In English

In my rush to post my article before midnight last night, I inadvertently left out the short list of the all-time great hymns written by Haldor Lillenas: “Glorius Freedom, “Wonderful Grace of Jesus” and “The Bible Stands.”

The last hymn is one my church very often sings as a congregation before a Sunday morning message, as they did just this morning, and my pastor always points out that the fifth stanza, sung in grace circles, was written by longtime fellow grace preacher, Ted Fellows, who has an assembly (Berean Bible Church) in Louisville, OH.

The added lyrics are: “The Bible stands in the King James Version, where it’s been preserved for me. God’s Word in English and without error is my final authority.”

In today’s sermon:

This month is the 500^th anniversary of William Tyndale publishing his translation of the New Testament, based on the Textus Receptus. It represented the first time the Scripture was placed in the English language in a whole book.

Tyndale wound up spending the last 18 months of his life in prison and then they burned him at the stake, all because the Roman church didn’t want the Word of God in the language of the people.

He had a famous confrontation with one of the papists who was condemning him and Tyndale made the statement that (and I paraphrase), “No matter what happens, I will give myself so that even the plough boy, just the common worker in the field, will know more about the Word of God than the pope in Rome.”

*****

Since I’ve brought Lillenas’ music to mind again, here’s one I found from the 1920s entitled, “He Will Carry You Through”:

If there’s trou­ble any­where,
And your soul is near des­pair,
Just trust in the Sav­ior and be true;
His com­pas­sion nev­er doubt,
He will al­ways help you out,
For He will car­ry you thro’.

Refrain

Are your bur­dens hard to bear?

Are you weight­ed down with care?
Just trust in the Sav­ior and be true;
If you think you can­not stand,
Let Him lead you by the hand,
And He will car­ry you thro’.

Refrain

In temp­ta­tion’s try­ing hour
You will need His keep­ing pow’r,
Just trust in the Sav­ior and be true;
Tho’ the sha­dows ’round you fall,
He’ll be with you thro’ it all,
And He will car­ry you thro’.

When you reach the swell­ing tide
Of death’s riv­er deep and wide,
Just trust in the Sav­ior and be true;
He will not for­sake your soul,
Tho’ the chil­ly waves may roll,
For He will car­ry you thro’.

*****

"The King James Bible, a book which, if everything else in our language should perish, would alone suffice to show the whole extent of (English's) beauty and power.”—Thomas Babington Macaulay

At the time of Jesus Christ, Greek was a universal language (the New Testament was written in Greek) and today English is a universal language.

"The English language, in its structure, in the way it works in its grammar and in the way the words are formed and the ideas are communicated, is comparable to the accuracy, structure and power of the Greek language," explains Richard Jordan.

"There are some reasons those languages became universal and it has nothing really to do with the power of the Greek Empire or the British Empire, because in the First Century the Greek Empire had been done away with. The Roman Empire with its Latin was the world's empire and yet Greek was still the universal language of commerce."

*****

One the keys to the Protestant Reformation was the popular belief that God not only wrote His Word and preserved it through time, but intended for it to be translated into the languages of the nations.

While there are many who say scriptural authority lies only in the "original manuscripts," or in the extant Hebrew and Greek manuscripts, and therefore only language scholars can interpret the "inerrant" scriptures, Scripture itself shows how this is not the case.

God's Word is designed to be translated into the languages of the people reading it and when someone says you can't successfully perfectly translate from one language to another, you can say back, "Well, God did!"

When scholars and seminary-types say no one can really understand the Bible unless they know the Greek language, they're really just pushing the false Roman Catholic notion that, "Well, if the priest can read it but I can't, then I'll have to go to him for all my information."

Isn't that what Rome's been saying for over 1,500 years? So, it's really just another sneaky Protestant popery idea and not what the Scripture gives you to understand.

*****

A great personality profile on the power of the King James Bible appeared in the New York Times several years ago.

Viktor Sukhodrev is a Russian man who for three decades was the Kremlin's chief language interpreter, including at superpower summit meetings and other occasions involving seven American presidencies, ranging from Eisenhower to George Bush Sr.

"Throughout the cold war, Mr. Sukhodrev was there in the middle—low-key, reliable, professional, the English-language voice of every Soviet leader from Krushchev to Gorbachev," writes the Times. ". . . He was present but not present, emptying himself of ego, slipping into the skin of the man who was speaking, feeling his feelings, saying his words."

Viktor first learned English as a young boy living in London during the 1940s. His mother, who was separated from his father, was a member of the Soviet Trade Mission, and while she was at work during the day, six-year-old Viktor would tag along on the walking route of a postman who lived upstairs.

"It was from the postman and his wife, he said, that he learned the British manners that gave him his special grace as an interpreter," reports the article. ". . . When at the age of 8 he entered the Soviet Embassy school in London, he found himself translating for school officials on public occasions, and he liked the feeling."

Viktor says of this time, "That is when I really believed, and never lost that belief, that when I grew up, I was going to be the man in the middle. I was going to be an interpreter. And if I was going to do that, I felt, I was going to be damn good. Maybe the best."

He returned to Moscow at age 12 and later went on to graduate from the city's Institute of Foreign Languages, quickly climbing to the highest level of the Kremlin.

"He found that the interpreter, as cool as he may seem, is often sweating much harder than the men on either side. Here at the pinnacle, where every nuance has a nuance, the mind is a constantly whirring computer, cleared of thought, making instant decisions."

Most importantly, there's no margin for error on the job, as Viktor testifies: "An interpreter at that level cannot—not 'should not'—simply cannot make a mistake. He cannot. No way. Well, if he did he'd be out and rightly so."

Even though Viktor is now retired, living with his wife, Inga, in their country home near Moscow, he says translating has become so much a part of him over the years that he can't seem to stop unconsciously translating even when reading or watching TV. When he witnesses an inexact translation made by a lesser interpreter on television, for example, he says he wants to shout out, "No! No!"

One of Viktor's pastimes is to take his English Bible, a Gideon KJV he stole from a hotel room on a trip to the U.S. with Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, and randomly open it to compare passages with a Russian translation of the Bible.

"It's been stunning!" Viktor's quoted saying. "I've been stunned by the magnificence of the translation. I feel that the Bible is perhaps the greatest work of translation that ever appeared in the world."

As the Times revealed, "The Bible may have held other hidden treasures for him. Formally, he was an atheist like everyone else in the Kremlin. But, perhaps, not alone, he said, 'I was not an unbeliever, let's say.' "

*****

Jordan tells of a missionary in Venezuela, later expelled from the country, who worked on translating the Bible into the languages of tribal people without a written language period.

"Families in Bolivia, too, have spent their whole lifetime going in to a tribe in the jungle in the hills that had no written language and learning the language and developing a grammar and a written language for them so they could then translate God's Word into their language. We should never fail to appreciate the heritage of the men and women who have gone before us to put the Bible into our language."