The Impact of Translated Scripture on Christianity

SPEAKER 01 : 0:01

Greetings to the brightest audience in the country and welcome to Bob and Your Life. Today we are going to a sermon which was given at Agape Kingdom Fellowship by Jason Troyer. Jason was one of the elders at Bob’s church, Denver Bible Church, back in the day. And this sermon is so important as Christians, especially in my type of circles, we got a lot of like prophet types, types who will go and confront the culture for their wickedness and their sin, which is, of course, so valuable. But Jason here, he’s giving this sermon, which is a sermon kind of directed towards my type of fire and brimstone Christian perspective. which is, hey, that’s a big part of the Bible, but another part is to live at peace, if at all possible. Super important sermon for our fire and brimstone brothers. So if you count yourself in that category, this one is directed at you. It’s also directed at me, so don’t feel too singled out there. Hey, let’s jump right into it, and I’ll see you on the other end.

SPEAKER 02 : 1:09

If it is possible, as much as depends on you, live peaceably with all men. Now, sometimes the battle comes to you and you have to defend yourself and your family. And so you’re not given the option. I highly recommend that you carry a firearm with you at all times, because sometimes you never know when the battle is going to come and we have a duty to protect, right? But the verse starts off with this, as much as depends on you. So if it’s up to you, live peaceably with all men. But there’s three parts to that verse. The last part is live peaceably. The second part is if it’s up to you. Well, the first part is if it is possible. Sometimes, even if it’s up to you, you can’t live peaceably with everyone. Some people are just knuckleheads, right? Can I get amen? All right. Christian pacifists, pew potatoes, country club Christians, all in unison get out their black highlighter and they go to work on that verse until it just reads, live peaceably with all men. That’s it. It’s the same type of edit job that some Christians do to judge not. Right? They turn to Matthew chapter 7 and they highlight that until it’s just two words left. Judge not. There’s nothing else in that entire chapter. So, To live peaceably doesn’t mean that we can’t call out evil, right? We must call out evil. There’s so many passages in the Bible where it tells us to be engaged to call out evil. Do we have to sit on our hands while an abortionist is killing children? No, I don’t think so. As with any Bible verse, we need to look at it in context. So let’s take a step back and we’ll read the verse before and the verse after, and we’ll see if that helps us out in understanding this verse. Today, we’re going to be looking at Romans chapter 12. So if you have your Bibles, please turn with me there to Romans chapter 12 and verse 17. Repay no one evil for evil… have regard for good things in the sight of all men. So don’t do evil. That seems like a pretty simple Christian concept, right? No matter what happens to you, don’t do evil. Got it? All right, that’s pretty basic, right? Then we have verse 18. If it is possible, as much as depends on you, live peaceably with all men. And now on to 19. Beloved, do not avenge yourselves, but rather give place to wrath, for it is written, vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord. So to avenge is dealing with, it deals with payback, right? It’s not something affirmative. It’s not something that you do preemptively. It’s payback. Does that person deserve payback? Well, it seems like the answer is yes, because the Bible doesn’t say don’t avenge yourself. It says, pause and let God avenge, right? So it seems like God is doing an appropriate thing by avenging that person. And who would you rather do the avenging? You, yourself, or would you rather God do that for you? I think I’d rather let God do that for me. So just by expanding out a little bit, we can see that this passage has to do with someone being the aggressor. doing something evil. And the admonition here is not to climb into the mud and get in there and get all dirty with the swine. Don’t repay evil with evil. If someone insults you, if someone slanders you, what is your response? Should it be to slander them back? No, of course not. So let’s think through an example that we’re all familiar with. If an abortionist kills a child, how should we respond? Well, first, we can’t repay evil with evil. So the abortionist is breaking God’s law, thou shalt not murder. And we shouldn’t, therefore, take the law into our own hands and become vigilantes, right? Next, live peaceably if you can. Sometimes that’s not possible. And so the Bible makes that conditional statement, if you can. And even if you can’t, then don’t repay evil for evil, right? In verse 19, don’t be the avenger. Allow God to do that. So how does God avenge? Well, certainly we can… We will all stand before God one day, and there will be a judgment seat where he separates the sheep from the goats, the wheat from the chaff, the unrepentant sinners, and casts them into outer darkness. But how else will God avenge? Well, Romans 13 is the go-to passage about human government. And thankfully, we’re right next to it, right? We’re in Romans 12. If you just flip one page over, we’ll get to the avenge part. Romans 13, 4. For he, that is the government, is God’s