Sunday Night, January 3, 2021 PM

I'm going to bring back to our study that we just barely began for Sunday night.

Coming to the Bible: Why We Need to Ask Basic Questions

And the title of the series you see there on the handout, Coming to the Bible. The whole idea is that we would use the Bible to answer some important questions about the Bible. And these questions are some of the, I would say, most basic.

And we talked about the last week, the last time we met, one of the questions was, I'm quoting someone who visited here very briefly on a Sunday morning, can I have one of those books? One of the free giveaway Bibles.

Can I have one of those books? That's all she asked. And talking about the very first question you have is like, can I have one of those? And what are we already understanding? And what are we wondering about when we, at the very beginning, receive a Bible?

And so I wanted to do this study and answer the basic questions about the Bible from the Bible, and I think that is a very important way to approach it. The Bible is the authority on the matter. And God, we talked about last time how God wants us to have his word.

That is a very clear idea in the scriptures that God wants his people, God wants his special creature made in his image to have his word. He wants us to have his word. And we are to desire the word. We are to value God's word in our lives.

And it's a wonderful, wonderful gift from the Lord. And we ought to be ready to receive his word and ready to give it away to those who ask for it. And so beyond that very basic beginning, in not any real particular order, I want to answer a few of the questions that we often have.

Some of these questions that we're going to answer, and you see quite a few there on the handout, the larger outline of where the whole study is going to go. You might be more interested in some of those questions than the others.

Perhaps you've already settled some of those things in your own studies. And perhaps someone you know, you would think, well, they need to answer this question before this one over here. But I'm not trying to put them in the order of sequence that they should be asked, but I think they all should be dealt with at some level.

So that's the main idea. So tonight, we're going to talk about which translation? And that's actually a much larger question than we realize. Are we all right? You okay, buddy? It's always exciting with Toby.

The Need for Translation and the Confusion of Languages

So we're going to talk about which translation. Now again, that can feel charged, that can feel controversial. It can feel in our world probably a little less so than a previous generation. But it can still be very important to a lot of people.

And I think we all, at some level, have a question about which translation. So we want to talk about that tonight, talk about translations. Do you think that the Bible has anything to say about translations?

Of course, yeah, exactly. And it's interesting to see how much it has to say about translations. And so we want to be informed by the word about translation. When I was very young, my mother is the one who taught me about translations.

My father preached from the New King James Version, and that's what I grew up on. And I still have my mother's light blue New King James Version New Testament with the Psalms and Proverbs, which she would read out of on a daily basis.

And I still have some of her notes in there. It's a precious inheritance that I have from her. But I remember her showing me a King James Version of the Bible and explaining to me that many felt that it was better.

And that's all she said. I mean, she just said, many feel that this is better, and some people use that. And this is what I use, this is what your dad uses. She's just trying to explain it to a young child.

And of course, I always had questions. She assured me that they were basically the same and not to worry, because I always worried about those things. I was always asking questions and worried about the details.

And then I immediately asked her if there were others, if there were other translations. And she said, of course, there were, though she didn't have any of them, so on. So we begin to think about translations when we first begin to read the Bible.

Sometimes as parents, we think about what translation would be good for our children to read or helpful for them to read. Sometimes we make a note of what translation is being used in a church. Or what translation a preacher or teacher is using, if we're gonna follow along with ours, and so on.

Growing up, I collected Bibles, I valued them, so I collected every freebie I could get my hands on. I had a bunch of Gideon Bibles, because they were always handing them out. And I winced a little when mom told me that those were really meant to be given away, not to be hoarded.

I'm like, I don't wanna give away my collection. That's like, I'm just getting started here. But partly related to translation is the fact that there are different Bibles. And there's all these different Bibles out there.

And some are gift Bibles, and my grandparents gave my brother and I one of those olive wood binding from Israel with pictures from the Holy Land, and all that kind of thing. They're gift Bibles, and some are study Bibles.

Some Bibles have the names of preachers, and scholars, and doctrines, and publishers on them, and some have notes throughout. Some offer you a lot of room to put your own notes in there. There's all these different styles of Bibles.

My father still preaches from a New King James Version Thompson Chain Reference Bible, and that's what he's been preaching from for decades. Perhaps you remember a special Bible given to you, one that you have been holding on to and using for a long time.

