Chapter 25

Loving the Bible More Than the Notes

What to do with a Dake Bible, how to test any note, and the God the notes made small

Now that you have seen the pages

You have now read what the notes of the Dake Bible teach about God, in Dake’s own words and with his page numbers. They give you three separate divine beings, each with a body, soul, and spirit of His own. They describe a God who lives in one place, who learns what free creatures will do, whose grace Dake called “naturally limited by the free moral agency of man,” and who changes His plans.¹ You have also seen the thirty reasons for segregation that the original printings set under Acts 17:26, and what later printings did with them. So the question left to you is a practical one. What should you do with the Bible in your hands?

I will give the hard part of my answer first. On the doctrine of God, Dake was a false teacher. Three separate divine beings who are one only in agreement is tritheism, which the church has always called heresy. The God his notes describe is smaller than the God of Scripture at every point the earlier chapters examined.² His notes should not be taught as Bible teaching, from a pulpit or in a Sunday school class. That judgment concerns what he printed. I make none about his salvation, and none about the many readers who trusted him.

So my counsel is plain. Read and teach from Scripture itself. If you want a study Bible, choose one whose notes you can check against a published statement of faith, or use none. If the Dake Bible on your shelf belonged to someone you love, you may keep it as an heirloom and a reference. And whatever Bible you open, test every note by the text. That last habit is the one you will use for the rest of your life, so most of what follows is about it.

What the book showed

Part I told Dake’s life and the federal case of 1936 and 1937 from the record (Chapters 2 and 3). It then showed the two habits that shape his notes. He took Scripture literally wherever he thought it possible, and he kept the church’s words while giving them new meanings (Chapters 4 and 5). Part II set out his Godhead in his own words and answered it from Scripture and the creeds. Then it took the attributes of God one at a time, along with his Christ and his Spirit (Chapters 6 through 14).³ Part III followed the same method into a world before Adam, a material heaven, healing and prayer run by law, and a spirit world mapped beyond what Scripture says (Chapters 15 through 19). Part IV documented the thirty reasons for segregation and answered them from the verse they claimed. It also traced how later printings reworded the note and finally replaced it, without a word to the reader (Chapters 20 through 22). Part V followed the teaching into the pulpits and answered his defenders (Chapters 23 and 24).⁴

None of this has been an argument against Pentecostal faith. I believe the gifts of the Spirit are for today, and I have said so from the first chapter. The positions that Chapter 1 set aside as in-house debates, such as Arminian teaching on grace and conditional security, premillennialism, and a modest gap reading of Genesis 1, were never part of the case. The Pentecostal churches themselves confess the historic doctrine of God. The Assemblies of God, for one, speaks of the Lord our God “as one Being of three persons.”⁵ The Trinity your denomination confesses is the historic one. It is not Dake’s.

How to test any note

A study Bible prints two kinds of writing on one page. The Scripture is God-breathed.⁶ The notes are one man’s comments on it, bound into the same book and read in the same sitting. Over time a reader can stop noticing where the one ends and the other begins.⁷ The habit that protects you is simple, and it works on every study Bible you will ever own, the good ones included.

The eye of a needle

Here is how the four steps work on one of Dake’s own notes. In Matthew 19 Jesus tells His disciples that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God. Beside that verse the Dake Bible prints this note.

A Jewish proverb commonly used to express great difficulty or impossibility. In the large gates in the city walls were small narrow ones, each called the needle’s eye, through which a camel might enter kneeling down if he were unloaded. Dake’s Annotated Reference Bible, newer typeset edition, N.T. p. 37, note d on Matthew 19:24⁸

You may have heard that gate described in a sermon. Now take the first step and read the passage without the note.

Then Jesus said to His disciples, “Assuredly, I say to you that it is hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. And again I say to you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.” When His disciples heard it, they were greatly astonished, saying, “Who then can be saved?” But Jesus looked at them and said to them, “With men this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.” Matthew 19:23–26 (NKJV)⁹

The disciples are “greatly astonished,” and their question is the question of men who have just heard that something cannot be done. Jesus answers them without softening the saying. With men it is impossible, He says, and with God all things are possible.

The second step asks what the note does with the key words. It calls the saying a proverb for “great difficulty or impossibility,” and then it paints a picture of difficulty only, a small gate that a camel can pass through if it kneels and is unloaded. The notes beside it lean the same way. On the word “camel” the page says, “Loaded camel, as required here,” and on the word “hardly” in verse 23 it says, “With difficulty they can be saved.”¹⁰ Read together, these notes turn Jesus’ “impossible” into “hard.”

