Is God able to provide an English Bible that says exactly what he wants it to say?
Capable isn't the issue. He is capable of a lot of things that He has not done.
I might ask you whether God is able to provide a Gaelic Bible (or any language you want to name) that says exactly what He wants it to say.
Or, did he intend that only those fluent in Hebrew and Greek would have any chance of understanding his revelation to mankind?
Hasty generalization fallacy and non-sequitor.
It is not necessary to be fluent in any language, including English, Hebrew or Greek in order to understand His revelation to mankind.
If we don't have the Word of God in our hands, aren't we all wasting our time discussing it?
The Bible is God's word and so no, we are not wasting our time. That doesn't mean that any English translation was an inspired (i.e. perfect) translation. In fact, we know for a fact that the English translations we have are not perfect translations for several reasons, not the least of which is the fact that there is no such thing as a perfect translation from one language to any other language.
The thing is that we don't have a perfect translation simply because we do not need a perfect translation. If we needed one, we'd have one but we don't need one and so there is no need for us to do all sorts of theological and rational back flips trying to make what we do have into more than it is.
The Bible is a very thick book that teaches us all sorts of things in all sorts of various ways. This complex redundancy serves as its own error correcting mechanism. This virgin issue is a perfect example of this mechanism in action. We can know that the Issiah passage is talking about a virgin, and that the translation is therefore accurate, because the Bible makes the issue painfully clear is lots and lots of other places. But even if the Issiah passage hadn't been translated correctly, we would still know how it should have been translated because of the fact that the Bible makes it so unavoidably obvious in so many other ways.
Now, what I've just very, very briefly and entirely incompletely explained above is a much firmer foundation for the Christian apologist to base his theology upon than some obviously clichéd belief in an inspired English translation of the Bible, which spawns the type of one liners that commonly get thrown around on this website. We should, as Christians, not only for own own sake but for the sake of unbelievers as well, strive to maintain a theology that makes real sense, and the only way that is possible is for us to be skeptical about our theology in a manner that is as intellectually honest as possible. That means we question every cliché and we don't believe things just because it sounds good or because it makes us feel better about the rest of our theology or because our parents said it, or because our pastor said it, or because 10,000 pastors have said in the past or anything else like that. We must guard our hearts and minds and be watchful for any falsehood, testing every single doctrinal truth claim in the fire of Scripture and sound reason, rejecting all things which cannot be so established.
Resting in Him,
Clete