But let me say a word about branding Bibles. I get a little nauseous when I look through the Christian Book Distributors catalog, and they've got My Little Pony Bibles, and Jesus Whispers in My Ear Bibles, and Viking Warrior Bibles, and all the different branding, and that kind of thing, trying to sell them.

I think that that's the wrong way to go. I think it's abhorrent. But historically, scribes and scholars have placed explanatory notes, sometimes in the margins, sometimes they put cross-references in there.

Historically, that is the case, and the church, our brothers and sisters in Christ, for many generations, have been putting a few cross-references, and study notes, and comments on the sides, in the copies of God's word.

And they've been doing that for generations. That is, that's not out of the norm, okay? The Geneva Bible is a good example of that. We do need to be careful, however, that we do not take up the study notes and the chapter headings, which are sometimes humorous, how off they can be sometimes, those chapter headings, maybe a title of this section of scripture, or the introductory material, and so on.

That, of course, is not holy scripture, all right? That's not God-breathed, and someone put that there, because they thought that would be helpful, all right? But that is not the genuine word of God.

That's something that we need to be aware of when we're reading through, and to, when we disciple others, we teach our children, or as we're making disciples, to let people know. That's not part of the original text, okay?

That's just somebody's idea, try to be helpful, and categorize some of the thoughts going on, but that's not holy scripture. So we have to be thoughtful about that as we make disciples. And we must be exceptionally careful that we do not get the idea that we must have explanatory notes, all right?

We must be careful that we do not get into the, well, you have to have a study Bible, explanatory notes. And we have to be careful that we don't begin to believe that Bible study means reading somebody's book that they wrote about the Bible, rather than actually studying the Bible.

The farther out from the Protestant Reformation that we get, the more, like Rome, the Protestants look, where I couldn't understand the Bible for myself, the whole idea of I could pray and ask God to help me understand the Bible, and just read the Bible straight up, and walk away with something that was good, and edifying, and helpful.

No, no, I gotta have experts tell me what that means. The Bible can't be understood by normal, plain folk. We gotta have experts to tell us what the Bible means. And that is very much the main thought in evangelicalism today.

Normal folks can't understand the Bible. The experts have to tell us what it means. And we've gotta be very, very careful about that. We can't agree to that. First John 2, 27 says, John says, as for you, the anointing which you have received from him abides in you, speaking of the Holy Spirit, and you have no need for anyone to teach you.

But as his anointing teaches you about all things, and is true, and is not a lie, and just as it has taught you, you abide in him. Now this isn't to say, whatever you think about the Bible is true. No, whatever the Holy Spirit thinks about the Bible is true.

And to be born again, have the Holy Spirit indwelling you, this wonderful truth, means that you are not required, it is not required that you have to have somebody telling you now. This is what it looks, this is what it sounds like, but here's what you have to believe about it.

Someone always telling you that, some official church tradition telling you what to believe. Tradition is helpful, it is not normative. So that's a few notes that we need to talk about when you start thinking about translations, you're also like, now you get a translation, now which Bible?

There's all these different versions of versions. And well, part of that's a blessing that we have the Bible, as we talked about last time. We have billions of Bibles that have been printed and taken all over the world.

And so we have billions of Bibles, and wow, how far we have come. What a blessing that is, that we have so many Bibles in the world today, in so many different languages, and we can praise the Lord for that.

He is keeping many promises in that. So let's talk about translation. So we have that basic truth that we see in the scripture that God wants us to have his word, those he makes in his image, he wants us to live according to his word.

When God communicated to Adam and Eve, he did so in words that they could understand. This is a basic observation of the text. When God, through his Holy Spirit, communicated through Moses to his people, it was in Hebrew.

It was in the language of Eber. The descendants of Eber spoke the language of Eber. God spoke Hebrew to them. That's what he wrote the Ten Commandments in. When God wrote the Ten Commandments on the slabs of stone, he wrote it in Hebrew.

Now, the very fact that we, today, us here, and I took eight hours of it, and I still can't hardly read it. Some of you may have studied Hebrew. You may read it better than I do. I don't know. But we don't know the language God first used in his written word.

