible writers make a whole point depend upon one phrase, the tense of a verb, a single word in a passage or the number of a noun—that’s how minutely close God calls it!

“The w-o-r-d-s are important—not just the phrases, not just the concepts, not just the ideas, not just the sense and the flow. That’s all important, but the words . . . By the way, this says something about preservation too. God intended that His word be preserved that accurately or how would you know for sure that the word was singular or plural, or that the word was in the present tense if God didn’t preserve the w-o-r-d-s?!

“If all these passages are true . . . if you alter one phrase, or you omit one phrase; if you change the voice of verb, or the mood of a verb, or the tense of one verb . . . if you change a single number of a noun in that Book that’s to break the Scripture! That’s how close God cuts it!”

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The Lord spoke face-to-face with Paul just like He did with Moses and Paul went out and preached the w-o-r-d-s God put in his mouth.

When Paul writes, for instance, in I Tim. 6:3, ‘If any man teach otherwise, and consent not to wholesome words, even the words of our Lord Jesus Christ . . .’ we know the things he wrote down were the individual words of Christ.

Jordan says, “Folks, those passages are strong in regard to Pauline authority but they’re also strong in the doctrine of inspiration. The words of Christ to us today are found in Paul’s epistles! What you have are not just Paul’s interpretations of things that Christ gave him—not just Paul’s take on the ministry of Christ—but the very w-o-r-d-s of the Lord Jesus Christ given to Paul and written down by Paul.

As Paul confirms in II Corinthians 3:3: “Forasmuch as ye are manifestly declared to be the epistle of Christ ministered by us, written not with ink, but with the Spirit of the living God; not in tables of stone, but in fleshy tables of the heart.”

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Israel, at the time of the writing of the book of Romans, still had an advantage in that the Word of God was given to them and the Gentiles had to go up to Israel to get it.

Paul reasons in Romans 3, “What advantage then hath the Jew? or what profit is there of circumcision? Much every way: chiefly, because that unto them were committed the oracles of God.”

Jordan says, “The Jew has an advantage in a whole lot of things, basically and chiefly that he’s got the Word of God and these Gentiles have got to start from point zero.

Later in Romans 10, Paul writes, “For the scripture saith, Whosoever believeth on him shall not be ashamed. For there is no difference between the Jew and the Greek: for the same Lord over all is rich unto all that call upon him.”

Jordan explains, “The nation Israel falls and yet God Almighty doesn’t just lop them off all in one whack. As Paul says in Romans 11:12, ‘Now if the fall of them be the riches of the world, and the diminishing of them the riches of the Gentiles; how much more their fulness?’

“Folks, they had a privileged position and status but there’s a slowly moving away from these people as being the focal point of God’s program.

“There’s a slow ascendancy of Gentiles throughout the Book of Acts in 33 to 63 A.D., along in there. And through that time period, the book of Romans, Corinthians, Galatians and Thessalonians are written. The diminishing process does not end until Acts 28.”