minister to you for good. But if you do evil, be afraid. For he doesn’t bear the sword in vain. For he is God’s minister and avenger to execute wrath on him who practices evil. The government should take care of criminals. They certainly don’t always do that, right? But that is the template. We in America can actually pressure our government to change its laws on how they are enforced, what the punishment is. We have the possibility of influencing the government. So we can push God’s avenger to fulfill that role and punish the evildoers. And if we can abolish abortion in law, and I know we all pray that we can do that, when there is a violation of that law, the government can rightly arrest, try, convict, and execute those who would harm a child. Now, it’s not up to us to attach the millstone, right? But it’s better that the millstone be attached than you harm a child. So the avenger should happen here on earth, but eventually will happen in heaven. Now, the same thing is true if someone cuts you off in traffic, right? Don’t repay evil for evil, right? We would call that road rage, and that can get out of control really fast, right? It’s not up to us to avenge in that situation. That’s not how a Christian should act. If someone, again, slanders you online, if you’re going back and forth in a debate, what’s the proper response? You want to hit them back, right? You want to. My wife is cheering, right? You want to because it feels like that’s something that you want to do. But over and over in Christianity, we have to deny ourselves, right? It’s not about us. It’s about how we can be in the image of God. All right, let’s read the next verse, verse 20. The average person, again, they want to meet force with force. They think that the greater volume in the argument is the one that’s going to win the debate. My lovely wife went to go see a debate between Bob Enyart and James White. You guys may be familiar with it. It was at the Brown Palace in downtown Denver many years ago. I went early to help set up lights and cameras and to get everything ready. So my pregnant wife shows up with three kids in tow. She was six months pregnant with Mariah, which means that Emma was about a year and a half, Abigail was three, and Joshua was four. So Even with all of that chaos, she was not going to miss this debate. So she’s getting the stroller out of the minivan. She is keeping her head on a swivel because we’re in downtown Denver. There’s traffic, there’s bad guys, there’s all kinds of things, right? But she is determined to get to this debate. But she did see a bad guy. As she was walking up to the kiosk in the parking lot there, she saw a man struggling at the kiosk to pay his bill. It was James White. And so she went up and just slipped the credit card in. It’s like, don’t worry, I got it. And he was so grateful. He was happy that someone was helping him out. And so as they’re walking into the Brown Palace, Rachel’s introducing the kids and this is Mr. White and going back and forth. And James White says, oh, what church do you go to? And Rachel said, I go to Pastor Bob’s church. Now, James White doesn’t have a lot of color in his face, but what color was there immediately drained out. And he kind of stumbled as they were walking, but he tried to keep pace because that’s not an ordinary thing to see your enemy in that context and to do good for that person. Bob always said that if protesters ever showed up at his house, that he’d go out there with Kool-Aid and cookies. Not hot coffee, don’t be silly, you don’t want to do dumb stuff, right? But Kool-Aid and cookies are fine. And it is so counterintuitive, but it is the Christian thing to do. Is that in Sung Soo’s art of war? No, not at all. That’s not how he would deal with his enemies, but that’s how God tells us to deal with our enemies. Now, we as a nation, we don’t turn the other cheek when we entered World War II. And even Ecclesiastes says there is a time for war, right? So there is that admonition. But Romans 12 isn’t about governmental policy, right? And even that next chapter that we read through, it talks about how Christians should interact with the government, not necessarily about government itself and the political structure and all that. Now, this church, you, my friends, you are a contentious lot, right? I don’t say that as an insult, but in and of itself, it’s also not a compliment, right? It is how you disagree that is telling. Do we disagree like Christians? We are Protestants, right? We’re all Protestants. We broke away from the Catholic Church a long time ago. The Catholic Church had dominance in Christianity and we protested. That’s how we get the word Protestant. It’s protestant, right? It all depends on how you pronounce it. But it’s protest right there at the beginning of Protestant. That is how we originated. There was a man that was so hated by the Catholic Church that 44 years after he died of a stroke, the Catholic Church dug up his bones and burned them to ash and spread his ashes in a river so that no one could venerate him. His name was John Wycliffe. You may be familiar with the name. He translated the Bible from Latin to English in 1382. His desire was that the common man could hear and understand the Bible. Once he translated the Bible into English, he wanted to get that word out. And so he had people called Lollards. They would go into the town square and they