That's the case. I don't read Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek fluently. I just don't. And I've had a lot of seminary education. I still, I'm not fluent. You know, I'm not even close. Now, the fact that we don't know the language that God first used in his written word, combined with the fact that he wants all people to have his word, to understand it and live by it, tells us that there's a need for translation.

And we see that borne out again and again in the stories in scripture, that there was a need for translation at this point, and at that point, and at that point. Where did it all begin? Well, that's in Genesis chapter 11.

Babel, Pentecost, and the Gospel in Every Language

So, let's open our Bibles to Genesis chapter 11 and read it for ourselves. Now, the whole earth used the same language and the same words. I like that. Same language and same words. And today, we're using the same language, but not the same words.

It came about as they journeyed east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar, and settled there. They said to one another, come, let us make bricks and burn them thoroughly. And they used brick for stone, and they used tar for mortar.

And they said, come, let us build for ourselves a city, and a tower whose top will reach into heaven. And let us make for ourselves a name. Otherwise, we will be scattered abroad over the face of the whole earth.

The Lord came down to see the city and the tower which the sons of men had built. The Lord said, behold, they are one people, and they all have the same language. And this is what they began to do. And now, nothing which they purpose to do will be impossible for them.

Come, let us go down there and confuse their language, so that they will not understand one another's speech. So the Lord scattered them abroad from there over the face of the whole earth, and they stopped building the city.

Therefore, its name was called Babel, because there the Lord confused the language of the whole earth. And from there, the Lord scattered them abroad over the face of the whole earth. So we see that when man determines to live life according to his own word, let us make for ourselves a name.

Well, that's that God made man in his own image to magnify God's name. But when man in rebellion says, let's make for ourselves a name, God simply divides and conquers. He confuses their language. You know, the confusion of language.

Now, again, it says the same language and the same words. With the same language and the same words, look how much man was able to accomplish. They were able to build a tower so tall that God had to come down low to even get a good look at it.

That's what the story says. But they were able to, you know, in their own estimation, they were able to accomplish so much, because they had the same language and the same words. And they were doing all of this accomplishment and all this work for their own glory.

And then God in judgment comes down and he confuses them. You know, it's a judgment of God to confuse the language of man. Has there been any recent confusion of words and language in our world? A massive redefinition of basic terms so that people are using the same language, but not even the same words.

And everybody is unable to communicate well anymore. That's a judgment of God. When man in his arrogance says, we will do what we want to do for our own name. And then God says, no. That's a judgment of God to confuse the language of man, to frustrate the efforts of man, to make it difficult to talk.

But we have a need for translation though, because in this judgment of God, we have all these different languages, people using different languages and different words, but we're still made in God's image to live according to.

God's word. And so in the realization of the messianic prophecies, through the family of Abraham, all the families of the earth are to be blessed, even though they speak all these different languages.

And so the Gentiles are to be brought into Zion. Good news throughout the entire entirety of scripture, lots of promises in the old Testament, the Gentiles are going to come to Zion. How? Well, through the consolidation of all of God's purposes and promises in Christ, through the preaching of the gospel, Christ will build his church.

And rather than gathering to a mountain and a temple that can be touched, very clearly we are told the nations are gathered into Christ, making up the heavenly Jerusalem on spiritual Mount Zion. We're told that in many different places, in many different ways.

But what if the gospel cannot be understood clearly? What if the gospel cannot be understood at all? How will they believe? How will they repent? How will they turn to Christ if they are not sent a preacher?

They need someone to preach the gospel to them in words that they can understand. So God in his providence, indeed, he has confused the languages, but he has not made things so different from one another that there cannot be analogous interpretation.

If you know one language, you can learn another language. And the more languages you learn, the easier it gets. You have all these analogous connections that you can make from one language to another.

And it's amazing that the way that words work from one language to another are surprisingly similar, even though it's difficult to always get the nuances. So what happens? Let's go to Acts chapter 2. God is fulfilling his promises in the person and work of Messiah.

And in the time of Christ, in the time of the early church, they lived in the Roman Empire. And one of the reasons why the Roman Empire was able to accomplish so much was due to Koine Greek, common Greek, the common language that everybody shared.

You could be from the east or the west. You could be from the north or the south. But everybody was able to functionally talk and do trade and do politics and so on in this language. We come to Acts 2.

