Kennystix's podcast
William Tyndale and the Vernacular Bible
The following message is by Pastor John Piper. More information from Desiring God is available at www.desiringgod.org. Thank you, thank you all for coming tonight. We want to get started right on time because we have a very tight schedule. We want to finish up in time for everyone to get to the banquet right at 650. I'm Lane Dennis, President of Crossway Books, and it's my great privilege tonight to introduce Dr. John Piper to you. John will be speaking to us tonight on William Tyndale in the Bible. And John, I'm sure all of you know well, but John is the pastor of Preaching and Vision at Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis, Minnesota. I love that preaching and vision both. And he did his undergraduate work at Wheaton College and earned his B.D. from Fuller and then his Doctor of Theology from the University of Munich. John is the author of more than 20 books. His latest is What Jesus Demands from the World, published by Crossway. And he and his wife have four sons and one daughter and an increasing number of grandchildren. And it is John's lectures that he gives every year and one of the great personalities from Church history have become legendary. And they are collected in a series of books called The Swans Are Not Silent. And it is my great privilege to have known John and to know John as a dear friend and to publish a number of John's books and to benefit from John and his passion for the gospel, his passion for God's Word and his passion to give God all the glory. Won't you welcome John Piper? My connection with William Tyndale and the English Standard Version published by Crossway, which really is the inspiration of this hour together, goes back to 1961 when I was 15 years old. My parents gave me a copy of the Scofield Reference Bible on my 15th birthday. They wrote in it. I can picture my mother's script so clearly. This book will keep you from sin or sin will keep you from this book. I love Mommy and Daddy. I underlined every page of that New Testament. I looked at it the other day. It's the King James Version, of course, and it was my Bible until I turned 19, four years. When I turned 19, I was at Wheaton College and can remember standing in the bookstore being discontent with the antiquity of the language of the King James in part. To this day, I can scarcely quote John 3.16 without saying, "What's that key word? For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that whosoever believeth in him shall not whosoever," that's the word, I wanted to say, "I can hardly not say whosoever. And no translations use whosoever anymore." I still say whosoever. So there it was. I had learned so much of it and I was disillusioned in part. There was on the bottom shelf to my left a stack of Bibles. I picked one up. It was the revised standard version and I bought it. And for the next 30 years read it every day. Same edition. I bought two others in the same edition with the same pagination. And memorized it for 30 years. And it went out of print and the new revised standard version was not usable because it was not faithful enough to the original and therefore I was stuck in leading my church and having the same Bible that I had to use and so I was thrilled several years ago when I found out that crossway was in negotiations with the National Council of Churches to purchase the copyright of the revised standard version and make it the basis of the English standard version which is what it is so that as I read the English standard version I feel at home this is my legacy revised standard version King James version William Tyndale. I didn't know that about William Tyndale until a year or so ago but that's my connection and you'll see the amazing influence of William Tyndale on the English standard version in just a moment but I'd like to pray for help before we go on. Father in heaven as I try to unfold some of this man's life and legacy for our good, for your glory you would help me. Give us ears to hear and help me not to make any mistakes about the meaning of his life and its application to us but rather to speak the truth in love and to be of service to these friends here in these few minutes we have I ask this in Jesus name, amen. 1531 Tyndale was 37 years old and he was in hiding on the continent, his homeland of course was England, if he had come home Thomas Moore the man of all seasons would have burned him alive because he hated him with a rabid hatred and he hated his doctrines which are reformation doctrines and he wrote a letter to the king from the Netherlands that went like this. I assure you if it would stand with the king's most gracious pleasure to grant only a bare text of the scripture that means without any explanatory notes. To be put forth among his people like as is put forth among the subjects of the emperor in these parts and of other Christian princes be it of the translation of what person so ever shall please his majesty I shall immediately make faithful promise never to write anymore. Not abide two days in these parts after the same but immediately to repair unto his realm and there most humbly submit myself at the feet of his royal majesty, his royal majesty offering my body to suffer what pain or torture yay what death his grace will so this translation be obtained until that time I will abide the asperity of all chances whatsoever shall come and endure my life as many pains as I am able to bear and to suffer in other words I will come back to England as you have mandated me to under one condition that you will authorize an English translation of the Greek New Testament and the Hebrew Old Testament I will come back to you and give myself up if you will do that and of course the king would not do it and more would not do it in Tyndale would pay five years later with his life. Every day nine years earlier he was a kind of counselor mentor in the house of a man in England as he was reading the Greek New Testament of Erasmus and as he was reading this he was falling in love with the doctrines of the Reformation as a Catholic priest and he began to get a reputation of being a dangerous person and Catholic priests would come through and have dinner with him and he would get into disputes with them in England and there was one famous encounter that you have all heard of because he spoke his second most famous words in this encounter an exasperated Catholic priest said to him we were better to be without God's law than the Pope's law and in response to that Tyndale said I defy the pope and all his laws if God spare my life air many years I will cause a boy that driveth the plow shall know more of the scripture than thou dust. And four years later he finished his Greek New Testament translation into English and began to smuggle it into England from the Netherlands in bales of cotton and it was burned by Bishop Tunstall and declared against the law and five pirated editions occurred in the next eight years three thousand copies were in the hands of people quickly and there was no stopping the English New Testament after that. For the first time in history there was a translation in English of the Greek New Testament Wycliffe's efforts 130 years earlier were all from the Latin Vulgate and this was the first printed English New Testament before he was martyred in 1536 he had completed not only the New Testament but all of the Pentateuch all of Joshua second up to second Joshua to second Chronicles and Jonah all of that went into the great Bible miles covered ails all of it went into the Geneva Bible the Bible of the nation one million copies sold while it was in print and all of it went into the King James version of the Bible we cannot overstate well I suppose we could but we seldom do the influence of William Tyndale on our language and to give you a flavor of the extent of his influence in the translation of the King James version we read this quote from David Danielle he's the one who wrote the main biography that's recent and it was so good I could hardly put it down I've commended it very very highly he said this William Tyndale gave us our English Bible the sages assembled by King James to prepare the authorized version in 1611 so often praised for unlikely corporate inspiration took over Tyndale's work nine tenths of the authorized versions New Testament is Tyndale's the same is true of the first half of the Old Testament which was as far as he was able to get before he was executed outside Brussels in 1536 let me give you a sampling of the words that are virtually unchanged little teeny changes of the to without and with the end to any and that sort of change still in the ESV to this day let there be light and my my brothers keeper the Lord bless thee and keep thee the Lord make his face to shine upon thee and be merciful to thee the Lord lift up his countenance upon thee and give thee peace I get really moved I use that almost every Sunday in my church and to think I'm using the very words of William Tyndale who was burned to put it in English for me is really moving to me those are his very words he thought up that translation five hundred years ago and we still use it verbatim today minus the the in the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God there were shepherds abiding in the field blessed are they that mourn for they shall be comforted our father which art in heaven hallowed be thy name the signs of the times the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak he went out and wept bitterly a law unto themselves in him we live and move and have our being though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels fight the good fight every word from William Tyndale and thousands more here's what Danielle said newspaper headlines to quote newspaper headlines today still quote Tyndale though unknowingly and he has reached more people than even Shakespeare now that was not only a amazing literary accomplishment it was an amazing theological experience it was in fact a theological explosion in the explosion cost him his life it was precisely the theological explosion that cost him his life so how did he how did he do this what was the nature of this man the nature of theology that was driving him it was just this antiquarian interest that this is a classic and it's good to have classics around or was it something deeper than that now to get a flavor for this man's commitments I found it helpful to contrast him and compare him with Erasmus new book was just published on and by Erasmus trying to redeem him from some of the from of his hiddenness and I like wind William Tyndale Erasmus was a 28 years older than William Tyndale they both died in 1536 Tyndale martyred by the Roman Catholic Church Erasmus a respected leader of the murdering church they both had been in Oxford and we don't know if they met each other perhaps perhaps not the similarities are remarkable as are the differences both were incredible linguists Erasmus a Latin scholar printed the first Greek New Testament Tyndale new eight languages Latin Greek German French Hebrew Spanish Italian and English both men loved the power of language and used it to the full both were craftsmen in the way they thought through their use of the English language and were very creative in their expressions and very compelling both loved the thought of a vernacular translation Erasmus wasn't eager to burn anybody for doing this as Thomas Moore was and did in his backyard Erasmus said he longed that every woman and every boy and man would read in their own language the New Testament so on that they were agreed they were both agreed that the abuses of the Roman Catholic Church in morality and in the monasteries was abominable and needed to be reformed however there was a massive difference between these men and the difference lay in their deep deep spiritual responses to Biblical truth Erasmus and Luther had clashed as you know over the issue of the freedom of the will riding their respective books Luther arguing that the will was in bondage to sin and we were incapable of remedying our condition and Erasmus defending self determination Tyndale loved Luther and he loved what he stood for and he loved his doctrines and he lived for them so he wrote this our will is locked and knit faster under the will of the devil then could a hundred thousand chains bind a man to a post because by nature we are evil therefore we both think and do evil and are under vengeance under the law convict to eternal damnation by the law and our contrary to the will of God in all our will and in all things consent to the will of the fiend it is not possible for a natural man to consent to the law that it should be good or that God should be righteous which make it the law now that view of human sin and bondage to it set the stage for the seriousness with which he took the gospel and set him apart tremendously from Erasmus and Thomas more these men did not see the seriousness of the human condition the way William Tyndale and Martin Luther did and therefore their apprehension of and love for the doctrine of God sovereign grace in the salvation of sinners was thin when Tyndale spoke these words with explosive power as he saw the reformers doctrines reflected in the New Testament whereas when Erasmus wrote he wrote of what he called the philosophy of Christ and there was a massive difference between that and the horrible condition that we humans are in and the glorious blood bought salvation that was wrought in Jesus Christ for enslaved and hopeless sinners Erasmus does not live in this atmosphere doesn't live in the atmosphere of the Reformation and what was being seen about the nature of the human condition and what was being wrought by God in the cross and what was being purchased by his blood. Erasmus has the appearance of reform but something is missing to walk from Erasmus to Tyndale and here I think back on my western sea of classes at Wheaton and I get a little bit ticked because while it is most certainly true that Erasmus should be read as the premier humanist of that century it would have been helpful to have pointed out to me that there was an alternative view and for some reason I missed it maybe was pointed out was my fault that this man stood for doctrines that would get William Tyndale burned at the stake and cruised to his death in old age without being burned himself. When you move from Erasmus to Tyndale to use the words of Mark Twain you move from a lightning bug to a lightning bolt David Danielle put it like this something in the Enchiridion and William Tyndale translated the Enchiridion into English which Erasmus wrote something in the Enchiridion is missing it is a masterpiece of humanist piety but the activity of Christ in the Gospels his special work of salvation so strongly detailed there and in the epistles of Paul is largely missing Christologically where Luther thunders Erasmus makes a sweet sound what to Tyndale was an impregnable stronghold feels in the Enchiridion like a summer pavilion where Luther and Tyndale were blood earnest about our desperate condition in bondage to sin and the glory and the gore of the salvation that was wrought for us at Calvary Erasmus and Thomas Moore joked and bantered in their letters back and forth about these things when Luther posted his 95 theses on the door at the risk of his life Erasmus wrote and sent a copy of them to Thomas Moore in a jocular letter including the anti papal games and witty satirical diatribes and so on now the reason I linger here in this contrast between Tyndale and Erasmus is because I don't think we can understand what was driving the translation of the New Testament without this there is no humanist antiquarian interest in classical documents driving William Tyndale you don't get burned for that this was a matter of absolutely infinite importance to William Tyndale that people understand the difference between him and Erasmus between him and Thomas Moore it was huge there was an elitist layered nuancing of church tradition biblical talk with the kind of Erasmus Thomas Moore highbrow academic talk they satirized the monasteries they didn't grown didn't grown over the monasteries and in this they were very much like a lot of people today a lot of notable spokesmen for the evangelical cause are like Erasmus and not Tyndale key writers for the emergent church sound to me just like Erasmus and whirls apart from William Tyndale I could name other certain movements listen to this word from Danielle the biographer not only is see see if you don't hear anybody here in 21st century evangelical writers in this not only is there no fully realized Christ or devil in Erasmus book there is a touch of irony about it all with a feeling of the writer cultivating a faintly superior ambiguity as if to be dogmatic for example about the theology of the work of Christ was to be rather distasteful below the best elite humanist heights by contrast Tyndale is ferociously single-minded in the matter in hand the immediate access of the soul to God without intermediary is far too important for hints of faintly ironic superiority Tyndale is as four square as a carpenter's tool but in Erasmus account of the origins of his book there is a touch of the sort of layering of ironies found in the games with persona what drove Tyndale to sing one note all of his life to the grave was his rock solid conviction that all humans are in bondage to sin blind dead damned hellbound and helpless and that God had acted in Christ at the cost of his son's blood to liberate human beings from his own damnation and wrath he was simply gripped by the glory of this blood bought salvation and he saw it locked up and invisible in the Latin Bible and the church structures and intentionally kept from the people there was only one hope and that was liberation from the bonds of sin through the preaching of full or gospel revealed in the Bible and that had to be made available and the church would not let it be made available so he wrote by grace this is Tyndale by grace we are plucked out of Adam the ground of all evil and grafted into Christ the ground of all good in Christ God loved us his elect and chosen before the world began reserved us unto knowledge of his son and his holy gospel then when the gospel is preached to us openeth our hearts and give us grace to believe and put it the spirit of Christ in us and we know him as our father most merciful and consent to the law and love it inwardly in our heart and desire to fulfill it and sorrow because we do not in other words this massive dose of bondage to sin and awareness of damnation and awareness of hell and awareness of wrath caused him to so sweetly embrace the salvation offered by God in the gospel Erasmus Thomas Moore and the elites weren't operating in this sphere it was no lightning bolt of blood bought gospel in Erasmus scarcely a hint of the blood but for Tyndale it was everything in much of evangelicalism today the doctrine of hell sin damnation wrath are swept away and with them the penal substitutionary atonement must go and with it the gospel for example thank you Justin for you I had seen this the day before you sent you said this this morning probably put it up last night on your blog so Hugh Hewitt would be happy of what's happening right now that I won't name any names here though I'm really tempted to because I could really implicate a lot of people but I'll just give you the quote from a well-known youth spokesman published in a well-known mainline youth ministries magazine just said this some might say I would be wise to swallow my misgivings about such stuff like God's sovereignty wrath and hell remain orthodox and thereby secure my place with God in eternity but that's just precisely my point if those things are true new God hell wrath if those things are true God might as well send me to hell I am a free agent after all and I have standards for my God the first of which is this I will not worship any God who's not more compassionate who's not at least as compassionate as I am that's Erasmus to the core that's the spirit of Erasmus only worse perhaps flying into the banner of evangelical youth ministry hell sin tonement sovereign grace were not weighty realities for Erasmus and Thomas Moore they were everything for William Tyndale which is why he was burned at the stake especially the doctrine of justification by faith alone when all is said and done there were numerous reasons this is the main one it's the way he wrote about that by faith we are saved only in believing the promises and though faith be never without love and good works yet is our saving imputed neither to love nor to good works but unto faith only that's what he died for and I'll show you that in a few minutes man is lost condemned hell bound under wrath Christ bears everything provides everything and is embraced by faith alone as our total sufficiency and that got him killed and that's why he wanted to translate the Bible that's the main reason he wanted to translate the Bible if you ask as I did in reading this history I just asked I find it incomprehensible that the church could burn people alive for reading an English Bible that's incomprehensible is it not and yet it happened for example the dramatist in John Bale 1495 to 1563 as a boy of 11 watched the burning of a young man of Norwich for possessing the Lord's Prayer in English John Fox records seven lawlords burned at Coventry in 1519 for teaching their children the Lord's Prayer in English the Roman Catholic Church burned people alive for teaching their children the Lord's Prayer in English you got to ask why why hatred for the Bible in the vernacular what is going on there were reasons some were surface reasons and some were the real reasons I'll give you the surface reasons as I found them articulated in the defenses of killing Bible readers one English language is rude and unworthy of the exalted language of God's word number two when one translates errors creep in so it is safer not to translate number three the Bible if it is in English each man will become his own interpreter and they may go astray into heresy and perish therefore he does a loving thing not to subject them to that damnable possibility four holy priests are given the divine grace to understand the scriptures but not the lay people five special sacramental value adheres to the Latin service in which the people cannot understand but receive grace those were the superficial reasons given for why they stood so lovingly against the translation of the Bible into English there were real reasons deeper reasons they were both power reasons ecclesiastical reasons and ultimately theological reasons um Thomas Moore who hated William Tyndale and burned Bible lovers in his backyard wrote three fourths of a million words against William Tyndale using language that we usually associate with Martin Luther only worse he hated him and he hated what he stood for and it boiled down to the translation of five words which if they were translated the way Tyndale translated them would undermine Thomas Moore's job and life and the Roman Catholic system and these were the words he translated presbutaros as elder not priest he translated ecclesia as congregation not church he translated methanol ao as repent and not do penance he translated eczema lago as acknowledge or admit instead of confess and he translated agape as love not charity and David Danielle the biographer comments like this he cannot possibly have been unaware that those words in particular undercut the entire sacramental structure of a thousand year church throughout Europe Asia and North Africa it was the Greek New Testament that was doing the undercutting so with the doctrinal undermining of these ecclesiastical pillars of priesthood penance and confession the power would be broken and in fact it was broken and Britain did not become a Catholic nation but a Puritan nation because of the Bible May 21st 1535 he came to the end of his freedom and I'll move to the end of his life here and try to point out in the way he died how central the doctrine of justification by faith alone was in what he believed and why he translated and why he was why he was burned at the state it was uh May 21st 1535 he was in Antwerp and Henry Phillips an Englishman at the instigation of the powers that be betrayed him into the hands of the church he had been living in exile hidden for 12 years and now he was caught and he was taken to the castle of villeverde six miles north of Brussels and there he stayed for 18 months until he was burned the charge was heresy with not agreeing with the holy roman emperor in a nutshell with being a Lutheran the catholic center in louvain a few miles away provided a four-man commissioning team to investigate and demonstrate his heresy they spent from May through the fall examining him one of them named latomas filled three books with his observations concerning William Tyndale and Tyndale wrote one book in his defense during those months and as you might guess it had this title "Solefi days eustificat apud deum faith alone justifies before god" that was the issue and that's what he wrote his last book defending and that is why his fate was sealed and he would be burned alive because he would not compromise that our works had no hand in the ground of our salvation these were not easy months in prison it was a long slow dying we have one sweet letter it's so good we have one letter from that period it was september 1535 beginning to get cool in the prison he'd been there since May was in the midst of all this grilling and he wrote this to the man in charge of the prison because they had confiscated all of his stuff and had it in storage somewhere he still dreamed that there might be a possibility he would get out and this is what he wrote a beg your lordship and that of the lord jesus that if i am to remain here through the winter you will respect the commissary you will request the commissary to have the kindness to send me from the goods of mine which he has a warmer cap for i suffer greatly from cold in the head and i'm afflicted by a perpetual katar which is much increased in this cell a warmer coat also for this which i have is very thin a piece of cloth to to patch my leggings my overcoat is worn out my shirts are also worn out he has a woolen shirt if he will be good enough to send it i have also with him leggings of a thicker cloth to put on above he has also warmer night caps and i asked to be allowed to have a lamp in the evening it is indeed wierism sitting alone in the dark but most of all mark that but most of all i beg and beseech you clemency to be urgent with the commissary that he might kindly permit me to have a Hebrew bible and a Hebrew grammar and a Hebrew dictionary that i may pass the time in that study in other words his work wasn't done yet he hadn't finished the Old Testament that if if i may pass the time of day in study in return may you obtain what you most desire so only that it be for your salvation but if any other decision has been taken concerning me to be carried out before winter i will be patient abiding the will of god to the glory of the grace of my lord jesus christ whose spirit i pray may ever direct your heart amen william tindallous we don't know if that request was ever fulfilled this what we know is that august of the next year he was degraded from the priesthood and then in october traditionally the date is set on october six he was tied to the stake and because he had been a priest was granted the mercy of being strangled by the executioner and then burned his last words according to john fox were lord these are probably the most famous lord opened the king of england's eyes do you know that three years later the bible was published in england the very tundstell who burned william tinde's bible in 1526 authorized it sheer politics the shifting of the vagaries of power he will do whatever he has to do well what shall we learn from this i have three concluding exhortations for the evangelical theological society and those of us who love being a part of it and love the name evangelical and and love the church of jesus christ and the mission that we've been given so here a few pastoral exhortations number one don't play games here don't play irasmian games here don't be cool clever hip nuanced rhetorically impressive irasmises the blood earnest tindales it matters this is the evangelical gospel blood bought agonizingly bought evangelical theological society you are not like any society in the world no games here it's just too serious irasmus couldn't be serious and some academics are constitutionally incapable of seriousness it seems and i'm pleading with you no games here that's number one number two don't minimize truth or doctrine especially the doctrines of sin and wrath and hell and grace and justification by faith alone apart from works of the law give yourself to your great calling etis there was a generation that paid with its blood just to put the bible just to put this book in english they paid with their blood 18 months of shivering cold with a constant cough unwilling to sign off on the doctrine of justification or stop translating the bible in such a way that would make it plain cost him his life so brothers and sisters please be willing to pay that academically relationally physically be willing to pay that to preserve it defend it explain it apply it and live it i was reflecting this afternoon i thought i might say and i'll say what i thought i might say without saying it because i'm not sure it's true but i think this might be the most important group of people in america that comes to these meetings i think that that might be true i mean not not because you're anybody just because you handle the most important thing and you teach people how to handle it i think if i if i just think that through who are the most important people in the world they are the ones who handle the most important treasures and teach others how to handle them and live them so i just don't think it gets much more significant than you are and so any thought of making light of this i mean i was talking to my assistant earlier about when i was an academic back at Bethel how unbelievably strong was the temptation just get your name in one of these seminars it's the academic thing to do a notch in your gun i read a paper it's so-and-so what a vile motivation and it's rampant it's just rampant and Wayne Grudem bless his heart said to me a few years ago piper you're not coming to these things often enough because i you know i'm a pastor and i i don't know if i belong anymore and um and he said you need to come because you you're just too powerful you too everybody around you likes you and they all agree with you nobody's going to criticize you at Bethel Ham and you come here you're going to get criticized you need that so so i started coming and and and it just occurs to me that if if i were to read a paper and this tells you i'm going to stop right now if i were to read a paper i would try not to fill the fill the time up because i really need to hear back from people because if i come here it's not to impress anybody with a paper i got more important things to do than press people with reading papers but i really do want to get things right i don't want to mislead my people i don't want to get into doctrines wrong so many plates will break if i drop the tray so let me pray and then i think we can take about 10 minutes for questions so let's pray father that's my best effort to let William Tyndale's life have its exhortation in the ETS and anything i've said that's amiss please correct it and if what i've said is helpful and true then confirm it and may it be of abiding significance for your glory and the good of this society and the millions of people that experience the trickle down of these brothers and sisters work pray in Jesus name amen so this wasn't planned to have a q&a but i finished early so raise your hand and i will say i don't know probably but go ahead and and try me because i i'm not a I did have three you know what i did i combined one and two i i had games earnest and doctrine written in the margin don't play games and then i it's a negative positive do be earnest don't minimize doctrine and truth and then and then be willing to pay maybe that would be the third one be willing to suffer and pay the price of yes indeed isn't that wonderful that he's pointing out the grace of god and in these kinds of differences that it was Erasmus's text that tindell was using to translate the bible god god will god will use whom he will in ways he please well said yeah that wasn't the point of the emergent that i criticized if you couldn't hear what he said if i'm going to try to draw an analogy between Erasmus and i said some writers in the emergent movement um not all for sure i wasn't thinking Mark Driscoll when i said that he said what about the bible's call to become all things to all people contextualization issues i'm i'm not going to get on anybody's case about contextualization issues at this this point what the analogy i drew was um a non seriousness about blood earnest realities hell wrath atonement these things are being downplayed and minimized and there is a kind of breeziness about the way certain people are writing and it doesn't have the bloody feel of the cross about it it doesn't have the hotness of hell about it they don't believe in hell they they i don't mean everybody called emerging i just mean those who don't don't and that's really serious that's really serious because it wrecks the gospel it's you can watch it happen as as this author that i just read to you pulls the plug on hell pulls the plug on wrath because god's got to be better than he is and he wouldn't say anybody to hell if he pulls the plug on those you've got to reinterpret the cross and what was that about and there it comes down so that's the flavor that i want to help young people like you however you contextualize don't abandon those things be take the hard job the easy job is to dumb down the gospel get rid of all of its hard pieces and then be relevant to young people what that is so easy good grief do the hard work how you going to preach hell and wrath and substitutionary atonement to people with piercings all over their body and tattoos everywhere so that they come back week after week that's a challenge and it can be done it can be done they're ready and eager if somebody can be the right kind of William Tyndale like person they'll come back they'll listen so i just i'm i abominate the dumbing down the the stripping of the gospel of these glorious realities calling it in an elitist kind of nuanced way a kingdom message for our time as though it's new it is so unbelievably old when i get it ask ask me another kind of question so it didn't it didn't try to base its translation on tindale but it's not a word that's in the language and it's not a word that's in the church and i had the esp what did the esp say in that fact it has church um so it it didn't it didn't try to base its translation on tindale but but on the rsv so whether or not that's a good call you'll have to ask uh ji packer um i i i'm dsv sure not a perfect translation i'm everybody in this room knows there's no such thing you're all greek readers and you know you all get frustrated reading every single version that's out there and so what what i love about the espv that will keep me reading of that die and keep my church reading is because as i assess the whole landscape of translations i think for the next 25 to 50 years it has the greatest potential of doing the full range that i would like to see done by a virgin in english getting children on the same page with their parents and teenagers on the same page and missions on the same page and study and memory and reading in in worship i think this on balance this way of doing it has the potential of of the church use of the bible the personal use of bible the academic use of the bible comes together here in a way that i think has the best chance of of being the bible of the church again i mean isn't it incredible that when i give the lineage that i'm i'm uh happy to be a part of it goes tindale coverdale janeva king james and what's the next one i'm going to mention american stand no i'll go one before the espv american standard just breathtaking the gap between those two because of the king james having such a wonderful hegemony meaning the church had one bible in the english language i would love to be there again i just love to be there again but i mean i'm not politically out to make that happen if god wants to make it happen let it happen but i think maybe time for one more then you got to scoop to the banquet the question is is there tension between the doctrine of original sin as as i read the quotes from tindale and the doctor of common grace by which people who have bondage to sin are able to have good insights and do good things and yes there's a tension and yes it's real and uh we have to live with it and acknowledge that uh they're both distorted they're both fallen they're both flawed and yes they can get us to the moon and solve smallpox i mean that's a glorious thing and we should give god credit for it so i don't have time to navigate the way between the two but i just affirm the tension that you highlighted i think we're done unless you want to say something thank you john we are very very grateful for those words of admonition and encouragement and wisdom and i don't want to make a commercial moment of this except to say that if you'd like to have a copy of the esv bible um you can stop by our booth and register for being on our update quarterly update and we'll be delighted to send you a copy of the esv new testament and also a cd ram with the complete text that's searchable and other resources so we're delighted to share that with you i'd like to just close our time and prayer if you would join with me our father in heaven we have uh heard the wonders of your word and the power of your word and the truth of your word and uh we pray that we would bow humbly before your word and that um that your truth would transform us and that we would have a passion for your glory and a passion for your truth and we wonder at the fact that you haven't trusted your word to us to teach it to publish it and to uh preach it and we pray that we would do that with great faithfulness and that we would do that in the reality that we can not do that in our own strength but in your strength alone and may we recognize it as by your blood alone and through faith in christ and his work um that we can do we can only do anything of any value so we would place our lives before you and in your hands and seek to glorify your name alone in Jesus' name we pray amen. Thank you for listening to this message by John Piper pastor for preaching at Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Feel free to make copies of this message to give to others but please do not charge for those copies or alter the content in any way without permission. We invite you to visit Desiring God Online at www.desiringGod.org. There you'll find hundreds of sermons, articles, radio broadcasts and much more all available to you at no charge. Our online store carries all of Pastor John's books, audio and video resources. You can also stay up to date on what's new at Desiring God. Again our website is www.desiringGod.org or call us toll-free at 1-888-346-4700. Our mailing address is Desiring God, 2601 East Franklin Avenue, Minneapolis, Minnesota, 55406. Desiring God exists to help you make God your treasure because God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in Him. [BLANK_AUDIO]
Listen Now