|
The Corner
Dear Friends, Satan has sought to undermine God even before the creation of man; Eve succumbed to his cunning attack of doubting the Creator’s command. Satan’s tactic hasn’t really changed for the last 6,000 years. He began by causing Eve to doubt God’s command. The he tried to destroy the knowledge of God over the ages. If Satan couldn’t eradicate it, then he tried to outlaw it. In the last 400 years he has inundated mankind with counterfeit versions of God’s word. The Bible is wonderful because it sets man free from the bondage of sin but Satan is doing all that he can do to pervert and destroy it. I recently had an opportunity to view a film on William Tyndale. He was a man who stood up and proclaimed the truth of God into the English language at a time when the Roman Catholic Church ruled England. He was a man of great learning who dreamed of the day when a common man would be able to read the Bible and be set free from the Satan’s yoke. When he published the New Testament, it was illegal to translate and read the Bible in English without permission from a Roman Catholic authority. Anyone found reading or teaching the Bible in English could lose everything they owned, be labeled a heretic, become an enemy of the State and lose their life. It was a horrible time when parents were burned at the stake for simply teaching their children the Ten Commandments and others were executed for just reading the Bible in English! Satan put up all kinds of obstacles to hinder the pure Gospel message from reaching the masses. The thinking among the unsaved Roman Catholic theologians was that if they had difficulties with God’s word, how could the common people understand it? Tyndale believed there was no reason why the common people of England could not understand the same words that were spoken by Jesus to the common people of Israel. He did not finish translating the whole Bible but it is estimated that 90% of his work made it into the King James Bible. So when you read Genesis thru Chronicles and the entire New Testament, much of it is Tyndale’s legacy. We are impressed with the many letters of the apostle Paul, but his Holy Spirit inspired writings were useless to the English people until Tyndale translated the New Testament and mass produced it for them. How many people were born again under the guidance of the Roman Catholic Church in England? These were truly the dark ages when the blind were leading the blind straight to hell. This is why Tyndale once declared in a conversation with a Roman Catholic cleric that he would cause a plowboy to know more about Scripture than this learned man. It was through his obedience and the Holy Spirit’s supervision that we now hold something so common in our hands but was so costly to him. William Tyndale was God’s outlaw who was persecuted and unjustly imprisoned but finally obtained a better resurrection and joined the saints mentioned in Hebrews chapter 11. If you haven’t read that passage of Scripture lately, please take time to read it today. It will help you appreciate the struggles of our “elders” and what it cost them to “obtain a good report” with the Lord. I’m sure Tyndale was greeted in heaven with these words: “Well done, thou good and faithful servant: thou hast been faithful over a few things, I will make thee ruler over many things: enter thou into the joy of thy lord.” (Matthew 25:21) May God richly bless you today,
Charles Thorell |