And again, this is one of the reasons why the New Testament was written in that language, because everybody used that language. But even that, in Acts 2, we see something remarkable happen. Verse 1, When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place, and suddenly there came from heaven a noise like a violent rushing wind.

And it filled the whole house where they were sitting. And there appeared to them tongues of fire distributing themselves, and they rested on each one of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak with other tongues, meaning languages, as the Spirit was giving them utterance.

These weren't mysterious, vain babblings that nobody had ever heard before. How do we know that? Verse 5, Now there were Jews living in Jerusalem, devout men from every nation under heaven. And when the sound occurred, the crowd came together and were bewildered, because each one of them was hearing them speak in his own language.

Same word as just a couple of verses before. So there were Jews who had come from all the different nations. Remember that the Jews had been scattered to the nations, and that they would often gather back to Jerusalem for feasts and many times the Jews who lived abroad later in their life, having made all their savings, would retire in the Holy Land because they wanted to die in the Holy Land.

So there's these people who grew up, these Jews who grew up in foreign lands, and they, of course, they knew Koine Greek. They may have some snatches of Hebrew they understood. They may be able to speak some Aramaic.

But they also had grown up in these other regions that had their local languages that the tribes and the villages all spoke. They grew up speaking that language. It was their heart language. It was the one they understood the best.

Nobody had to tell them the nuances of that language because they knew it instinctively. It was the language they grew up with. They would still miss some nuances in Koine Greek. They would still miss a few things here and there with these other languages.

But this was the language that they knew the best. It was the language of the Parthians and the Medes and the Elamites and the residents of Mesopotamia, the language of Cappadocia and Pontus in Asia and Phrygia and Pamphylia, the language from Egypt and Libya and Cyrene and so on.

Visitors from Rome who spoke Latin. And the Holy Spirit had come upon the church. And here, these apostles and church members, what are they doing? They are speaking, by the power of the Holy Spirit, these local native languages.

And these Jews are hearing it like, this is the language I know best. How do they know that? Are you hearing this? You're hearing your own. They are hearing it in their, in the, they all knew Koine Greek.

Bunch of them all knew Aramaic. But they're hearing the word of God, the gospel of Jesus Christ, being preached to them in the language they know best. And it's a good thing. It's a holy thing. It is a, it's a miracle of God blessing thing, that they are hearing it in the language they know best.

So here at this very pivotal moment in scripture, we are, we are shown that translation, that someone hearing the gospel, hearing the word of God in the language they know best, is a wonderful, godly thing.

It's a good thing. God used that, that particular spiritual gift in the church to great effect as the gospel went forth all over the Roman Empire, and people heard the length, the power, heard the power of Christ, heard the preaching of the gospel in the, in the, in the language they knew best.

Praise, praise to the Lord for that. The fact that God gifted the church through his Holy Spirit to preach in languages they had never learned, deserves our focus. Jesus said he would build his church.

He told his disciples to go, go out from Jerusalem to Judea, to Samaria, to the, to the uttermost parts of the earth. He told them to go, and then immediately told them to wait. Go! Wait. Wait for what?

Wait until the power from on high comes to you. Wait until the promised comforter comes to you. Wait until you are anointed to do this work. Wait for the empowering of the Holy Spirit. And so when that power came, they preached in a variety of languages.

Why? Because he told them to go into all the world, and all the world was using a variety of languages. And this tells us the priority of translation according to the Bible. By the way, remember that Luke is Paul's buddy.

Right? You know, you know, the physician Luke, Dr. Luke, who wrote the Gospel of Luke and the Book of Acts. He hung out with Paul on all his missionary, a bunch of his missionary journeys. And Paul and Luke used the exact same terms for this spiritual gift of speaking in tongues, or speaking in languages that use the exact same language.

They are talking about the exact same gifting. There is actually no room in Scripture for any kind of glossalia, of babbling on on something that is not language. It is actually speaking in languages that people knew.

Okay, that is what is being talked about in the Scripture. And all we got to do is read Scripture next to Scripture and see that that is the case. So translation is worth struggling for. I was talking about the goal of translation.

The Goal of Translation: Every Nation Hearing the Word of God

Let's talk about the goal of translation. And we've already talked about Romans 10. How shall they hear without a preacher? Many things are coming to mind right now, and I've just got to get them off my chest.

