Quite a reign

When James was 13 years old, as the young king in Scotland, he had a distant cousin, Esme Stuart, a French Catholic, who came to Scotland to befriend King James and seek to convert him into Catholicism.

As an account reads, “Though still in his early teens, James used his most persuasive arguments on his cousin, causing him to become a Protestant convert. He was to die a Protestant. Esme wrote a document which ‘condemned in detail many aspects of Catholic belief and practice.’

Jordan says, “The dude’s a soul-winner at 13 years old, preaching the gospel! In March of 1604, James told the Protestant clergy, ‘Be more careful diligent than you have been to win souls for God. Where you have been in many ways sluggish before, now wake yourselves up again with a new diligence at this point.’

“You say, ‘Wow, what’s got him so fired up?!’ When he established the colony in Virginia, it was ‘for the propagating of the Christian religion to such people as yet live in darkness and miserable ignorance of the knowledge of the worship of God.’

“He pleaded that, ‘The true Word of God and the service of God in the Christian faith be preached, planted and used in the new colony of Virginia. The inhabitants of those parts live in utter ignorance of divine worship and are completely deprived of the knowledge and solace of the Word of God and probably will remain and end their days in such ignorance unless such a great evil is cared for as soon as possible. Therefore, we ought to end that out of the love for the glory of God and the desire to work for the good and the salvation of souls to those parts. Dedicate yourselves to and perform the ministry of preaching the Word of God in those parts.’"

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In a book to his son, James made it clear, “As to the apocryphal books I omit them because I am no papist.” Jordan says, “That’s good advice from a dad to his boy. He wrote his boy about godliness, holiness, a fear and knowledge of God, decidedly pure and chaste conduct. Among James’ good qualities, one contemporary said, ‘None shine more brightly than the chasteness of his light which he hath preserved without stain, down to the present time, contrary to the example of almost all his ancestors.’ ”

James’ writes his son about how a man should carry a “certain natural modesty and kindness. He wears his hair short, about food and clothing he does not care, I wish therefore someone has a single coat or one living before others have doubles of plurality.”

Jordan says, “That doesn’t sound like the description 50 years later of
King James being this prurient-interested person. He wrote in his book ‘Demonology’ that ‘evil is never to be done that good may happen. Sodomy and witchcraft are horrible crimes. When choosing friends, my son, guard against corrupt lads, effeminate ones, eschew to be effeminate in your clothes.’

“The dude was pretty clear to his son. He said, ‘Be ever careful to prefer the gentlest nature and enjoy frequently hearing the Word of God.’

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Sir John Oglander said about James “he was the best scholar and wisest prince for general knowledge that ever England knew.”

Jordan says, “That’s probably a common view of him from contemporaries but he was also a widely persecuted king. His official motto when he took the crown was ‘Blessed are the peacemakers,’ yet he fought with the Catholics most of his life.

“While he was king in Scotland he was confronted by a Roman Catholic conspiracy called the Spanish Blanks, in January, 1593. Basically a bunch of Jesuit priests, Father William Wright and crowd, instigated a plot to bring 5,000 Spanish troops to Scotland to take over the kingdom. It was discovered it was thwarted but it set James’ political bent—they didn’t like him.

“In The Gunpowder Plot of 1605, 13 conspirators were after James and their goal was to restore the Catholic religion in England. In 1603, there was a big plague in London in which 30,000 people died. The Catholics fomented the idea that the plague was God judging the Protestants.

“The superstition of all that gets to going and so, in order to discourage that, here comes James out of the shoot and he begins to attack the Roman system as being superstitious. As he does that, these Jesuit terrorists begin to plot his destruction.

“Here’s what Guy Faulks said in his trial: ‘Many have heard King James say at the table that the pope is the Antichrist, which he wished to prove to anyone who believed the opposite.’

“And it was that opposition that James took to the front that caused these guys to say, ‘Hey, we need to get rid of King James.’ They filled the basement of Parliament with gunpowder. They were going to do it in November of ‘05. Now what happened is it was discovered. James immediately condemns the Jesuits as a generation of vipers and things go on from there.

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“He lived all of his reign under the threat of personal attack by Jesuit terrorists. One of the first accounts of that I ever read was a story of a young girl who was a chamber maid; a servant in the castle.

“For King James’ protection, when he went to bed at night bodyguards would slide a bolt through the door to secure it so he’d be in his chamber locked from the inside.

“But with the bodyguards bribed to go away, terrorists managed to have that mechanism disabled and the bar taken out, so the door, rather than being locked, was open. This little girl found out about the plot and she ran up into the king’s chamber and warned him of what was happening. They discovered the door couldn’t be locked to keep the assassins out.

“This young girl goes and takes her arm and puts it through the hasp on the door and uses her arm to hold the door locked while James gets away. And this young girl literally has her arm broken and severed in half and dies from the wounds.

“Imagine a guy who can inspire that kind of loyalty out of young believers. As I said, 50 years after his death, he’s being hounded and claimed to be a homosexual by professed Roman Catholic antagonists.

“I just want you to understand King James was not this nefarious guy or this detached, uninterested person. When you find out who he really was, he turns out to be a Bible believer, a scholar in his own right and someone who the Jesuits targeted specifically for destruction over and over.

“His crowning achievement was probably, during his reign, the term Great Britain was applied to the British Commonwealth. He did have quite a reign.”

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In the first decade or more after its introduction in 1611, the King James Authorized Version was simply entitled, “The Holy Bible,” and that’s all you read: “The Holy Bible containing the Old Testament and the New Testament.”

Jordan explains, “They did not put people’s names on the Bible. King James did not say, ‘This is my Bible.’ Where King James came from is in the dedication. The translators dedicated it to the king and consequently, as Ecclesiastes says, ‘Where the word of the king is there is power.’

“By the way, it’s interesting that many of the English bibles that have been translated down through history--many of the influential bibles in the line of the Textus Receptus--have been translated under the reigns of good kings, including Alfred the Great in 899 with the Saxon Bible and Alfonso XIII of Spain when the Protestant bible came out. You find under the reign of some of these monarchs who were favorable to the Scripture the peaking of translations for those nations. And that’s not a fluke. That’s part of the way things operate.

“You’d be well to look into some of these things and enjoy the details. You need to be able to look across history and spot some of your kinfolk.

“King James did oversee the setting up of the most extensive translating process of any bible in history. With three separate locations, two separate translating groups checking the translations of the others and then editorial committees bringing them together; bringing in all of the peoples’ knowledge and the whole country and fine-tuning the thing, going over all the controversial issues. And they were not producing a new translation. They were also not trying to produce an easier-to-read translation.”