Celebrating the Quad Centenial of 1611 King James Bible

            The new year will mark the 4^th Centennial of the KJV. While this was not the first English translation, it has become one of the most widely used, in its modernized form, of all the early English translations. John Wycliffe was the first to translate the Bible into English that was widely circulated in manuscript form (before the printing press). It became illegal because of his stance against the Catholic Church’s teachings on several things in England in 1409. The manuscripts usually had a date before 1409 to circumvent the religious ban. Interestingly, because Wycliffe translated word for word from the Latin Vulgate, there wasn’t any way to distinguish it from other English translations so later Bible commentators from about 1600 through 1799 mistook the banned manuscripts as orthodox translations.

William Tyndale translated the New Testament in 1525 and later began a translation of the Old Testament but did not finish it before his death. Myles Coverdale took Tyndale’s translation and with only minor adaptations made it into the Great Bible version which was adopted as the Authorized Version by the Church of England during the reign of King Henry VIII. After his death, Edward I became king at age eight, and he named Lady Jane Grey as his successor in his will. She was queen for nine days. The movie about her depicts some of her arguments with the religious leaders of the day. She believed in individual salvation by grace, not works based salvation, and she believed the Eucharist did not turn into Christ’s body and blood. She was beheaded in the Tower of London in 1553 and was succeeded by her cousin, Mary I, Queen of Scots who reinstated the Roman Catholicism as the state religion resulting in many English Reformers fleeing the country.

John Calvin led these Reformed Protestants in Geneva where these scholars produced the Geneva Bible. This translation was actually a revision of the Great Bible and Tyndale’s Bible based on the original languages. Then came the Church of England’s Bishop’s Bible which failed to displace the Geneva Bible in the hearts and parlors of the common folk. The Roman Catholics subversively imported the Douay-Rheims translation in 1582.

King James VI of Scotland convened the Hampton Court Conference in 1604 with instructions that the Bishop’s Bible, then the Authorized Version of the Church of England, as the primary guide so as to keep the words recognizable to readers, and the translation to be true to the ecclesiology of the Church of England.

Forty-seven scholars divided into six groups and translated sections of the book, each completed by 1608. The King’s Printer, Robert Barker published the Authorized Version in 1611 which was sold loose leaf for ten shillings, and bound for twelve shillings.

This volume opened the eyes of many ordinary people like you and me. Suddenly, God’s word was there for all to read, albeit not all people could read. However, it has been one of the most published Bibles since the first day ink was set to paper. However, there have been many modernizations made to the original 1611 text. For example…

1611 version of 1 Corinthians 13:

1. Though I speake with the tongues of men & of Angels, and haue not charity, I am become as sounding brasse or a tinkling cymbal. 2 And though I haue the gift of prophesie, and vnderstand all mysteries and all knowledge: and though I haue all faith, so that I could remooue mountaines, and haue no charitie, I am nothing. 3 And though I bestowe all my goods to feede the poore, and though I giue my body to bee burned, and haue not charitie, it profiteth me nothing.

1769 version:

1. Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal. 2 And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing. 3 And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing.

Comparing the two, besides the punctuation and spelling changes, the word no is substituted erroneously for the word not. In the original Greek the word  μή mē (may) is a primary particle of qualified negation and is adverbially translated not. It is apparent that the 150 something years between the first publication of the King James Version and the 1769 published version the English language had undergone tremendous changes indicated by the nearly 24,000 changes between the first edition and the 1769 Oxford text edition. The substance is the same, no matter what language a person reads. While the words may be spelled differently, and some of the meanings of the words have shifted with modern usage, we can still be astounded that the Bible has remained steadfast since Moses wrote the Law and the Apostles wrote their epistles. 

(A lot of this history came from Wikipedia. While I generally take this source with a huge grain of salt, the sources for this piece on Wikipedia are quite authoritative. You might also want to check out The King James Bible Trust)

Little baby feet...

Reprint from 12-20-05

Little, sweet baby feet. Mary will soon cover them with her hand, warming them against the night chill. She has treasured in her heart all the words spoken about her first born Son.

Things like, "The angel was so glorious, shouting out praises to God on High and the Good News! The Messiah is born! Our long awaited Savior, the Lord, is born!"And word went out publically, through the bright streets of Bethelehem. The star shining down on the child. The little feet, toes curled against the chill, wiggled in His mother's hand.

Eight day old, tiny feet with pink toes that curl in pain as the centuries-old right of covenant is performed on the Messiah.

Simon lifts his old eyes, tears spilling from their corners to the Lord God Almighty. Praising Him for this precious gift. Anna speaks to all who will listen about the Christ child, this most amazing gift from God.

The feet grew large enough for little sandals as they toddled, one in front of the other. Tiny hands holding on to a big Daddy finger. His first steps, those little feet on their own, dust swirling around them, making the little nose sneeze. A delighted chuckle from Daddy, and a bright grin from Mommy. Loving, watchful eyes guarded those little feet from the fire, the holes, the rocks.

One day a mighty procession fills the streets of Bethelehem. Camels dressed in finery, servants dashing from house to house questions in their expressions, the star's bright light settled over one house. Magi, wise men from the far East nod and smile. They get off their beasts and carefully search the packs until fine gifts are found. Gold, frankencense and Myrrh. Reverently they enter His presence. They bow and worship Him, kissing His little feet.

The days go by and His feet grow larger, tucked underneath Him as He sits in His Father's House. The voices of many echo around. He speaks with great authority and the voices quiet. "Did you not know that I must be in My Father's House about My Father's business?"

The days go by and His feet grow larger. The heat bears down and the slap of leather against hard ground is muted by many voices. Dust billows up and covers those following behind Him. Disciples they are called. A word that loosely means dust gatherers as they follow Him. Men and women thirsting for the living water that falls from His lips; hungering for the Bread of Life.The days go by and storms cease, roiling billows calm, deaf hear, blind see, sick are healed, lepers are cleansed, demons are routed, stories are told, His feet get tired and His bones grow weary from the press of the opressed. His own received Him not but those that did receive Him were given Life because He is the Way, the Truth and the Life, the Doorway to Heaven.

The feet carried Him through desert and over mountain, through streams and over the sea.One afternoon the feet are resting against cool tile. A woman enters the room. She settles at the feet. Her tears wash the dust from them. Her hair dries them. She kisses His feet in deep worship for she has been forgiven much. She washed His feet as the nobleman did not. Reverent worship by anointing them with ointment. One day the feet stumble down the street, drenched in His blood.

The feet are in agony as they trudge toward Golgotha. The nails are hammered through them into the cross. Splinters pierce the skin. Blood drips from them into the dust. The feet strain to hold Him up for one last breath and then He gives up His spirit.

Tenderly the feet are washed one last time, a hundred pounds of spices and clean cloths are wrapped around the body and He is laid to rest in a freshly hewn tomb. The stone covers the entrance and darkness engulfs the One. Days pass. Suddenly, the earth quakes.Those dear feet touch earth once more, transformed. The same, but different, glorified, radiant feet and body. These dear feet walk down a road and the King tells His story from Genesis to Malachi , all those things that foretold His coming, His dying, His arising in victory over sin and death.

On the mountain, the last thing the disciples see are the soles of those feet rising to Heaven.

Oh happy day, the day I can sit at those feet that are even now on the pavement of sapphire as clear as the heavens... To kiss them in worship and adoration... To sit at them and learn from He who has all knowledge and has all power and secured victory for me and gave me life eternal with him. Oh happy day, O glorious feat.

A question of free will

Usually when "one of those passages" keep coming back to my mind, I have found that God is trying to teach me something very important. I have been thinking about the Free Will question.

God created Man and he created Woman. He called His creation Good. This is important to completely understand because at first everything was pristine and good and without sin.

We don't know what kind of fruit the Tree of Knowledge had on it. Someone somewhere decided that it was an apple (shrug) go figure.

Let's look at the Scripture verse by verse: God created the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. (Gen. 2:8-9) Then God put Adam into the Garden of Eden that He had made for him so he could work the Garden and keep it in order.

Then: 16 GOD commanded the Man, "You can eat from any tree in the garden, 17 except from the Tree-of-Knowledge-of-Good-and-Evil. Don't eat from it. The moment you eat from that tree, you're dead." The Message

Here is the very first commandment. God had not commanded anything of Adam before. Nor had He commanded light or stars or birds. He just spoke and it was. But to Adam, God gave intelligence to understand it was a command, and God expected obedience from him. Not only obedience, but also to have obedience one must understand the "rules" to obey. One must understand the authority that commands obedience, and one must understand there be consequences for rebellion.

Adam had the intelligence to understand all of these things.

Let's consider two things at work in the garden, and two results:

Unbelief was at work. Idolatry was at work. Rebellion took place. Consequences followed.

   1. God commanded Adam not to eat of the fruit or you will surely die. God commanded Eve through Adam.

We know that Adam did eat from the Tree. We also know that Adam did not physically drop dead from eating that fruit. So what happened when he took that bite?

Here is something to consider when we study what God did to bring Adam and Eve to life.

Breathed means Naphach -- breathe give up or lose (life).  That means that God gave His Spirit to Adam. God poured part of Himself into Adam and Eve. Adam was the first created human being and he was created saved. His own spirit was given life by God's breath.

Breath is the Hebrew word Nashamah and means breath of God, spirit of man. So God gave Adam and Eve not only a soul, but a spirit as well. Some people believe the soul and spirit are the same. That's a complicated discussion for later. For now, when the couple rebelled/disobeyed God, He removed His Spirit and the separation was intensely felt; they were bereft of God's presence. Spiritual death.

Life is the Hebrew word Chayay which means to live, have life, be quickened to life.

But more than that, God created Adam with a perfect fellowship with Himself. Adam knew God intimately and Adam had God's Spirit abiding within Himself.

Let's remember that Adam and Eve were the only flesh and blood that ever entered God's presence. They could revel in His presence because they were innocent of any sin. They didn't even know what sin was. They did not know what evil was and did not experience evil.

Okay... let's go back and look at another verse.
Gen 2:7 Then the LORD God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being.NASB

 Gen 2:25 And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed.  
   2. God is the authority over all things both in Heaven and on Earth.Short and sweet: God is the Creator and He is all powerful, all knowing, omnipresent, and has control over all things. God is God and greatly to be praised. Isaiah 6:1 ...the Lord sitting on a throne, high and lifted up, and the train of His robe filled the temple.

   3. Rebellion (disobedience) sets in when humans don't believe, forget, or fail to acknowledge #1 and #2.

The serpent asks with a sneer: Did God really say you can't eat of every tree in the garden? (Raising doubt with tone and increasing doubt by suggesting God was withholding something precious.)

Eve says: He told us we may eat the fruit of the trees, but the one in the middle we can't eat from it (true), nor touch it (false) lest we die (true).

Serpent sneering more: Oh, come on. You won't die. (Lie) God knows (presumption) that in the day you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God (Lie, lie, lie), knowing good and evil (to a degree, but having no real ability without God to resist the evil and embrace the good).

Eve was deceived, but she also didn't believe God's word (unbelief). She also thought it would be a great thing to be a god (idolatry). She disobeyed the command (rebelled).

Now, Adam was standing right there beside her during this whole intercourse with the serpent. He didn't say a word against the deception going on. He, also, didn't believe God, thought it would be a good thing to be a god, and he ate the fruit that Eve gave him. Adam chose Eve over God. He didn't trust God to give him another helpmeet. So he chose to disobey God's command and he ate the fruit.

This fruit was from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Basically, it wasn't solely the fruit that gave them the knowledge, it was the act of disobedience also that gave them the knowledge. They were no longer innocent and they knew they were naked. Consider chapter 3 in Genesis... A lot of finger pointing went on, but if we follow God's leading...we'll see who God considered the real culprit.

3:14 -- The serpent is cursed more than anything created. The woman's seed will bruise its head with His heel... 16 -- The woman's pain in child birth was greatly multiplied and in spite of the pain of childbirth, her desire would be for her husband. She would be ruled by him.
3:17-19 -- The man's labor is greatly increased in order for his family's needs to be provided for; and here is where God decrees Man will physically die. "sweating in the fields from dawn to dusk, Until you return to that ground yourself, dead and buried; you started out as dirt, you'll end up dirt."

3:23 -- God sends Adam out of the Garden, away from His own presence. Spiritual death was immediate. God quickened them to life with His own Spirit, now they had to live, work, procreate without that Spirit inside.

Thus are the physical consequences of the first sin--the sin of unbelief, idolatry, rebellion--was established. Adam and Eve were given Free Will from the very beginning, otherwise they would not have been able to defy God's command to not eat from the Tree of Knowledge.

It was always God's intention for humans to have Free Will because He has never desired Forced Worship. He desires us to desire Him above all things. He desired Adam & Eve to make Him ruler of their hearts just as this is His desire for His children. They exercised their freedom of choice. The sin was disobedience to God's command.

The consequence was loss of the Holy Spirit of God abiding within their hearts. Therefore, Adam & Eve Spiritually died the instant they took that bite of the fruit. They eventually physically died, however the Spiritual death was much more trumatic because God banished them from His presence and set an angel with a firey sword to guard the entrance.

   4. The consequence of this was that all humans ever after are born with a God-sized hole.

Man was created to be Spiritually alive with God's Spirit. When this was taken away, the God-sized hole gives Mankind this intense craving to be filled. Mankind does all kinds of crazy things to fill this hole. He tries everything from work, to money, to drugs, to self-mutilation, to pursuit of knowledge (Ecclesiastes is a good example of all of this) to pursuit of perfect physical appearance, to having as many children as possible, to all kinds of church work, to buying as many toys as possible, clothes, shoes, possessions, big houses... the list goes on and on.

Nothing fills that God-sized void except the Holy Spirit. It took the willing sacrifice of Jesus to reconcile humans to the Living God again legally. In the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus sweated drops of blood in His anxiety but He chose to obey God's will. Now, we can freely choose to either accept Jesus as our Savior or to reject Him. (Proof of this choice is in Acts 12--you might note that we are not given a reaction from Drusilla whose father was Herod Agrippa. He's the one that was eaten alive by worms because of his pride and refusal to bend to God's will.)

Here's the wonderful thing about this kind of Freedom. When we accept Jesus as Savior -- That's the last decision we ever have make on our own. (Foolishly, we sometimes make decisions on our own, but we don't have to.) We have much greater wisdom at work in us than mere human wisdom after the Holy Spirit resides in our hearts. Choosing Jesus means choosing Him as Ruler of the Heart and Mind and Body and Soul.

This is how a Christian is known to other Christians...True Believer to other True Believers. The True Believer will desire to obey God and will be convicted by the Holy Spirit when he/she sins. Does this mean we won't have periods of rebellion and/or times of seduction into doing ungodly things? No. We most certainly will have those times because we are not perfect and we still reside in our fleshly, carnal, physical bodies.

What it means is that we will be convicted of our sin when we sin and we won't be able to sleep at night or have peace in our minds or be content. We will worry. We will fret. We will do all manner of running away from God until we recognize the sin for what it is. When we confess that sin and repent from that sin...Then God cleanses us, refreshes us, gives us peace in our hearts and minds. Our witness is restored from the shambles it was in and we are stonger in the Lord than ever before.

Our Free Will becomes a trophy for Jesus, a crown at His feet. It is the free will offering that we bestow upon Him.

About to lose my lady-like demeanor

I was driving back to work after lunch the other day and just as I got to my turn off something came flying at me from the truck in front of me. This white thing tumbled onto the highway spewing ice and straw and whatever liquid was at the bottom of the cup. It was a government truck, too. You'd think...

It got me to thinking about character and how our actions expose our character when we least expect it.

In first grade, I learned that a tattle-tale has no sense of honor, and just wants to get as many people in trouble as possible. (She'll grow up to steal your boyfriend if given half a chance, mark my words!) I learned that red check marks on your report card aren't a good thing, but generally mean that "You talk too much"... Moi?

Later, I learned that many people will say one thing but when your back is turned will do/say something entirely different. Those people could not be trusted. I learned that the people who followed through with what they promised could be trusted in the big things as well as the little things.

Even later, I learned that entrusting money to a spendthrift only made that person's bad money management even worse. I also learned that when someone kept your secret, they could be trusted in a personal crises as well.

People that throw things out the window are the kind of humans that expect others to fix their messes; who will spew their emotional trash around for everybody to hear, never caring about other's feelings. Those people will carry around anger and bitterness and like an avalanche drop it all over some unsuspecting victim, with never a thought about it... leaving the mess in their wake, never looking back.

Beware of people who throw trash out their windows. They will never pick up after themselves.