Longing for the Word – 1 Peter 2:2

Here’s a link to the video of when this sermon was originally given: Longing for the Word – Parkhill Community Church

Before we start, let me tell you a quick story of the life of a Bible. This Bible was printed on cheap, rough dime novel mass-market paper, and sported an equally unattractive cardboard binding that made the book look like it was ready to be replaced the day it was made. This particular Bible wouldn’t spend its life on a bookshelf, or in a pew being read once a week by churchgoers. Instead, this Bible found itself buried at the bottom of a sack underneath a load of dry beans that crossed the border into the East African country of Eritrea. Once smuggled into this closed, totalitarian nation, the little Bible became the answer to many, many months of desperate prayer for a copy of Scripture as it was passed on to a young evangelist. Invigorated with zeal for God’s Word, this young man was quick to tell people about the carpenter from Nazareth who came to save the world. Though he wore the title of evangelist, was genuinely filled with the Holy Spirit, and truthfully proclaimed the Word of God, this young man wasn’t able to bring a single person to Christ, or see any tangible fruit from his labor. Tragically, this man was arrested and imprisoned for proclaiming the message of Jesus Christ. Initially the prison let him keep his Bible, but it wasn’t too long before a particularly cruel prison guard took to noticing the man’s Bible, and how he would talk to the other inmates and guards about Jesus. So, consequently, this guard took the Bible away from him. Around the same time, the evangelist volunteered to start cleaning the bathrooms of the jail; an awful, disgusting job which no one else wanted to do. You might be wondering why this story seems to have taken a strange turn, or if I’m going to get to the point, or if there’s a happy ending. Well, as it turns out, the guard who confiscated the Bible was using the pages of Scripture to wipe his backside in the prison bathroom. So, as the evangelist faithfully cleaned the bathroom and emptied the waste bins, he was retrieving, washing, and reassembling the pages to his treasured Bible one page at a time. As the years went by, one of the young men that the evangelist was ministering to began to listen to the gospel message after seeing the immense love that the evangelist had in his heart for the people in the prison with him, as well as his love for the Word of God. This man came to Christ, and even became the new owner of the evangelists Bible after the evangelist died in prison from the years of illness and beatings. It was then that the Bible’s new owner wept from his prison cell when he recalled the hate that drove him to confiscate and desecrate the Bible while he was a guard, and he thanked God for sending him an evangelist that was so in love with His holy Word, that’d he’d forfeit his life in order to proclaim the truth to one man who hated him.

Although probably everyone here today owns a Bible, probably several, I doubt many of us know much about how the Word of God came to rest in the pages of the books we now hold in our hands. Let’s begin this sermon with a quick refresher of some of the history of the Bible, and how it’s been developed over the centuries.

1. The Word of God Revealed
2. Over a long period of time
3. About 1600 years, and a span of 40 generations
4. By approximately 40 authors from every walk of life
5. Moses, political leader trained in the universities of Egypt
6. Peter, fisherman
7. Joshua, military general
8. Nehemiah, cup bearer to the king of Persia
9. Daniel, royal advisor in the courts of Babylon
10. Luke, physician
11. Solomon, philosopher king
12. Matthew, tax collector
13. Paul, Pharisee and tentmaker
14. In different places
15. Moses in the wilderness
16. David in a palace
17. Daniel on a hillside in Babylon
18. Paul inside prison walls
19. Luke while traveling
20. John in exile on the isle of Patmos
21. At different times
22. David in times of war
23. Solomon in times of peace
24. During different moods
25. Some writing from the heights of joy
26. Others from the depths of sorrow and despair
27. On three continents: Asia, Africa, Europe
28. In three languages: Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek
29. With subject matter involving hundreds of controversial topics
30. The origin of humanity and the universe
31. The nature of God
32. The nature of man, sin, and humanity’s redemption to God
33. Yet There Is Harmony and Continuity…
34. “The Paradise Lost of the book of Genesis becomes the Paradise Regained of Revelation.”
35. “Whereas the gate to the Tree of Life is closed in Genesis, it is opened forevermore in Revelation.” (Geisler and Nix)
36. Imagine what you would have if you took just ten authors…
37. From one walk of life, one generation, one place, one

time, one mood, one continent, one language

1. Speaking on just one controversial subject?
2. What would you get?
3. The Word of God Translated
4. The Septuagint
5. 70 scribes working in the third century B.C. to translate the OT/Hebrew Bible into Koine Greek.
6. Legend says that these 70 scribes where isolated in 70 separate room and the final documents each produced were all identical, and this was viewed as a sign of God’s divine providence over His scripture for His people.
7. Irenaeus
8. Second century A.D.
9. Gathered the first century writings nearly universally accepted by the church and declared 21 of our current 27 books as inspired Scripture.
10. While well-meaning, Irenaeus had some weird views. For example, he declared Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John as inspired gospels, but believed in strange and arbitrary symbolism from the beings described in Ezekiel 1 and Revelation 4 to say that the four gospels must correspond to the creatures with four faces. “As for the form of their faces, each had the face of a man; all four had the face of a lion on the right and the face of a bull on the left, and all four had the face of an eagle.” (Ezekiel 1:10). I think Pastor Wayne said it best when he said that, “Irenaeus was a good guy, but didn’t quite get there.”
11. Athanasius of Alexandria
12. 20^th Bishop of Alexandria
13. Used his 39^th festal letter (367 A.D.)(Easter message) to officially recognize all 27 books of the New Testament, that were recognized by the church as inspired Scripture.
14. By this time the books that comprise our current Bibles were already a near-universally accept canon, but Athanasius’ letter officially recognized what Christians already knew.
15. Codex Vaticanus and Codex Sinaiticus
16. Fourth century collections containing both the Old and New Testaments, as well as apocryphal texts. (i.e. books of Judith, Tobit, Baruch, The Shepheard of Hermas, etc.
17. These two codices are our oldest collections of biblical documents and are valuable in modern biblical translation, as well as in teaching us about how our 66 books were used in conjunction with apocryphal and pseudepigraphal documents by the early church.
18. The Vulgate
19. When I mention the Vulgate does anyone feel a slight twinge go down their spine? I don’t know why the vulgate is connected with such a bad stigma in evangelical circles, because it was really a remarkable document when it was first introduced by translating Scripture into the common language of the time.
20. Jerome
21. Lived and worked in an underground grotto at the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem from 382 to 390 to translate the Greek Bible into Latin.
22. The Latin Vulgate served the Roman Catholic Church until it was replaced in 1965 with the Nova Vulgata. This new Latin version is only intended for liturgy and church rites. While Jerome was sincere in his attempt to create a faithful Bible translation, he did not have the most reliable manuscripts at his disposal, which led to blaring inaccuracies. For example, the vulgate incorrectly says that Moses grew horns after witnessing God’s glory in Exodus 34, when modern translations say that his face shone brightly. Don’t believe me about Moses’ horns? Check out Michelangelo’s masterpiece sculpture of Moses as an example of what can happen when God’s word is incorrectly transmitted.
23. The English Bible
24. John Wycliffe
25. Seminary professor at Oxford University.
26. Translated the Vulgate into Middle English in 1382, against the wishes of the Catholic Church.
27. Was not martyred, but died from a stroke in December 1384, and was posthumously declared a heretic by the church in May 1415. Because he was buried on concentrated ground, his bones were exhumed, burned, and cast into the river.
28. John Hus
29. A supported of Wycliffe’s who was burned at the stake in 1415, with his Wycliffe Bible used as kindling for the fire.
30. As he died, he proclaimed, “In a hundred years, God will raise up a man whose calls for reform cannot be suppressed.”
31. In 1517, exactly 102 years later, Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the doors of the church in Wittenberg. Luther would go on to translate the Bible into his native German language, in the 1530’s, and kick start what history now calls the Protestant Reformation.
32. Biblical degradation
33. In the 1490’s an Oxford professor, and the personal physician to King Henry the 7th and 8th, Thomas Linacre, decided to learn Greek. After reading the Gospels in Greek, and comparing it to the current edition Latin Vulgate, he wrote in his diary, “Either this (the original Greek) is not the Gospel… or we are not Christians.” The Latin had become so corrupt that it no longer even preserved the message of the Gospel… yet the Church still threatened to kill anyone who read the scripture in any language other than Latin… even though Latin was not an original language of the scriptures.
34. William Tyndale
35. Completed his translation of the New Testament in the 1530’s, after being forced to flee England.
36. “If God spare my life, I will see to it that the boy who drives the plowshare knows more of the scripture than you, Sir!”
37. We must remember that the main purpose of the Protestant Reformation was to get the Bible out of the chains of being trapped in an ancient language that few could understand, and into the modern, spoken, conversational language of the present day.
38. One risked death by burning if caught in possession of Tyndale’s New Testament.
39. Tyndale was burned at the stake in 1536. His last words were, “Oh Lord, open the King of England’s eyes!”
40. Just three years later Tyndale’s prayer was answered. In 1539, King Henry the 8^th would not only allow, but fund the creation of an English Bible for use by the Church of England. This Bible, called the “Great Bible” was the first English Bible commissioned by the church or government.
41. The Geneva Bible
42. Reformers Myles Coverdale and John Foxe, along with help from John Calvin and John Knox, produced the Geneva Bible in Geneva, Switzerland so that their families and friends living in England could read God’s Word and understand it.
43. Completed in 1560, this was the Bible of William Shakespeare, the pilgrims, and the founding fathers of the United States.
44. King James
45. Commissioned the printing of a 1611 Bible that now bears his name; the King James Version.
46. Continues to be a popular edition today, albeit in very translated and edited forms. Make no mistake, virtually no one still uses a 1611 edition of the KJV.
47. American Translations
48. American Standard Version- 1901
49. New American Standard Version – 1971, current version was revised in 1995
50. New International Version – 1973
51. New King James Version – 1982
52. English Standard Version – 2002
53. Transition statement: Rest assured that the book you hold in your hands faithfully and accurately relays the words that God spoke to the prophets, kings, and apostles that wrote the texts that comprise the pages of Scripture. When you read the Bible, you are listening to the very words of God. If God has given his people such a special gift as His Word, preserved through the Bible, why do so many people reject and ignore what it says. This isn’t just a symptom of our own time and culture, but has existed from the very beginning when God first spoke to Adam in the garden. On that fateful day in the garden, evil was allowed to prevail because the Word of God was not taken to heart, ignored, twisted, and ultimately rejected.

While we may try to respect God’s Word for the precious gift that it is, often times we fail. This is something Israel was very guilty of as well.

III. The Word of God Ignored

1. By the nation of Israel
2. Zechariah 7:9-12

“Thus has the Lord of hosts said, ‘Dispense true justice and practice kindness and compassion each to his brother; and do not oppress the widow or the orphan, the stranger or the poor; and do not devise evil in your hearts against one another.’ But they refused to pay attention and turned a stubborn shoulder and stopped their ears from hearing. They made their hearts like flint so that they could not hear the law and the words which the Lord of hosts had sent by His Spirit through the former prophets.”

2. Judges 10:11-14

“The Lord said to the sons of Israel, ‘Did I not deliver you from the Egyptians, the Amorites, the sons of Ammon, and the Philistines? Also when the Sidonians, the Amalekites and the Moabites oppressed you, you cried out to Me, and I delivered you from their hands. Yet you have forsaken Me and served other gods; therefore I will no longer deliver you. Go and cry out to the gods which you have chosen; let them deliver you in the time of your distress.’”

3. Ezekiel 3:4-7

“Then He said to me, ‘Son of man, go to the house of Israel and speak with My words to them. For you are not being sent to a people of unintelligible speech or difficult language, but to the house of Israel, nor to many peoples of unintelligible speech or difficult language, whose words you cannot understand. But I have sent you to them who should listen to you; yet the house of Israel will not be willing to listen to you, since they are not willing to listen to Me.’”

4. Judges 19-20

The children of Israel, God’s chosen people, had every opportunity to hear the word of the Lord, and they continued to reject God in order to do “…what is right in [each person’s] own eyes” (Judges 21:25). As the people who were supposed to be a blessing to the nations, Israel continually rejected God and His Word and shows itself to be no better than some of the worst people in the Old Testament; the people of Sodom. