Bible Translation Is Devotion
This post is a boiler plate for a longer article, later on.
I want to look at how some early Bible translators devoted heartfelt days, some working deep in the night, to give God's word to people in their native tongues — be their language French, German, English, or so on.
Writing in the Night
Early translations of the Bible were done by men of deep devotion. They burned midnight oil, or they rose very early, under apparent lead of the Holy Spirit.
Some of the texts they translated were first written by the Apostle Paul, who, hundreds of years earlier, also had worked day and night (1 Thessalonians 2:9).
It's true that Paul wrote about night as in natural nighttime; but he also wrote about night as in spiritual darkness. When he said that, as Christians, we don't sleep in night, he didn't mean we don't get a good night's rest. He meant that we keep aware of what's going on in this world, that we keep vigilant in prayer, that we avoid doing evil, that we avoid drunkenness and other problems of the "night," that we live as children of the day.
After all, at the time when Jesus walked the earth as a man, some shepherds had a certain custom. Some constructed sheepfolds where sheep rested at night. But, instead of a physical door to the fold, the shepherd himself sat in the doorway, keeping watch. In effect, the shepherd served as the door to the sheepfold in the dark of night.
And isn't that how Jesus explained His ways to us? Didn't He say, "I am the door?"
So Paul had a burden about being vigilant in the night, in spiritually dark times. He likely did often sleep at night. He kept vigilant against spiritual darkness, whether in daylight or after nightfall. But he also apparently had times of actually keeping busy in the night.
What were some of the likely activities that kept Paul awake at night, or that, according to tradition (Proverbs 31:15), caused him to rise early in the night?
Tasks Paul likely attended to, beginning in the night, included
I want to look at how some early Bible translators devoted heartfelt days, some working deep in the night, to give God's word to people in their native tongues — be their language French, German, English, or so on.
Writing in the Night
Early translations of the Bible were done by men of deep devotion. They burned midnight oil, or they rose very early, under apparent lead of the Holy Spirit.
Some of the texts they translated were first written by the Apostle Paul, who, hundreds of years earlier, also had worked day and night (1 Thessalonians 2:9).
It's true that Paul wrote about night as in natural nighttime; but he also wrote about night as in spiritual darkness. When he said that, as Christians, we don't sleep in night, he didn't mean we don't get a good night's rest. He meant that we keep aware of what's going on in this world, that we keep vigilant in prayer, that we avoid doing evil, that we avoid drunkenness and other problems of the "night," that we live as children of the day.
After all, at the time when Jesus walked the earth as a man, some shepherds had a certain custom. Some constructed sheepfolds where sheep rested at night. But, instead of a physical door to the fold, the shepherd himself sat in the doorway, keeping watch. In effect, the shepherd served as the door to the sheepfold in the dark of night.
And isn't that how Jesus explained His ways to us? Didn't He say, "I am the door?"
So Paul had a burden about being vigilant in the night, in spiritually dark times. He likely did often sleep at night. He kept vigilant against spiritual darkness, whether in daylight or after nightfall. But he also apparently had times of actually keeping busy in the night.
What were some of the likely activities that kept Paul awake at night, or that, according to tradition (Proverbs 31:15), caused him to rise early in the night?
Tasks Paul likely attended to, beginning in the night, included
- Mapping travel plans to visit churches far away from Israel;
- Reading letters from the churches that were forming;
- Making righteous judgments (not judging in order to condemn to hell), to settle matters of sin in the churches (1 Peter 4:17);
- Listening to other ministers, to agree in prayer or to correct by letter;
- Standing guard against danger, watching and praying; and
- Writing sermons and letters to churches.
His writings have nothing to do with Shakespeare, and everything to do with living and breathing for Jesus.
As Heaven Has Led
The Bible tells us interpretation is a gift of the Holy Spirit (1 Corinthians 12:10).
And far more souls have interpreted the holy texts than mankind ever will know.
Men, and apparently women also, have always had stirrings of heart to interpret the Hebrew record, as well as to interpret God's direct words to us.