The third step checks the note against its setting. The disciples’ astonishment and Jesus’ answer both stand against it. The same page even agrees with Jesus in one place. Beside “With men this is impossible” it says, “It is impossible for man to save either the rich or the poor, but God can save and has saved both classes in all ages.” Then, beside “with God all things are possible,” it goes back to the gate: “To the rich salvation is possible but difficult due to the fact that it is hard for them to keep their hearts off riches.”¹¹ A reader who trusts every note on the page is left with a camel that squeezes through. The test in this step is Dake’s own. He wrote it into the rules of interpretation in his course.

If we want to prove a church doctrine, get plain passages on the subject and do not base the proof on historical events which literally happened and which were never recorded to teach such doctrines. Always get two or three plain Scriptures to prove a doctrine, or forget it. God’s Plan for Man, Lesson Three, rule 14, p. 44¹²

That is a good rule, and the gate note does not meet it. The note gives no Scripture at all. The only other place the Dake Bible mentions the gate is a note on the shutting of Jericho’s gate in Joshua 2, and that note’s one reference sends the reader back to Matthew 19:24.¹³

The fourth step is to remember that the note has an author. The gate is Dake’s explanation. He printed it as a fact about ancient cities without saying where he learned it. He also set it beside the words of Christ, where a reader can easily take it for part of what Jesus meant. The example is small, but the lesson is not. If a note can soften a saying of Jesus without anyone noticing, a note can do the same to a word like “one.”

The step most readers skip

Of the four steps, the second does the most work, and it is the one most readers skip. A note can be built entirely out of words you already believe. Dake’s course says that God is omnipresent, and a reader who stops there agrees with him. The difference lies in his definition, which keeps God’s body in one place and lets His presence reach you through relationship (Chapter 9). He does the same with “Trinity,” “person,” and “one.” So the second step comes down to one question: what does this writer mean by that word? Look for his definition before you agree with his sentence. Chapter 5 shows how to ask that question of any teacher.¹⁴

What to do with the Bible in your hands

The Scripture text in a Dake Bible was never the problem. Its center columns carry the King James Version, and Dake Publishing now issues a New King James edition as well.¹⁵ If you keep reading from your Dake Bible, read the verses as God’s Word and the notes as one man’s comments, and test each note before you repeat it to anyone.

If you teach, my counsel is firmer. Do not teach from Dake’s notes. Teach from the text. When you want help with a passage, use a study Bible or commentary whose publisher states its doctrine plainly, so that you can compare its notes with that statement and with Scripture. Ask the leaders of your church which ones they trust. Appendix F lists a few books for further study.

Many Dake Bibles are family Bibles. If yours belonged to a parent or a grandparent, nothing in this book asks you to part with it. The names and dates written in its front pages belong to your family’s story, and a person can be dear to God and still be wrong about a note. Keep it as an heirloom and a reference. Let the Scripture in it, and not the notes around the Scripture, be what you read aloud and teach.

If you taught from these notes

Some readers of this book have taught from Dake’s notes for years. If you are one of them, what you feel now is probably grief, and it deserves that name. Something you trusted has turned out to be less than you thought, and that is a real loss. Give yourself time, because there is no deadline for grief.

You do not need to carry shame for it. You did not write the notes. You trusted a Bible that came to you with a respected name on its cover, and many people you respected trusted it before you. The man who wrote the notes answers for what they say. Your years of teaching were not wasted either. Week after week you read Scripture to your class, and God has said of His word, “It shall not return to Me void.”¹⁶

Paul told Timothy that “All Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness,” and he told him to be “a worker who does not need to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth.”¹⁷ That is the work in front of you now. You can tell your class what you found, show them the page, and then show them the passage that answers it. A class learns a great deal from a teacher who checked a note, found it wrong, and said so.

Dake himself described the kind of reader I hope you will be.

I agree with that description, and it asks of you only what Dake asked of his own readers. It asks the same of me.

The God the notes made small

Each chapter in Part II took something away from the picture of God that Dake’s notes draw. What Scripture puts in its place is larger, and it is better news for anyone who prays. Here are the five truths his notes made small, with the passages that teach them.

The God who is one

Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one! You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength. Deuteronomy 6:4–5 (NKJV)

Israel confessed these words as the heart of its faith, and Jesus called them the first commandment of all.¹⁹ The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit have never been three beings who agreed to work together. They are the one God, and the believer who prays is met by that one God, whole and undivided. No person of the Godhead has to be persuaded by the others to love you. The love that met you at the cross was the love of the one God who saves.