would tell the townsfolk in English what the word of God said. Not in Latin, but in English. When they went to church, it sounds weird, right? But even today, you can go to a Catholic church and listen to Latin mass. You get anything out of Latin mass? The Amish, they go to their church and they speak Pennsylvania Dutch, which is a derivative of German. But I went to an Amish church church service because my parents grew up Amish. We went back to visit grandma in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, Dutch country, and the sermon was in German. Even the Amish did not know what the pastor was saying. How can you be fulfilled? How can you understand who God is when the pastor stands at the pulpit and talks to you in a language you don’t understand? It makes no sense. And so Wycliffe wanted to bring the people their Bible in English. So these Lollards, they were the first English street preachers, right? You could go to church and listen in Latin and you wouldn’t understand a thing. Or you could go to the town square and you could listen to this street preacher read you the Bible so you could know what God’s word said. Before that, you had to just trust what the priest told you about what the Bible said was accurate because the priest would read it in Latin and then he would tell you what it means in English. Wink, wink, nod, nod, right? How do you know? How can you check? So these law lords were helpful in understanding what the word of God actually said. Now, of course, these street preachers, they were hated by the church, right? They were tortured and killed unless they recanted and agreed to stop reading the Bible in English. The reason that it was so hated is because at the time the church thought Latin was a beautiful language. It was almost the language of God. And so if you translated the Bible into English, it was almost as if you’re introducing curse words into God’s word. And they were so offended that anyone would try to translate the Bible into English. So Wycliffe resisted the Catholic church and its evils by using the Bible. Martin Luther followed up with his 95 Theses almost 100 years later, a little bit more than 100 years later in 1517. And so there was a movement beginning to not just take the church’s word for it, but to look at God’s word. And it’s such a revolutionary thought. It boggles our mind today because, of course, we all have Bibles in our homes and we can read it and we can go online. We could find out what the Bible actually says. And if you want, you can go back to the original languages and find out what they say. But at this time, it wasn’t available. And so these men brought that idea to the common man. So you have Wycliffe. And then 100 years later, you have Luther. And then, at about the same time, there was a man back in England teaching the Bible to English speakers named William Tyndale. He aimed to translate the Bible from its original languages, Greek and Hebrew, into English. So apparently Wycliffe, Tyndale, he wasn’t intimidated that they dug up Wycliffe’s body 44 years after he died and burned his bones. That didn’t seem to intimidate him. So again, Tyndale went back to the Hebrew and to the Greek and he gave us phrases like this. The Lord bless thee and keep thee. The Lord make his face to shine upon thee. That was the first time that phrase was ever used in English. See, with translation, the sentence can still be accurate, but it can sound very different. It’s as if the Hebrew and the Greek were skeletons, right? It has the basis, but we all have skeletons and we all look very different, right? So as we translate the Bible from Hebrew, the verse can say, thou shalt not murder, right? Some translators change it a little bit and they say, thou shalt not kill, right? That’s a part of translation. No one would translate it and say, thou shall kill, because that’s not what the bones say. But even with translation, you can add flavor. You can add some originality, as long as you’re being true to the original. And that’s why the scholars learned those original languages so they can get back to the roots, get back to the skeleton, and then they could bring that out. We owe a lot of what we have in the English Bible to Wycliffe and to Tyndale. They didn’t pick up a gun or a knife. They used the pen. Tyndale was the first person to ever use the word Jehovah. The Hebrew Bible uses the four letters of the tetragrammaton, YHWH. That’s the name for God. Because in Hebrew, there are no vowels. So Tyndale, he added vowels so that it made sense. It was a pronounceable word. So he took the letters YHWH, that’s the skeleton, and then he added some flesh to it. And that’s how we get Jehovah. Now, other people can use those same four letters and they can get Yahweh. But Tyndale decided on Jehovah. He also gave us phrases like, the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak. Fight the good fight of faith. The salt of the earth. Those all came from Tyndale. Words have a range of meaning, and he could have translated it very differently from the way he did, but he had a gift to make things memorable. I want to tell you one more memorable word origin. It’s about jumping sheep. Did you know that the Old Testament talked about jumping sheep? It did. So it could be translated jumping sheep or skipping sheep or lifting up the sheep. But what Tyndale came up with was the Passover lamb. He gave