For example, about 670 years after Jesus went back to Heaven, a monk named Caedmond tended cows during the day. He was a musician, but he didn't feel gifted enough to sing hymns with his brethren when dinners were finished each evening.
Instead, something stirred his heart to write poems or hymns on his own at night, to paraphrase parts of the Bible, translating from Latin into his native tongue, which was Anglo-Saxon (the language that evolved into Old English). He paraphrased (in English) the Bible's accounts of the Creation, the Exodus, and the Crucifixion.
But Caedmond wasn't the only one stirred up in heart to pull parts of the ancient texts into a heartfelt tongue.
There was a bishop named Aldhelm, an extremely gifted interpreter, around the year 700. And there were others as educated as him — and still others, who were less scholarly but led just as tirelessly by Heaven.
We're not likely ever to know the names of the yearning souls who privately wrote down whispers from Heaven about the meaning of one passage or another.
But we know that yearning was real and true to many people, because at least one statement from the Roman Catholic church complained that "laymen and silly old women" were being allowed to interpret scriptures (The New Westminster Dictionary of Church History: The Early, Medieval, and Reformation Eras, Westminster John Knox Press, 2008, page 88).
One name we do know, was that of another scholar — not a lay person but a priest. Like Caedmond long before him, this priest, Jacques Lefèvre d'Étaples, quietly wrote some of the scriptures in his native tongue. He began publishing copies of his French translations in 1523. The French Parliament banned those printings of the New Testament in 1525; but d'Étaples went on to translate the whole Bible and to publish it, working in exile in Belgium, in 1530.
How Latin Was Both a Blessing and an Enemy
For a very long while, the Catholic church was, by large, the most influential in reaching the world for Jesus. But that early outreach, that ministry, was different back then.
When people met for church services, they didn't have Bibles in hand. But, like slaves in early America, congregants had to rely on whatever the priests said, without being able to explore and absorb truths of the Bible on their own.
Catholic leaders had compiled the church's Bible from the original texts that were in Hebrew and Greek (because apostles like Paul had written partly in Greek). The Catholics needed the Hebrew and Greek texts to be in a language that a great many priests could understand, whether the priests were Spanish, French, German, or so on.
So, Latin was the language the church agreed to use for its Bible. Catholics translated from Hebrew and Greek into Latin.
The trouble with that, however, was that most lay people (the congregations) didn't all know Latin; so their priests had to know both Latin and the tongue of the people. A German priest, for example, had to study in Latin but speak to the people in German. And, again, that meant the people couldn't also study for themselves.
Worse than that, Catholic leadership became conceited about Latin translations, and the church forbade translations other than in Latin.
But men continued to be stirred in heart to interpret the scriptures, privately for the most part: on their own, with sincere and devoted hearts.
Working for Faith
As the church, we're not supposed to get bogged down in arguments over words. And, for the most part, Bible translators have not.
When there have been obstacles to translating the Bible as the Holy Spirit has led, men have worked around those obstacles, some translating very privately; others fleeing persecution for their translations; and at least one, William Tyndale, giving his life for the work of interpretation.
Says a documentary, They Valued the Bible (Watchtower Bible and Tract Society): Tyndale's "work was more than that of scholarly ambition." He "loved the Bible."
But, in some ways, Tyndale was influenced by Martin Luther.
Luther had studied philosophy, but he came to believe we only can learn about God through divine revelation. And scripture became increasingly important to him, according to Martin E. Marty's book, Martin Luther (Viking Penguin, 2004, page 6).
Martin Luther was an imperfect Christian, conflicted about whether or not Turkish/Islamic invasions were divine punishment or simple revelations of evil, conflicted about how to fight those invasions, and conflicted about how to both love and rebuke Jewish brothers and sisters.
But the work he did gave birth to churches that had parted with Roman Catholic practices that were based on a belief in purgatory. Luther's work ushered in the Protestant Reformation, which also broke with the Latin translations of the Bible, giving more and more people direct access to Heaven's words.
