One time in a phone interview I conducted with Oscar Woodall, a worldwide evangelist from Florida who died two years ago, I asked what he thought was the No. 1 issue facing the Body of Christ today.

Without hesitation, he answered, "Final authority.” Of course, he was referring to the Bible and the need for Christians to implicitly trust that God has perfectly preserved His Book.

Oscar explained, “When God says He’s magnified His Word above His name, that indicates to me His Word is more important than anything else and I equate the perfect Scripture to a perfect Savior.”

He then added, “It's a very volatile issue because people don't like to submit to authority.”

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In Woodall’s 1993 book, My Journey from Law to Grace, he explained that when he’d ask the question, “What’s most important to God?”, the responses he’d get from people typically included, "souls, love, family, truth, justice, righteousness."

"They are all good answers, but not complete," Woodall wrote. "Most important to God is His inspired, preserved Word(s) written on pages of a book we can hold in our hand. . . Satan from the Garden until now, by lies and human reasoning (scholarship, so-called), seeks to destroy, corrupt and craftily handle the words of God."

Woodall fully understood why the King James Bible is God's error-free, perfect Book for English-speaking people today as opposed to all the subsequent “modern versions” derived from corrupt manuscripts.

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At the time of Jesus Christ, Greek was the universal language. It was replaced by English, which represents the only other universal language in modern world history.

Scholars will tell you that the English language is in its structure, its grammar and the way the words are formed—the way ideas are communicated—comparable to the accuracy and power of the Greek language.

The Holy Bible of 1611, which was later named the King James Version, represented the culmination of 100 years of translating into the English language. The reason it supplanted its predecessors is because the effort to get the Word of God into English had arrived.

As Gail Riplinger, author of several critical books on the infallibility of the King James Bible, once wrote, “Scholars agree that the English language did not become fixed until the King James Version. Earlier editions, like the Tyndale and the Geneva, although practically identical to the King James Version, did not always contain the built-in dictionary found in the King James Version. They did not need it, because they were written at the unusual juncture in history when English was becoming English; the root languages of Anglo-Saxon, French and Latin were still familiar. . .

“One secular lexicographer admits, ‘About the beginning of the 17^th Century, in the reign of James 1, our language had already begun to assume the form in which we now find it, and is from that date entitled to be called the English language. From the time the Bible was translated into English, and, by being printed and spread among the people . . . the language may be said to have been fixed.’ ”

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All down through the ages, religious-types have wanted people to believe that unless they can read and understand Greek they can’t study the Bible. Theology schools have routinely taught this same hooey.

My pastor, Richard Jordan, explains, “The idea is if I can read it and you can’t, but you really want to know what it says, where do you have to go? You have to come to me, dontcha? Isn’t that what Rome’s been saying for 1,500 years? So, it’s really just another sneaky Protestant popery idea but it isn’t what the Scripture gives you to understand.

“When Moses wrote down Exodus 5:1 in Hebrew, reporting, ‘I told Pharaoh to let my people go,’ you know he said that in Egyptian even though he wrote it in Hebrew, so you call that a translation.

“From these types of passages, I know you can translate from one language to another and it still be God’s Word. Now, that’s considered heresy if you say it that way, but I’m saying it that way because I’m reading a verse (that proves it)!

“So my faith isn’t in the ability to understand the language limitations and the linguistic techniques of making the transfer. I understand the difficulty of all that. I’ve studied Greek, Hebrew, French, Spanish. I studied Latin.

“I freely confess I’m not a linguist, but I am familiar with some of what it takes to transfer from one language to another—the difficulties and so forth of all that. But I can also read my Bible, and my Bible tells me that when something is properly translated from one language to another, God considers it still His Word.”

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As Psalm 12:6-7 verifies, “The words of the LORD are pure words: as silver tried in a furnace of earth, purified seven times. Thou shalt keep them, O LORD, thou shalt preserve them from this generation for ever.”

Jordan explains, “If it’s pure it means it’s clean; it doesn’t have mistakes, doesn’t have errors, doesn’t have deficiencies in it.

“Not only did He make them and give them pure, clean, right, true and sure but then He says, ‘I’m going to preserve them.’ You see it isn’t enough to say, ‘God wrote a book over there and we’re over here.’ I need it now! So, God didn’t just write His Book and forget about it. He preserved that word so that you can have in your hands a final authority that you can depend on because it’s God’s Word.

“If God says His Word is perfect (Psalm 19:7) and He’s going to preserve it, what does He have to preserve it as? He’s got to preserve it as perfect. Because when He’s preserved it, if it isn’t what He started out with, then it isn’t the same thing!

“It can’t be almost perfect, almost pure, almost sure, almost clean. . . It either is or it isn’t. If you believe in an ‘almost bible’ then you can only almost trust in it. And you’re in trouble because you don’t have an absolute, final authority.”