On his live YouTube podcast this morning out of Florida (Fellowship Bible Church Orlando), Pastor Joel Hayes (a native of Springfield, Ohio) fielded a live "text" message from a viewer that read in part, "Seems like most people have some sort of wonky view about something."
Hayes responded: I don't know what my wonky view would be. Okay, I thought of one. This might be wonky, but I think it's right.
Probably the craziest thing I can think of that I've taught behind the pulpit is I think the apostles might well make an appearance during the tribulation here on earth.
Nobody believes that, nobody thinks that, but, you know, you consider the fact, you really go through the Olivet Discourse and He is talking to the disciples specifically about the things they're going to see and hear and experience.
They're going to be captured and they're going to be brought before kings, leaders of nations, and "don't think about what you're going to say because the Father will give you the words through the spirit," and, you know, the Lord is very detailed about what they are going to personally experience in the Tribulation and you remember He told . . .
Was it Revelation 10 where the Apostle John was told how he was going to speak before kings and nations? That never happened in the Book of Acts. That started this theory of, "Woah, I wonder if that means John's going to make a return to the earth during the Tribulation?" Just a theory that fits the facts. But that's pretty wonky, I would imagine some people would think.
Another wonky one is the "Holy Spirit Transportation Service." I'll go to the mat over that one. You remember Phillip with the eunuch, and he suddenly disappeared and then he was miles away later preaching somewhere else? He took a ride on the "Holy Spirit Transportation Service."
Why does this exist in the Bible? Because it foreshadows life in the coming kingdom. You know, if you're in some North American continent and you're living your life and the Lord says, "Yeah, I want you to come to Mt. Zion and have dinner with me," you're not going to have to book a flight and fly around the world to go see Him. The "Holy Spirit Transportation Service" will take you around the globe in an instant. That's life in the kingdom.
You have to maybe show up in Jerusalem every Saturday and worship the Lord--the "Holy Spirit Transportation System" will just take you around the globe instantly. It's like the transporter beam on Star Trek but far more efficient and no issues.
You remember when Elijah was on the run? Jezebel and her spineless husband were on the hunt for him and he was talking to that guy and he said, "Well, tell him to come see me here," and the guy's like, "What do you mean? For all I know the Holy Spirit might transport you to a mountain somewhere and then I'm going to bring him here and you're not going to be here and I'm going to be a dead man basically."
And Elijah says, "No, as I'm standing before the Lord here, I will be here when you bring the king," and he did and they had a conversation about Baal worship. It was a known fact that the Holy Spirit would transport people like that in such a way.
He'll just whisk you away to some mountain somewhere else because God had something He wanted you to do.
I would also argue that on a few occasions that happened with the apostles during the Lord's earthly ministry. There were some stories where it sure looked like they took a ride on the "Holy Spirit Transportation Service." I'd have to get my notes out and look it up, but I could go into that more. That might be considered wonky by some.
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Here's another outtake from a seminar given at my church by Michigan Pastor Bryan Ross, an accomplished Bible historian and author, in light of this year's 250th anniversary of William Tyndale translating the New Testament into English from Greek and Hebrew:
Prior to William Tyndale's work the English people had no capacity to understand the mystery, much less justification because the Bible doesn't exist; they can't what? Paul says in Ephesians 3: [4] Whereby, when ye read, ye may understand my knowledge in the mystery of Christ)
[5] Which in other ages was not made known unto the sons of men, as it is now revealed unto his holy apostles and prophets by the Spirit;
These phrases "Give us this day our daily bread," "Blessed are the poor in spirit," "Fight the good fight of faith." These do not originate with the King James. They originate with William Tyndale. These expressions that we all identify as the King James, they all originate from William Tyndale.
I have a book by David Teems, "Tyndale: The Man Who Gave God an English Voice," and at the back of the book he's got an appendix where he lists out a bunch of words that occur in English for the first time through William Tyndale. I'll read a few of them, not all of them, because it would take too long:
Apostleship, Athenian, beggarly, castaway, chasten, chastening, childishness, Corinthian, mercy seat, fellow soldier, fisher, fishermen, godly, godspeed, grossly, guest chamber, Passover.
He goes on and on for page after page. Then he says on Page 270, "William Tyndale is the 618th most frequently quoted source in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) with a total of 728 quotations. About .02 percent of all OED quotations are attributed to William Tyndale."
So again, we're not talking about someone who has an influence just on the English Bible; we're talking about someone who you could argue literally MAKES the English language . . .
I'm going to show you that about 83 percent of the King James New Testament is essentially the work of William Tyndale.
In 1520, before Tyndale does what he does, the English language is essentially a completely dead language. It possessed zero prestige for literature or scholarship.
Translating the Bible into English was considered a debasement of the bible. That's how little English as a language had any recognition and, in fact, some of the Catholic Church authorities thought it was a disgrace to the bible for the bible to even be in English.
So, the English language is essentially dead at the bottom of the pond in 1520.
Then William Tyndale translates and publishes his New Testament in 1526 and we see the first sort of up spike and then eventually throughout the 1500s we see a massive increase in language culminating with Shakespeare and the King James Bible.
I want you to think about something. How many of you remember your world history class when you studied the Renaissance? How many of you remember that all the Italian Renaissance artists are all named after Ninja Turtles? Michelangelo, Leonardo, Donatello, Raphael.
But the Italian Renaissance that happened in Italy in the south is known for its painting and its sculpting and all of that. The Sistine Chapel and the David and the Pietta and all this famous sculpting and artwork created by those Renaissance artists who arguably had the greatest art created in world history.
But the northern Renaissance was different and particularly in England. Name to me any famous English famous sculptor from the Renaissance? You can't because there weren't any!
The English Renaissance was characterized by the English Language, and so who stands at the forefront of the English Renaissance? Shakespeare.
All of the King James Bible translators were reared in the Elizabethan Age of Shakespeare. You do realize that the last thing they did on the translation of the King James Bible is they sat in a room and somebody stood at a pulpit like this and they read the text out loud.
And the other guys listened to the text being read out loud, and if something didn't sound right, they would raise their hand and object and discuss how it sounded. Because the English Renaissance becomes an auditory Renaissance. It's a Renaissance of the spoken word and all of that is touched off by who? Tyndale.
So what Tyndale does with his bible is he literally teaches people the English language that then Shakespeare comes along later and does what he does.
Tyndale forced English to carry the weight of divine revelation, because back here nobody thought it was good for anything and by now everyone is starting to think, "Wow, this is what God's Word should sound like."
As his arch-antagonist Thomas Moore mocked, literally saying, "All England must now go to school with Tyndale to learn English," and he didn't mean that as a compliment. He didn't want that to be the case, so there's Tyndale's enemy acknowledging that Tyndale is doing something great in the culture of England.