My dear readers,

Question: Regarding the VPP, it's a battle that we have fought locally rather than globally. Many parts of the world may not explicitly disagree with this doctrine. How will that affect their salvation?

Answer: VPP stands for “Verbal, Plenary, Preservation”. When applied to the Bible, it means that God has perfectly preserved all the words in the Bible (in the original languages of Hebrew, Aramaic for the Old Testament and Greek for the New Testament) to the jot and tittle.

The devil knows how important the Bible is to the Christian. He attacks all the very needful and crucial blessings bestowed by God to His children to help them in their spiritual battle against the devil. For example, he attacks the local church witness, knowing that they are believers’ home away from home. Churches are the only places (other than godly Christian homes) where Christ is the Head and the Bible is the rulebook to guide every church member’s godly behaviour, and where all believers worship and talk about Christ freely and openly without fear of persecution. Out there in the world, believers are always on guard, with their armour on. Hence, there is a constant attack on biblical churches from within and without.

The Bible has come under an unceasing attack by the devil from the beginning, even before the fall of man. The old serpent said to Eve in the Garden of Eden, “…Yea hath God said?...” (Gen 3:1). The truthfulness and trustworthiness of God’s Word is the bedrock of every believer’s faith in Christ. Believers know that their entire belief is anchored in the perfect Bible. The devil attacked believers with the fire of persecution in the early period of the church’s founding. The fire of persecution purified the church's witness, as believers were proved genuine and sincere by the high price they paid to believe in Christ. They literally counted the cost of believing in Christ. Many lost loved ones and their lives for the faith.

After the church emerged from the darkness of the catacombs in the 4^th century onward, doctrinal debates among churches soon ensued. The devil began to attack individual doctrines from within the church, such as the humanity and deity of Christ. The Roman Catholic church soon embargoed the Bible and kept it away from the ordinary people, and forbade it to be translated into the vernacular language of the people so that they could not read God's Word for themselves. When the 16th-century Reformation began on 31 October 1517, it rekindled the fire of gospel purity. That Reformation flame burned throughout Europe and spread across to Great Britain and to the United States of America.

However, at the turn of the 20th century, Christianity entered a period of rapid decline through infiltration and internal decay. The Charismatic Movement was born in 1906 and soon became the cement that the devil used to glue all the Protestant churches into one ecumenical whole with its emphasis on feelings and emotions. Christianity became carnal and man-centred. A new mindset of compromise, where love was emphasised and doctrines were ignored, gave birth to the Ecumenical Movement in 1948. By the turn of the 20^th century into the 21^st century, Christianity had fallen away, i.e. turned apostate, which God prophesied would happen before Christ’s return.

This rapid spread of compromise and the devil’s success is mainly due to the attack on the perfect Bible. In the early 1900’s the devil attacked the perfect Bible at its source, that is, when the Bible was first written. The attack originated within Christianity, led by so-called theologians, pastors, and seminary professors. To succeed, they cunningly taught that these mistakes are minor and occur only in the names of people, places, and numbers in the Bible. To comfort the gullible and spiritually wayward, they added that the doctrinal portions of the Bible and the gospel message are still perfect, inerrant and infallible. To defend the veracity of God’s Word, fundamental Christians introduced the term VPI, which stands for “Verbal, Plenary Inspiration.”

Today, the attacks and their perpetrators are more severe and deadly. These attackers of the Bible claim that they believe in VPI but not VPP. On the one hand, they do not deny that the Bible is perfect (for they claim to believe in the inerrancy of the Bible, or VPI), but on the other hand, they teach that the Bible is not perfect, i.e., it contains errors because God failed to preserve His Word perfectly. They are singing the same devilish tune as the old attackers, namely that mistakes are only in the numbers and names of people and places. The reason a Christian believes in the VPI doctrine of the Bible is that he believes in VPP; the Bible he holds in his hands is perfect. Tragically, today’s professing believers did not learn from past mistakes. Many have fallen prey to the devil’s end-time deception. Thus, Christianity has fallen away in these last days, as God had prophesied in 2 Thessalonians 2:1-3.