Ultimately, Luther's writings, in German, spurred the formation of many reformed churches during the 1520s, followed by Tyndale's efforts to translate into English during the 1530s.
Next, Pierre Robert Olivétan, who had been a student of d'Étaples, worked in Switzerland to publish another crucial translation of the Bible. What was different about Olivétan's work is that he didn't rely on Latin translations at all; but Olivétan went back to the original Hebrew and Greek in order to translate into French. And, because he was in Switzerland, he successfully published that Bible, in 1535.
It was Olivétan's "Geneva Bible" that John Calvin revised and printed in 1546. That was followed by translations from people who had been exiled from England, resulting in an English "Geneva Bible" in 1560. But others also published successful translations, including Francisco de Enzinas, who, wanting to better explain the scriptures, published the first complete New Testament translation from Greek into Spanish, in 1543.
By 1599, in Germany, the New Testament was being published in eight European languages (The New Westminster Dictionary of Church History: The Early, Medieval, and Reformation Eras, page 87).
Eliminating Errors: Under Sponsorship of King James
As Bible translation came to a boiling point, boiling over geographic and church boundaries, there was less and less resistance to the free-flow of Bible interpretation.
Countries like England let down their guard, and, in January 1604, King James I of England met with representatives of the Church of England, which included Puritans. That and related meetings were called the Hampton Court Conference.
The Puritan cause at those meetings was to stop government from imposing punishment in matters of the church; and, with so many Bible translations in print by then, they also wanted to make a less easily misunderstood version of the Bible available to the masses.
There, was born the idea for a Bible sponsored by King James, who had become leader of England as the closest living relative to Queen Elizabeth I.
Queen Elizabeth, before James, had opened the country, and its official church, to the Protestant Movement, meaning the country had, in some ways, broken with Catholicism, allowing the import of Bibles for the masses.
That new freedom, under Elizabeth, was a far cry from the era when Tyndale had fled the country in order to translate and print a Bible — having individual pages of his Bible smuggled into England in the pages of other books, before he was imprisoned and executed during his exile.
Many other translators worked on Bibles following Tyndale's death.
And Elizabeth opened the floodgates.
But, again, with so many different versions of the Bible in print, there was no shortage of errors in the texts. And that was one of the Puritans' complaints.
They felt some English Bibles "were corrupt and not answerable to the truth of the original."
But how on earth could the Church of England work on a Bible that avoided the mistakes? The Bibles produced at Geneva, in French and in English, seemed to be doing well, maybe because Olivétan and John Calvin weren't simply inspired men but were determined to study the Hebrew and Greek texts.
King James responded by commissioning more than 50 scholars, under oversight of Archbishop Richard Bancroft. The scholars met in small groups, and they gathered for collective conventions, but they also wrote letters to one another and to other scholars.
They went to original Hebrew and Greek texts in as much as they could. They were faithful to the Holy Spirit.
Says Encyclopedia Britannica online: "The impact of the original Hebrew upon the revisers was so pronounced that they seem to have made a conscious effort to imitate its rhythm and style in their translation of the Hebrew Scriptures."
But to be sure the passages that began to reveal themselves in their translations were not nonsense but truly were what God was saying (not only to them but to others before them), they read Tyndale's works for background. They also turned to Jewish commentaries that had been written.
And, yes, the King James translators argued about the meaning of more than one passage.
Some passages were prophetic and probably difficult for them to fully comprehend. And some passages were like unraveling ancient riddles, as in more than a few of Solomon's proverbs.
... Jesus told His disciple Peter that He was giving His church the keys to Heaven (Matthew 16:19). So, it's no wonder, today, when that same Holy Spirit leads men to try unlocking the scriptures in new ways.
Today, when various translators look at early Hebrew texts to further clarify or magnify the King James or other translations, some passages do inevitably get pulled away from the whole of what Heaven has said.
An example, from one of our favorite modern translations, the Holman Christian Standard Bible (HCSB), makes the mistake of saying, in Philippians 2:7, that Jesus "emptied Himself."
