Slideshow image

   

This morning as is my habit, I opened the Bible app on my phone and read four chapters as a regular part of my Bible reading plan. I could have chosen to read from the Logos app on my PC or from one of the many hard copies of the Bible I have in my possession.  We periodically receive a Christian Books catalogue which has multiple pages of various Bibles and study guides for sale. All this to make the point that for us the Bible is readily available. This was not always so. For well over a thousand years after the ascension of Jesus the Bible was simply not available to the common man.

              Two significant challenges were the main cause of this situation. First, much of the population was illiterate, unable to read even if the Bible had been available. Secondly, it was illegal to copy and distribute God’s word to the people. Such activity was deemed to be heretical  and several heroes of the faith were willing to suffer and die because they believed that this story of Good News, that is the gospel needed to be readily available to each person who then could study, reflect and meditate on what God was saying to them. There was no shortage of haters for those like John Wycliffe who were determined to make the Bible available to the general population in a language they could read and understand.

              Heny Knighton one such hater put on paper the elitist reaction to Wycliffe’s radical effort to uplift peasants, women, and other ‘swine’. He writes: “As a result, (of Wycliffe’s translation) what was previously known only to learned clerics and those of good understanding has now become common and available to the laity, in fact even to women who can read. As a result, the pearls of the gospel have been scattered and spread before swine.”

It would seem that for a time the haters prevailed. Wycliffe, William Tyndall, and other reformers were hunted down, persecuted, imprisoned, tortured, and some died horrible deaths because of their commitment to the cause. But the cat was out of the bag so to speak. The translations became popular as the general population longed to read the scriptures for themselves. Hand written copies of even small portions of the scripture became precious and eventually the invention of the printing press opened the floodgates of availability.

All of this happened centuries ago, but even today there are many locations in the world where the sale or the import of the scriptures is illegal. So, as you reach for your personal copy of the scriptures today whether it be an app or a hard copy of your favourite translation, take a moment to be thankful for those heroes who paid dearly that their followers, and you and I  might have access to God’s Holy Word.       

                                                                                                                   Pastor Dave