us that phrase. Tyndale worked against the powers that be and gave the body of Christ a huge gift that we still benefit from today. He didn’t burst open the doors of a Catholic church and interrupt the priest. He worked in his own way to share the gospel with the common man. Of course, he was killed for heresy. As you might imagine, he was strangled. And just in case that wasn’t enough, while he was tied up to that post after strangulation, they burned his body. But right before Tyndale was strangled and burned, he reportedly said this, Lord, open the King of England’s eyes. There was no malice. There was no hatred. He wanted to bring truth even to the King of England. And I think his actions all the way up into the end reflect this passage in Romans 12. He didn’t repay evil with evil. but he overcame evil with good. Thankfully, killing for heresy is not as common today because a lot of my friends have been called heretics. And I’m glad that you guys are still here today. But we can question the status quo. People like Warren McGrew, Chris Fisher, Jesse Murrell, men in this room, and many more who are watching the sermons, they continue to fight to give the body of Christ the best vision of God. He who is worthy of worship because of his attributes. And if we misrepresent God’s attributes, we do damage to not only him, but to the body of Christ. Open theism wasn’t in the lexicon a few decades back. But there was more than a hundred years from Wycliffe to Tyndale. Where will open theism and the free will of God be in a hundred years? I don’t know. As we continue to study and share truths from God’s word to people who disagree with God’s word, we call them Calvinists, but it could be a lot of different things, right? We should remember Romans 12 as a template for how we interact with our friends and even our theological opponents. How should we approach tough situations? Situations that need to be confronted. Well, let’s go back a little bit further in Romans 12 and let’s read verse 9. If you love the criminal more than the victim, you are evil. In May of 2023, a schizophrenic drug user threatened to kill people on a subway in New York City. Daniel Penny intervened and was later charged with murder because he protected innocent people on that subway train. In the media during the trial, they kept showing the picture of Jordan Neely. That was the homeless drug addict who was threatening people. They kept showing a picture of him when he was 16. Well, Jordan Neely died when he was 30. So why show a picture of him when he was 16? Did nobody take a picture of him in the last 14 years? Maybe, but I think they were trying to make the… Criminal, the victim. They were trying to make the victim the criminal, right? It wasn’t on accident. Daniel Penny, he should have been given the keys to the city and have been hailed as a hero. And Jordan Neely should have been held out as an example of why we don’t do drugs, right? He ruined his life way before that day. His life ended on that day, but his life was ruined well before that day. abhor what is evil, cling to what is good. In order to do that, you have to be able to discern right from wrong, right? It’s not my truth and your truth. It’s the truth. It’s been said so many times, but as we deal with knuckleheads in the world, they’re going to go to that Over and over and over again. And you know what? It’s going to be frustrating. So when they frustrate you and they call you stupid, do you respond back with insults? Do you repay evil for evil? Of course not. Let your love be without hypocrisy. So after the trial, the homeless man’s father got out in front of the cameras and he asked, why did this have to happen? He said he loved his son. yet his 30-year-old son was homeless. Did the father show him real love and find him and help him get him the help that he needed? Do you think that New York City has the resources to help a drug addict? Of course, right? It’s full of compassionate, loving liberals. Now their love is hypocritical, right? They would advocate for a needle exchange. Does that help the drug user? It helps him take cleaner drugs, but the problem is not the dirty needle. The problem is the drugs. So their love is hypocritical. This man’s father didn’t go the extra mile to help his son. But now that his son was a celebrity, then he shows up and wants to be involved in the aftermath, right? But the aftermath is really the civil suit against Daniel Penny for killing his son. His father is obviously much more responsible for Jordan’s death than the good Samaritan who had to intervene. But the hypocritical love, that hypocritical love he says he has, he didn’t save his son at all. And so because he hurt, because his son died, he’s lashing out and, of course, trying to cash in. Now, as for us, it should be obvious…

SPEAKER 01 : 28:19

Stop the tape. Stop the tape. Hey, this is Dominic Enyart jumping in. We are out of time. If you want the entirety of this sermon and all of the AKF sermons and all of Bob Enyart’s sermons, you can get those by going to Enyart.shop and clicking on the sermons button, and you can get access to all of Bob Enyart’s sermons. This was Jason Troyer, a guest speaker. We’re so thrilled that Jason could preach for us. That is such an honor that he would preach. Again, Enyart.shop to get all of Bob Enyart’s sermons. You do not want to miss that. Hey, may God bless you guys.