The God who is here

Where can I go from Your Spirit? Or where can I flee from Your presence? If I ascend into heaven, You are there; If I make my bed in hell, behold, You are there. If I take the wings of the morning, And dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, Even there Your hand shall lead me, And Your right hand shall hold me. Psalm 139:7–10 (NKJV)

David pictures every direction a man could run: up into heaven, down into the grave, east with the dawn, and out to the far side of the sea. In every place he finds God already there. Through Jeremiah the Lord asks, “Do I not fill heaven and earth?”²⁰ So God Himself is present with the believer who calls on Him tonight, wherever she is. He is present too with the son or daughter she prays for, however far away they live, so her prayer does not have to travel to reach Him.

The God who knows

Remember the former things of old, For I am God, and there is no other; I am God, and there is none like Me, Declaring the end from the beginning, And from ancient times things that are not yet done, Saying, “My counsel shall stand, And I will do all My pleasure,” . . . Isaiah 46:9–10 (NKJV)

God offers His knowledge of what is to come as the proof that He alone is God, and He backed the claim with names. He named Cyrus long before Cyrus was born, and He named Josiah generations before his reign. Jesus told Peter that he would deny Him three times before the rooster crowed, and it happened as He said.²¹ Nothing that happens to you reaches God as news. That is why Paul could write, “And we know that all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are the called according to His purpose” (Romans 8:28). A God who had to wait and see what free creatures would do could not make that promise.

The God who can

Ah, Lord GOD! Behold, You have made the heavens and the earth by Your great power and outstretched arm. There is nothing too hard for You. . . . Behold, I am the LORD, the God of all flesh. Is there anything too hard for Me? Jeremiah 32:17, 27 (NKJV)

Jeremiah prayed the first part, and God answered with the second, turning the prophet’s confession into a question that leaves no exception to name. In Scripture the question about God is never whether He is able. When a leper came to Jesus, he said, “Lord, if You are willing, You can make me clean.” Jesus put out His hand and touched him and said, “I am willing; be cleansed.”²² Prayer is asking an able Father to act. An unanswered prayer does not prove that you failed a condition, and no creature’s will sets a limit on what He can do.

The God who does not change

For I am the LORD, I do not change; Therefore you are not consumed, O sons of Jacob. Malachi 3:6 (NKJV)

The second line gives the reason for the first. Israel had been unfaithful, and the nation was still standing because God had not changed. James calls Him “the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow of turning,” and Hebrews says, “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever.”²³ I became a Christian in 1987, the year I got my first Dake Bible and the year Dake died. The God I came to know that year is the same God now, and He will be the same God for my daughter and for anyone who comes to Him after us. He cannot be worn down or talked out of a promise, because His promises rest on who He is.

Dake’s invitation, and the last word

Dake asked his readers for this kind of testing. When he opened his lesson on sanctification, a doctrine on which Christians have long disagreed, he wrote this.

The whole Christian world is more or less divided on the subject and for that reason every thinking Christian should search the Scriptures and be open-minded to every statement in the Bible which throws any light on the subject. We invite the reader to lay aside prejudice and preconceived ideas on one side or the other, and for the sake of truth, to investigate earnestly and honestly the following facts gathered from an examination of over 25,000 separate statements in Scripture: . . . God’s Plan for Man, Lesson Thirty-Four, p. 625²⁵

He was writing about one doctrine, but the invitation fits his whole course, and I have accepted it. In the preface to Revelation Expounded, the book he first wrote as a young man, he gave his readers a standard that reaches further still.

To enable the reader to see for himself what the Bible says, over six thousand references are given—at least two or three to prove each point. Let the Scriptures themselves be the final word of authority on any question. If the reader has intelligence enough to understand what is written, he has intelligence enough to believe what is written and that is all that is necessary. Revelation Expounded, Preface²⁶

I agree with that standard, and I have tried to hold my own pages to it. Scripture is the final word on every question, including the questions about Dake’s notes, and the questions about mine. The believers in Berea were praised for testing an apostle in exactly that way.

These were more fair-minded than those in Thessalonica, in that they received the word with all readiness, and searched the Scriptures daily to find out whether these things were so. Acts 17:11 (NKJV)

On the doctrine of God, the notes in the Dake Bible teach another God under the church’s words, and the Bible they are printed in answers them. The God of that Bible is one God in three persons, present in every place, and knowing all things before they happen. He is able to do all He has promised, and His love is the same from one generation to the next. You can teach your class about Him with a clear conscience, and you can pray to Him with confidence. So keep reading the Book, test the notes, and hold on to the church’s great words with the meanings they have always had.

The last word belongs to neither Dake nor me.

Now to Him who is able to keep you from stumbling, And to present you faultless Before the presence of His glory with exceeding joy, To God our Savior, Who alone is wise, Be glory and majesty, Dominion and power, Both now and forever. Amen. Jude 24–25 (NKJV)