There have been missionary movements that have gone to natives to teach them the King's English so that they can read the Bible. That is not biblical to go teach, you know, natives in Southeast Asia to speak the King's English so that they can have the Bible in the King James Version.

That is not biblical. In the Bible, even though everybody knew Koine Greek, there at Pentecost, the Holy Spirit moved so they could hear the gospel preached to them in their native languages. You see that?

And also there's another horrible story. I just have to share. Someone was a missionary. He said he thought it was a great, great story that this missionary would walk through the jungles of South America.

And he would just shout the name Jesus. Over and over and over again, as he walked through the jungle, hoping that maybe the native out there somewhere would hear that name. Because the promise was if they called upon the name of Jesus, they would be saved.

So I just, you know, I just had to get that off my chest. That is not biblical. Everybody does not have to speak English. We don't have to, they don't have to have English translations. Even the people who live in Greece today don't read the Bible from Koine Greek.

It's too old. They don't understand it. That's not modern Greek. They have to have a translation from the Greek into the Greek. We need translations that we know. God wants us to have his word. And because we don't naturally read and understand the language that it was first written in, God desires for it to be in our own language.

He showed it at Pentecost. He shows it through the whole scriptures. We need the word of God in our own heart language that we can know what it means, that we can know who God is. And God faithfully works through that process.

There's a few more verses I want to read for us. These are favorites of an old Gideon who would visit our church in Tennessee from time to time. These are his favorite verses. Acts chapter 10 verse 37.

That word I say, and I got to read this out of the King James because he loved the King James. Those are the only ones he ever handed out. He said, that word I say you know which was published throughout all Judea and began from Galilee after the baptism which John preached.

It was published everywhere. That word was proclaimed, declared, duplicated, made sure that everybody would hear that word. And then Acts 13 46 that Paul and Barnabas waxed bold and said, it was necessary that the word of God should first have been spoken to you, but seeing you put it from you and judge yourselves unworthy of everlasting life, lo, we turn to the Gentiles.

For so hath the Lord commanded us, saying, I have set thee to be a light of the Gentiles. Again, every time you read the word Gentiles, that word simply means nations. That's what it means, nations. In the idea of different people groups who speak different languages and have different backgrounds, different cultures.

To be light of the nations, that thou shouldest be for salvation unto the ends of the earth. And when the Gentiles heard this, they were glad and glorified the word of the Lord. And as many as were ordained to eternal life believed.

And the word of the Lord was published throughout all the region. What is this that God wants? He wants his word to go out to all peoples of all nations, to have his word in their heart language, that they know what he wants them to know about him, about his son, Jesus Christ, about who they are made in his image, and so on.

To have that understanding, to have that light. What is God's plan? Habakkuk 2 .14, for the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the sea. That's the plan.

And God is in the process of accomplishing that. Billions of Bibles, you're saying. Now, some of the translations that we have today throughout the world, some of the people who need them don't have them yet because it's hard to get these things printed and distributed.

But they have it in their language, it's just getting it to them and having missionaries to go and to preach. Maybe Lennox will go to one of those. We have about a quarter of a billion people who have no translation of the Bible in their own heart language.

About a quarter of a billion. But the vast majority of peoples on planet Earth right now have at least a portion or all of God's word translated in the language they know best. And the rest of them are in the target, in the attention of the translation societies like Wycliffe and others.

And we support currently a translation into the language of the Palika people in Africa. And we're supporting a translation into Mongolian in Mongolia. This is important work that we would support that.

This is God's business. He wants to see this done. He's using his church to do it. So sometimes when we think about coming to the Bible, we're often asking, which translation? Wow, we have an embarrassment of riches.

How many English translations do we have? Wow, we have a lot. And some of them are good. That's a joke for later. We're going to talk later about how the Bible is translated. What are the principles of translation?

How is it supposed to be done? And you know what? The Bible has something to say about that as well. Any questions or thoughts about translation, about the study we've looked at tonight? Habakkuk or Habakkuk or over the on the other side of the world, they say Habakkuk, chapter 2, verse 14.

If you're from Australia, it's Habakkuk. Okay. All right. Well, I hope it's been helpful to you. We'll continue past the priority translation next time we're able to do that. Let's close by singing the doxology together.

Praise God from whom all blessings flow. Praise him, all creatures.