The truth is that Jesus, in His walk in earth, "made Himself of no reputation." To some, that may sound like fancy words from old Englishmen. But all the Spirit is saying is that God made Himself as a servant, familiar with affliction but clean in heart and in robe: spiritually and mindfully cleansed of any evil He was subjected to or witness to.
Jesus made Himself as a servant, but has always remained full of heavenly hope.
The translators, under King James, spent nearly a decade doing the work of unraveling every passage and verse. They were not casual in their efforts.
They were devoted.
The King James version of the Bible was first published in 1611. And by the 1700s, Catholics in England had begun to accept the Bible that the church had asked for from King James.
Pastors Guide Us in the Word
Having a Bible that's in our language, and that's accurate to Heaven's leading, isn't all that we need as individual Christians.
Heaven has told us, through the Apostle Paul, that we need our pastors (Romans 10:14).
Paul's letters to Timothy, and passages like the eighth chapter in Acts, also are evidence that we need our pastors to help interpret our ancestors' texts, and to shepherd us.
It's true that God can and does reveal truths to us as individuals (Hebrews 8:10-12; Ephesians 4:25). But it's equally true that we need our pastors (1 Peter 2:25).
And, maybe, even pastors need other pastors, to help keep them from error.
How many times have we heard a pastor say, I read that so many times and never saw that until now?
So often, we know a scripture with all our heart, but there are mysteries there still to be seen. Just listening to a new pastor one Sunday, one soul realized something about the Hebrews 11 account of how Abraham was faithful in putting his only promised son on a alter of sacrifice.
So many Bible versions of Hebrews 11:19 make it sound as if Abraham actually killed Isaac, and that he did so because he had faith that God would raise Isaac from the dead. But that's not what the scripture is truly saying!
Abraham didn't kill Isaac! The Old Testament didn't lie about that. So, what Hebrews 11:19 is saying, about how Abraham knew he would receive his son back, isn't only that he had faith that his son wouldn't be eternally dead; but, at the end of that day, Abraham actually still had his living and breathing son "as a symbol" of something to come: as a symbol of new life in Christ, which was to come.
The soul who went to that truth with a pastor one Sunday never would have seen that without the pastor.
The God's Word translation Bible says, "Abraham did receive Isaac back from the dead in a figurative sense," but that translation is not telling the truth.
What the King James Version (KJV) means in saying Abraham received Isaac back "as a figure" is possibly best understood through hearing from a Catholic pastor who reads from the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops version of the Bible, which says Abraham received Isaac back "as a symbol."
Hearing the word "symbol," from a pastor, gives so much more clarity about the meaning of Isaac being spared, of Isaac having new life, not perishing under his father's hand.
Jesus tells us, today, of family killing one another. But we, the church, those abiding in Him, have every assurance of salvation (new life), of forever life in Jesus.
Imagine how hopeless life would be if we, today, were like folk who once laughed at the scriptures, because the Old English of the KJV sounded so strange and foolish.
Imagine how hopeless life would be if God hadn't included interpretation as one of Heaven's gifts.
Imagine how hopeless life would be if none of us wanted to know the meaning, if none of us wanted guidance from Heaven, and from Heaven's pastors in earth.
Where Are We Now
While much of the church still prospers today, we're living through times that are troubled enough to make us wonder how near we are to the time of tribulation that Jesus warns about.
With more and more doubt asserting itself worldwide, and with the greater and greater un-repentance that Jesus said would happen (Matthew 24:12), we know the state of the church isn't all good.
To too far an extent, our world is
So We Need Jesus (and We Need Our Pastors)
Sometimes, the oddest of ministries say it best: "People are looking for identity," says Rabbi K. A. Schneider of television's Discovering the Jewish Jesus.
The fact of that matter can be seen in a documentary program like Family Pictures on PBS. That program, in 2019, included a segment featuring a nightclub where performers consider themselves like a family one to another.
But, in Jesus, we hold together as family in a way that's different from that. In Christ, we try to keep one another from cleaving to the nightclub, making mistakes, and misrepresenting life the way God intends. Or, just generally, we try to deliver one another from sins.
Silly at times, T. J. McBride Ministries offers a different idea about breaking free of sins, when Pastor McBride gives a sermon called "It's Not About You."
Of course, the love of Jesus is all about you, and me, too. But what Pastor McBride is saying is that following Jesus, living for Him, isn't like liking or following someone on Facebook, isn't like liking one another in a worldly way; but it's having a higher calling, and it's stepping into that faith, actually living what you believe, which includes denying your ill feelings and offering forgiveness when needed.
That's what it is to have your identity in Christ, who we all need, so much.
We need to be able to see Jesus in our pastors, and in one another, even though we're expecting Him to show up on a grand scale one day and deliver this world.
To cope with our time waiting for the Savior to return in full, He has to live in our hearts.
As Heaven Has Led
The Bible tells us interpretation is a gift of the Holy Spirit (1 Corinthians 12:10).
And far more souls have interpreted the holy texts than mankind ever will know.
Men, and apparently women also, have always had stirrings of heart to interpret the Hebrew record, as well as to interpret God's direct words to us.
For example, about 670 years after Jesus went back to Heaven, a monk named Caedmond tended cows during the day. He was a musician, but he didn't feel gifted enough to sing hymns with his brethren when dinners were finished each evening.
Instead, something stirred his heart to write poems or hymns on his own at night, to paraphrase parts of the Bible, translating from Latin into his native tongue, which was Anglo-Saxon (the language that evolved into Old English). He paraphrased (in English) the Bible's accounts of the Creation, the Exodus, and the Crucifixion.
But Caedmond wasn't the only one stirred up in heart to pull parts of the ancient texts into a heartfelt tongue.
There was a bishop named Aldhelm, an extremely gifted interpreter, around the year 700. And there were others as educated as him — and still others, who were less scholarly but led just as tirelessly by Heaven.
We're not likely ever to know the names of the yearning souls who privately wrote down whispers from Heaven about the meaning of one passage or another.
But we know that yearning was real and true to many people, because at least one statement from the Roman Catholic church complained that "laymen and silly old women" were being allowed to interpret scriptures (The New Westminster Dictionary of Church History: The Early, Medieval, and Reformation Eras, Westminster John Knox Press, 2008, page 88).
One name we do know, was that of another scholar — not a lay person but a priest. Like Caedmond long before him, this priest, Jacques Lefèvre d'Étaples, quietly wrote some of the scriptures in his native tongue. He began publishing copies of his French translations in 1523. The French Parliament banned those printings of the New Testament in 1525; but d'Étaples went on to translate the whole Bible and to publish it, working in exile in Belgium, in 1530.
How Latin Was Both a Blessing and an Enemy
For a very long while, the Catholic church was, by large, the most influential in reaching the world for Jesus. But that early outreach, that ministry, was different back then.
When people met for church services, they didn't have Bibles in hand. But, like slaves in early America, congregants had to rely on whatever the priests said, without being able to explore and absorb truths of the Bible on their own.
Catholic leaders had compiled the church's Bible from the original texts that were in Hebrew and Greek (because apostles like Paul had written partly in Greek). The Catholics needed the Hebrew and Greek texts to be in a language that a great many priests could understand, whether the priests were Spanish, French, German, or so on.
So, Latin was the language the church agreed to use for its Bible. Catholics translated from Hebrew and Greek into Latin.
The trouble with that, however, was that most lay people (the congregations) didn't all know Latin; so their priests had to know both Latin and the tongue of the people. A German priest, for example, had to study in Latin but speak to the people in German. And, again, that meant the people couldn't also study for themselves.
Worse than that, Catholic leadership became conceited about Latin translations, and the church forbade translations other than in Latin.
But men continued to be stirred in heart to interpret the scriptures, privately for the most part: on their own, with sincere and devoted hearts.
Working for Faith
As the church, we're not supposed to get bogged down in arguments over words. And, for the most part, Bible translators have not.
When there have been obstacles to translating the Bible as the Holy Spirit has led, men have worked around those obstacles, some translating very privately; others fleeing persecution for their translations; and at least one, William Tyndale, giving his life for the work of interpretation.
William Tyndale
Says a documentary, They Valued the Bible (Watchtower Bible and Tract Society): Tyndale's "work was more than that of scholarly ambition." He "loved the Bible."
But, in some ways, Tyndale was influenced by Martin Luther.
Luther had studied philosophy, but he came to believe we only can learn about God through divine revelation. And scripture became increasingly important to him, according to Martin E. Marty's book, Martin Luther (Viking Penguin, 2004, page 6).
Martin Luther was an imperfect Christian, conflicted about whether or not Turkish/Islamic invasions were divine punishment or simple revelations of evil, conflicted about how to fight those invasions, and conflicted about how to both love and rebuke Jewish brothers and sisters.
But the work he did gave birth to churches that had parted with Roman Catholic practices that were based on a belief in purgatory. Luther's work ushered in the Protestant Reformation, which also broke with the Latin translations of the Bible, giving more and more people direct access to Heaven's words.
Ultimately, Luther's writings, in German, spurred the formation of many reformed churches during the 1520s, followed by Tyndale's efforts to translate into English during the 1530s.
Next, Pierre Robert Olivétan, who had been a student of d'Étaples, worked in Switzerland to publish another crucial translation of the Bible. What was different about Olivétan's work is that he didn't rely on Latin translations at all; but Olivétan went back to the original Hebrew and Greek in order to translate into French. And, because he was in Switzerland, he successfully published that Bible, in 1535.
It was Olivétan's "Geneva Bible" that John Calvin revised and printed in 1546. That was followed by translations from people who had been exiled from England, resulting in an English "Geneva Bible" in 1560. But others also published successful translations, including Francisco de Enzinas, who, wanting to better explain the scriptures, published the first complete New Testament translation from Greek into Spanish, in 1543.
By 1599, in Germany, the New Testament was being published in eight European languages (The New Westminster Dictionary of Church History: The Early, Medieval, and Reformation Eras, page 87).
Eliminating Errors: Under Sponsorship of King James
As Bible translation came to a boiling point, boiling over geographic and church boundaries, there was less and less resistance to the free-flow of Bible interpretation.
Countries like England let down their guard, and, in January 1604, King James I of England met with representatives of the Church of England, which included Puritans. That and related meetings were called the Hampton Court Conference.
The Puritan cause at those meetings was to stop government from imposing punishment in matters of the church; and, with so many Bible translations in print by then, they also wanted to make a less easily misunderstood version of the Bible available to the masses.
There, was born the idea for a Bible sponsored by King James, who had become leader of England as the closest living relative to Queen Elizabeth I.
Queen Elizabeth, before James, had opened the country, and its official church, to the Protestant Movement, meaning the country had, in some ways, broken with Catholicism, allowing the import of Bibles for the masses.
That new freedom, under Elizabeth, was a far cry from the era when Tyndale had fled the country in order to translate and print a Bible — having individual pages of his Bible smuggled into England in the pages of other books, before he was imprisoned and executed during his exile.
Many other translators worked on Bibles following Tyndale's death.
And Elizabeth opened the floodgates.
But, again, with so many different versions of the Bible in print, there was no shortage of errors in the texts. And that was one of the Puritans' complaints.
They felt some English Bibles "were corrupt and not answerable to the truth of the original."
But how on earth could the Church of England work on a Bible that avoided the mistakes? The Bibles produced at Geneva, in French and in English, seemed to be doing well, maybe because Olivétan and John Calvin weren't simply inspired men but were determined to study the Hebrew and Greek texts.
King James responded by commissioning more than 50 scholars, under oversight of Archbishop Richard Bancroft. The scholars met in small groups, and they gathered for collective conventions, but they also wrote letters to one another and to other scholars.
They went to original Hebrew and Greek texts in as much as they could. They were faithful to the Holy Spirit.
Says Encyclopedia Britannica online: "The impact of the original Hebrew upon the revisers was so pronounced that they seem to have made a conscious effort to imitate its rhythm and style in their translation of the Hebrew Scriptures."
But to be sure the passages that began to reveal themselves in their translations were not nonsense but truly were what God was saying (not only to them but to others before them), they read Tyndale's works for background. They also turned to Jewish commentaries that had been written.
And, yes, the King James translators argued about the meaning of more than one passage.
Some passages were prophetic and probably difficult for them to fully comprehend. And some passages were like unraveling ancient riddles, as in more than a few of Solomon's proverbs.
... Jesus told His disciple Peter that He was giving His church the keys to Heaven (Matthew 16:19). So, it's no wonder, today, when that same Holy Spirit leads men to try unlocking the scriptures in new ways.
Today, when various translators look at early Hebrew texts to further clarify or magnify the King James or other translations, some passages do inevitably get pulled away from the whole of what Heaven has said.
An example, from one of our favorite modern translations, the Holman Christian Standard Bible (HCSB), makes the mistake of saying, in Philippians 2:7, that Jesus "emptied Himself."
The truth is that Jesus, in His walk in earth, "made Himself of no reputation." To some, that may sound like fancy words from old Englishmen. But all the Spirit is saying is that God made Himself as a servant, familiar with affliction but clean in heart and in robe: spiritually and mindfully cleansed of any evil He was subjected to or witness to.
Jesus made Himself as a servant, but has always remained full of heavenly hope.
The translators, under King James, spent nearly a decade doing the work of unraveling every passage and verse. They were not casual in their efforts.
They were devoted.
The King James version of the Bible was first published in 1611. And by the 1700s, Catholics in England had begun to accept the Bible that the church had asked for from King James.
Pastors Guide Us in the Word
Having a Bible that's in our language, and that's accurate to Heaven's leading, isn't all that we need as individual Christians.
Heaven has told us, through the Apostle Paul, that we need our pastors (Romans 10:14).
Paul's letters to Timothy, and passages like the eighth chapter in Acts, also are evidence that we need our pastors to help interpret our ancestors' texts, and to shepherd us.
It's true that God can and does reveal truths to us as individuals (Hebrews 8:10-12; Ephesians 4:25). But it's equally true that we need our pastors (1 Peter 2:25).
And, maybe, even pastors need other pastors, to help keep them from error.
How many times have we heard a pastor say, I read that so many times and never saw that until now?
So often, we know a scripture with all our heart, but there are mysteries there still to be seen. Just listening to a new pastor one Sunday, one soul realized something about the Hebrews 11 account of how Abraham was faithful in putting his only promised son on a alter of sacrifice.
So many Bible versions of Hebrews 11:19 make it sound as if Abraham actually killed Isaac, and that he did so because he had faith that God would raise Isaac from the dead. But that's not what the scripture is truly saying!
Abraham didn't kill Isaac! The Old Testament didn't lie about that. So, what Hebrews 11:19 is saying, about how Abraham knew he would receive his son back, isn't only that he had faith that his son wouldn't be eternally dead; but, at the end of that day, Abraham actually still had his living and breathing son "as a symbol" of something to come: as a symbol of new life in Christ, which was to come.
The soul who went to that truth with a pastor one Sunday never would have seen that without the pastor.
The God's Word translation Bible says, "Abraham did receive Isaac back from the dead in a figurative sense," but that translation is not telling the truth.
What the King James Version (KJV) means in saying Abraham received Isaac back "as a figure" is possibly best understood through hearing from a Catholic pastor who reads from the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops version of the Bible, which says Abraham received Isaac back "as a symbol."
Hearing the word "symbol," from a pastor, gives so much more clarity about the meaning of Isaac being spared, of Isaac having new life, not perishing under his father's hand.
Jesus tells us, today, of family killing one another. But we, the church, those abiding in Him, have every assurance of salvation (new life), of forever life in Jesus.
Imagine how hopeless life would be if we, today, were like folk who once laughed at the scriptures, because the Old English of the KJV sounded so strange and foolish.
Imagine how hopeless life would be if God hadn't included interpretation as one of Heaven's gifts.
Imagine how hopeless life would be if none of us wanted to know the meaning, if none of us wanted guidance from Heaven, and from Heaven's pastors in earth.
Where Are We Now
While much of the church still prospers today, we're living through times that are troubled enough to make us wonder how near we are to the time of tribulation that Jesus warns about.
With more and more doubt asserting itself worldwide, and with the greater and greater un-repentance that Jesus said would happen (Matthew 24:12), we know the state of the church isn't all good.
To too far an extent, our world is
- full of unbelief (Romans 11:25)
- falling away from faith (1 Timothy 4:1; 1 Corinthians 9:27; Hebrews 10:26-31; 2 Thessalonians 2:3; Romans 1:26; 2 Peter 2:20)
- growing cold (Matthew 24:12)
- following false Christs (Matthew 24:24)
- loving a culture of self (2 Timothy 3:1-7; Romans 1:28-32)
- misusing the truth (Romans 1:18)
- uncaring toward that part of Israel that remains faithful, uncaring toward goings-on in the Middle East, uncaring toward almost any other problem area that seems unrelated to one ethnicity or another (Matthew 24:10; Romans 2:28-29).
So We Need Jesus (and We Need Our Pastors)
Sometimes, the oddest of ministries say it best: "People are looking for identity," says Rabbi K. A. Schneider of television's Discovering the Jewish Jesus.
The fact of that matter can be seen in a documentary program like Family Pictures on PBS. That program, in 2019, included a segment featuring a nightclub where performers consider themselves like a family one to another.
But, in Jesus, we hold together as family in a way that's different from that. In Christ, we try to keep one another from cleaving to the nightclub, making mistakes, and misrepresenting life the way God intends. Or, just generally, we try to deliver one another from sins.
Silly at times, T. J. McBride Ministries offers a different idea about breaking free of sins, when Pastor McBride gives a sermon called "It's Not About You."
Of course, the love of Jesus is all about you, and me, too. But what Pastor McBride is saying is that following Jesus, living for Him, isn't like liking or following someone on Facebook, isn't like liking one another in a worldly way; but it's having a higher calling, and it's stepping into that faith, actually living what you believe, which includes denying your ill feelings and offering forgiveness when needed.
That's what it is to have your identity in Christ, who we all need, so much.
We need to be able to see Jesus in our pastors, and in one another, even though we're expecting Him to show up on a grand scale one day and deliver this world.
To cope with our time waiting for the Savior to return in full, He has to live in our hearts.
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More to come!
"Therefore speak I to them in parables: because they seeing see not; and hearing they hear not, neither do they understand."
"And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it."
Matthew 16:18
"From that time forth began Jesus to shew unto his disciples, how that he must go unto Jerusalem, and suffer many things of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and be raised again the third day."
"But he answered and said unto them, An evil and adulterous generation seeketh after a sign; and there shall no sign be given to it, but the sign of the prophet Jonas:
"But, beloved, be not ignorant of this one thing, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day."
"Therefore speak I to them in parables: because they seeing see not; and hearing they hear not, neither do they understand."
Matthew 13:13
"And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it."
Matthew 16:18
"From that time forth began Jesus to shew unto his disciples, how that he must go unto Jerusalem, and suffer many things of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and be raised again the third day."
Matthew 16:21
"But he answered and said unto them, An evil and adulterous generation seeketh after a sign; and there shall no sign be given to it, but the sign of the prophet Jonas:
For as Jonas was three days and three nights in the whale's belly; so shall the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth."
Matthew 12:39-40
"But, beloved, be not ignorant of this one thing, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day."
2 Peter 3:8
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