Is the Deep State Manipulating God’s Word?
By Movieguide® Contributor
Former country star Granger Smith recently weighed in on why we can rely on the Bible, even amid speculations that the government is changing it for nefarious purposes.
He decided to address this topic after a listener asked if someone is “manipulating” the Bible for “potentially the wrong reasons.”
“The reason I wanted to talk about this — and the reason I said Deep State — is because there’s this idea that there’s an entity out there, there’s a group or a person that is bigger than the government because it wouldn’t be Joe Biden doing this,” he said on his podcast. “It wouldn’t be the American government…It has to be bigger than that because it’s manipulating the world.”
Smith explains that his listener’s concern is valid, especially as conspiracies about the Deep State’s influence proliferate online.
However, he reiterated that the Bible and God’s truth don’t change, even if people try to change it through false translations. Thanks to the internet, though, we can do the research to understand where a translation we’re reading comes from.
“2024 is a wonderful time to live, in any religion,” Smith explained. “It’s a wonderful time to live because we have the internet. We could research things. We could look at history. We could look to recent discoveries of ancient things better with more knowledge and more efficiently than any other generation before us. What a time to live.”
“There’s also a lot of responsibility on us because now we’ve been given a lot of information,” he added. “What are we going to do with this? But here’s the deal, y’all. It boils down to this: modern translations — good, scholarly modern translations — are derived from early ancient text. It’s not a game of telephone.”
People who claim the Deep State is changing the Bible are typically comparing different English translations like the KJV and the ESV, and Smith acknowledges that there will be differences between the two.
However, “You don’t have the KJV and then was revised into the whatever, then that was revised into the whatever, and then they use that to revise it into the whatever,” Smith described. “Modern scholarly translations always will use a team of scholars and they go back to the oldest manuscripts that we have.”
Any differences there are between good translations are “trivial.
“None of those times does it ever say something that changes something about who God is,” he explained.
Smith left his country music career after he felt God call him into ministry last year.
“Being a musician was never a prison, but this is a new passion, a new focus, a new direction that I believe is going to allow me to focus more on individual people and their lives, which is ultimately why I started music touring in the very beginning,” he told PEOPLE. “This is an even more micro-focused position in that. I’m not going anywhere.”
“I just want to glorify God the best way that I can,” he said at the time. “I want to learn and grow and serve my local church and allow my pastors to equip and affirm those next steps. Lord willing, I want to be used to help people find their purpose.”
Smith relied on his faith after the tragic death of his son, River. Movieguide® reported:
Country music star Granger Smith is sharing how his faith helped him after the tragic death of his 3 year-old son…
The singer said that it wasn’t until he “surrendered to God” that he found any peace.
“God gave River to us for three years and that was his mission,” Smith explained. “I don’t think God takes anyone too soon. I believe he was put on this earth for the exact amount of time… He lived a good 1,000 days. That’s a huge example for me and how we’re going to look at every single day.”