Whether the recent battle fought within some Baptist-Presbyterian churches was global or local is difficult to determine with certainty. But the spark of this attack on the perfect Bible originated in the USA, within Christianity. Two books, written by professing teachers of God's Word, “From the Mind of God to the Mind of Man” (published in 1999) and “God’s Word in Our Hands” (published in 2003), undermine and attack the perfect Bible, cloaked in diabolical language that pretends to defend it. When some Christians from ecumenical churches were asked if they believe the Bible is perfect, they said that it cannot be anything else but perfect! Common sense says that no one would be so foolish as to destroy the foundation of their house, which they spent millions building, while they and their family are still living in it. Isn’t the Bible the perfect bedrock of every doctrine and all that a Christian believes in? Why would a born-again believer destroy his own faith, unless he is a wolf in sheep’s clothing?

The real question we need to ask is why it happened to only some of the more conservative B-P churches and not the Neo-evangelical ones which do not practise biblical separation among other compromised doctrines? The answer is that when a church is sound and fundamental and is earnestly contending for the faith once delivered unto the saints, it is very much advancing the kingdom of God. The devil hates this the most! Sinners who attend these fundamental churches are saved in Christ. Children of God who attend these fundamental churches grow in grace and in the knowledge of Christ Jesus our Lord. They draw nearer to God in Christ. They are more discerning and not easily deceived by Satan. The devil will target these kinds of churches. He knows that attacking and destroying them from within is the most effective approach. How many of the B-P churches in Singapore are still steadfast in God’s truth today? Sadly, only a handful.

When a sinner prays the prayer of salvation, he believes he is doing it sincerely. He heard the gospel about his sins, death, hell and God’s love for him in Christ who suffered and died for him and rose from the dead for him. How does one really know that salvation has taken place after the prayer? One of the ways God helps us to know is through God's Word. If the person is born again in Christ, he receives God’s Word differently after salvation. Before salvation, the Bible is heard but not obeyed. After salvation, the believer recognises the voice of his Saviour, Jesus Christ, when God's Word is declared correctly, and he obeys it. Jesus says in John 10:27-28, “²⁷My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me: ²⁸And I give unto them eternal life; and they shall never perish, neither shall any man pluck them out of my hand.” Do you think Jesus will declare to you that the Bible was perfect in the past in terms of inspiration, but the one you have today contains mistakes because God did not preserve them perfectly? Or do you think Jesus will declare to you that the Bible is perfect as it was when God first inspired it, and He preserved it perfectly throughout the ages so that all generations of believers will always have the perfect Bible?

The backbone of Christianity is the perfect Bible (both VPI and VPP). All believers believed that the Bible is perfect at the point of salvation, when the gospel was received. Who would want to believe in the gospel if they are told that the gospel shared to them comes from a Bible with mistakes? However, after they believed, the churches they have been attending now teach that the Bible contains mistakes. They are told not to worry, for the gospel that comes from the Bible is without error. Doesn’t this sound foolish? Who would be silly enough to risk their eternal destiny at the hands of these fallible leaders who have not seen the Bible in the original languages? How could these leaders even dare to teach such forked-tongue doctrines and hope to get away with it? And yet they continue to get away with it because their churches are filled every week.

Christians always fight a spiritual battle for the souls of men, women and children and no matter how illogical it sounds. A man’s IQ is useless in the spiritual realm. Spiritual things are spiritually discerned. A spiritual man has the Holy Spirit dwelling in him to see the spiritual things of God. The Bible is a spiritual book. How can a person, who claims to be born again, not believe that his Heavenly Father is perfect and therefore His words are perfect? If God’s Word is not perfect, how can God be perfect? How can a born-again person listen to God’s Word weekly and feel nothing in his soul when his church believes that there are mistakes in the Bible? Why would born-again parents deliberately send and allow their children to attend Sunday School and be taught that the Bible lessons originate from a Bible with mistakes?