RECEIVED wisdom

The Bible itself, through many different verses, tells you it’s going to be translated into all the languages of the nations. Romans 16:25-26 says, “Now to him that is of power to stablish you according to my gospel, and the preaching of Jesus Christ, according to the revelation of the mystery, which was kept secret since the world began,
[26] But now is made manifest, and by the scriptures of the prophets, according to the commandment of the everlasting God, made known to all nations for the obedience of faith.”

There’s a whole realm of doctrine in Scripture about how God’s Word is not just written, but it’s preserved and disseminated. Unfortunately, in most of the debate about the Bible, these proofs are completely overlooked and ignored.

Paul tells us in Eph. 4:11 that God “gave some, apostles; and some, prophets; and some, evangelists; and some, pastors and teachers.” The prophets referred to here are the New Testament prophets.

Paul was a prophet but he was also an apostle. He never wrote anything as a prophet; he wrote as an apostle. Paul warns in I Cor. 14:37, “If any man think himself to be a prophet, or spiritual, let him acknowledge that the things that I write unto you are the commandments of the Lord.”

Jordan explains, “One of the jobs of a prophet all through Scripture is to say, ‘Thus sayeth the Lord.’ He spoke for God. One of the jobs of the prophets in those churches Paul established was to say, ‘This is God’s Word.’ ”

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From I Cor. 5:9 (“I wrote unto you in an epistle not to company with fornicators.”) we see that before I Corinthians, Paul had already written a letter and an epistle to the church of Corinth that did not wind up in the Bible.

Jordan says, “So do we have lost scripture? Who’s to say one letter from Paul is Scripture and the other’s not? Well, hey, folks, that’s why God put a prophet in the assembly, giving him the gift of prophecy. So that that prophet could acknowledge that the things Paul’s writing here—‘This is scripture; that one isn’t.’

“By the way, in II Thess. 2:2 there were some people counterfeiting epistles, writing them and saying they were from Paul when they weren’t! But, you see, the local church there had an office, a prophet, a God-empowered person with a supernatural ability as a gift of that church to say, ‘This is scripture,’ and to speak for God.

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“When Paul wrote to the Thessalonians, he said, ‘I want this epistle to be read by all the brethren.’ He writes Colossians 4 and says, ‘I want you to read the epistle I wrote to the Laodiceans and I want them to read the one I’m writing you.’

“You think the Colossians sent their original copy of what Paul wrote them to the Laodiceans? No way. From the very beginning they were making copies of the Scripture and distributing and assimilating them out.

“Who made the copies and how do you know they were right? They had someone in the church there who was supernaturally empowered by God, not simply to identify, but to write them down. The prophets didn’t originate the Scriptures; the prophets were making copies of them that were just as authoritative as the original. All those copies of God’s Word were to be taken and the commandment of God is they’re to be preached and made known to all nations.”

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Zechariah 8:23 is a verse in Israel’s program about the Millennium Kingdom as an illustration of what it means to preach to all nations: “Thus saith the LORD of hosts; In those days it shall come to pass, that ten men shall take hold out of all languages of the nations, even shall take hold of the skirt of him that is a Jew, saying, We will go with you: for we have heard that God is with you.”

Jordan explains, “Now if you get 10 dudes come up there from 10 different languages and grab a hold of you and start talking, you got a problem because if you’re going to talk back to them, you got to do it in 10 different languages. You know what you’re going to need? The gift of tongues.

“Can you understand why, on the day of Pentecost, God gave to the apostles the gift of tongues? They’re flat gonna need the ability to speak a lot of different languages. You see this effectual reversal of Genesis 11 in Acts 2:4: ‘And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance.’ God is talking through them in other languages.

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“I Cor. 14:21 says, ‘In the law it is written, With men of other tongues and other lips will I speak unto this people; and yet for all that will they not hear me, saith the Lord.’ Notice God can speak more than one language. He tells Israel, ‘I’m gonna speak to you in a bunch of different languages, and when I do, it’s still going to be me talking.’ Language is not a barrier for God to talk.”

Acts 2 goes on, “Now when this was noised abroad, the multitude came together, and were confounded, because that every man heard them speak in his own language.
[7] And they were all amazed and marvelled, saying one to another, Behold, are not all these which speak Galilaeans?
[8] And how hear we every man in our own tongue, wherein we were born?
[9] Parthians, and Medes, and Elamites, and the dwellers in Mesopotamia, and in Judaea, and Cappadocia, in Pontus, and Asia,
[10] Phrygia, and Pamphylia, in Egypt, and in the parts of Libya about Cyrene, and strangers of Rome, Jews and proselytes,
[11] Cretes and Arabians, we do hear them speak in our tongues the wonderful works of God.”

Jordan says, “You see that? They’re filled with the Spirit, they take God’s Word and they translate it into all these different languages ‘and they were all amazed and marveled . . .

'How come all these dudes from up north (Galilee) can speak all these different languages?’ Look at all those different languages! ‘And we’re all hearing in our native language,’ and they’re saying, ‘What in the world does all of this mean?!’

“When Paul says that over there in Romans 16:25, he’s expecting God’s Word to be taken and placed in the languages of the nations so that they would hear God’s Word in their own language.

“I Cor. 14:21 is a quote out of Isaiah 28 and that’s God Himself talking. Notice God Himself can speak with other tongues. God speaks every language, and when His Word is placed in those other languages, it is as much the Word of God as it was in the original language as far as He’s concerned.”

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Another great illustration is in Esther 1:21-22: “And the saying pleased the king and the princes; and the king did according to the word of Memucan:
[22] For he sent letters into all the king's provinces, into every province according to the writing thereof, and to every people after their language, that every man should bear rule in his own house, and that it should be published according to the language of every people.”

If you look at verse 1, it says, “Now it came to pass in the days of Ahasuerus, (this is Ahasuerus which reigned, from India even unto Ethiopia, over an hundred and seven and twenty provinces.”

Jordan says, “This dude’s the ruler over 127 different provinces. Do you think there must have been a little bit of a diplomatic communication issue here?!

“Verse 22 says they’re going to take that letter and translate it into 127 different languages, and when those 127 different nations and languages got that letter in their language, it was the word of the king and it was just as authoritative as it was in the original language the king spoke and wrote it in. Because once you put it in that Receptor language, that’s what he would have said had he written it in that language to start with!

“The translators of the King James Bible wrote a preface from the translators to the reader. In it they said, ‘As the king’s speech which is uttered in parliament, being translated in French, Dutch, Italian and Latin, is still the king’s speech, no cause therefore why the word translated should be denied to be the Word. . . ’

“And then they referenced that passage in Esther 1:22. You see the translators understood they were handling God’s Word and that when you translate it, it’s still God’s Word because the commandment of the everlasting God was that His Word would be made known to all nations.

“Somebody says, ‘Well, what about the language limitations?’ Obviously it didn’t stop the word of the king from getting into the other language. You say, ‘Well, you can’t translate perfectly from one language to another.’ Duh!

“If that’s a problem for you, I suggest you go to Acts 22 and read the first 18 verses where the Apostle Paul stands at the porch of the temple and speaks to his brethren, the Jews, in the Hebrew tongue, according to the text. Paul spoke at least 7-8 different languages. He spoke that in Hebrew but when Luke wrote it down, in every copy of any text that anybody ever reads, they say he wrote it down by inspiration of God in Greek. Hebrew and Greek are very different languages with different syntax, grammar, vocabulary and even letters. They use different alphabets. Hebrew says something very condensed; Greek is fuller.

“But that’s no big thing for Luke to do that. Moses talked to Pharaoh in Egyptian, but when he wrote it down in Exodus, he wrote it in Hebrew. When God the Holy Ghost decided to write down what Moses said, God the Holy Spirit dictated it in Hebrew. So God the Holy Spirit translated it!

“This translation issue is not the blank wall people make it sound like. The issue is to take God’s Word and to put it in the various languages of the nations and that’s been done since the very beginning.

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“The issue in the KJB when it was translated was not to make it easier to read. When you study the history of the English Bible, you discover that the KJB is the LAST English bible in a long history that goes all the way back to Wycliffe’s era in the 1400s.

In the 6th century, beginning with John Wycliffe, Matthews, Coverdale, Bishops, Geneva; these various bibles over a 100-year period of time where they’re putting God’s Word into English, and each time they polish it, they refine it a little more, and what you have with the Authorized Version is that last polishing; that last ripe fruit.

“I Thessalonians 2:13 says, ‘For this cause also thank we God without ceasing, because, when ye received the word of God which ye heard of us, ye received it not as the word of men, but as it is in truth, the word of God, which effectually worketh also in you that believe.’

“The Bible was translated into the Gothic language in the 4th Century. In 350 AD, the Goths--they were some people from that part of the world there in Acts 2 on the day of Pentecost. The gothic territory is in what we now call Germany. It is the earliest predecessor of the English language. There are verses in your Bible that trace the origins of the phraseology all the way back to the Gothic translation in the 4th Century.

“What’s put in the 1611 version was already there in all the bibles before it. William Tyndale, the Matthews Bible, the Coverdale Bible, the Geneva Bible and the Bishops Bible, there’s only one word in that verse that’s not found in all those other bibles. There’s nothing new in that verse and, in fact, almost all of that verse is exactly the way William Tyndale first translated it.

“By the way, before Tyndale you can go all the way back to the Gothic translation and come through the Spanish, the French, the German, the Italian, as well as the old Latin, and find there it is—all those languages and you see the traces of it.

“We call the KJB the Received Text and that means it’s always been there. You hear people argue, ‘Well, where was the bible before the KJB?’ Right there! It’s always been here! That’s why we say it was received’ it’s been the one the church has always used and Erasmus finally put together his Greek text in the 16th Century . . . it was only after the fall of Constantinople in 1457 that the Greek manuscripts began to flood into Europe. They had been pushed out by you know who.

“But the Holy Mother Church had also pushed out the Believers. The Waldensians, the Albegensians, the Carthians, the Moravians. They had pushed them out too and the Bible Believers had taken their Bible and fled.

"Who do you think would have been interested in translating God’s Word into an obscure northern European language? Maybe somebody trying to win them to Christ? Maybe somebody whose relative had been won to Christ and wanted to take it back home with them? Wouldn’t you have an interest in that?

“Now, in English it took almost 100 years during the period of the Reformation, especially when Henry VIII was trying to kill them while they were doing it! Tyndale had to flee his homeland for the continent to finish his translation because Henry VIII had the secret police out after him and he was finally betrayed by one of his buddies into the hands of the papist who burned Tyndale at the stake for his trouble.

“You know what that is? That’s a good environment to translate in because only the real Bible Believers. . . people trying to make a buck off religion won’t be getting involved in it then! The translators weren’t doing it for economic interest. They’re doing it because they wanted to see the day when the simple boy behind the plow would know more of the Scripture than a pope in Rome. That was the motivation behind it and that’s what got it to us.”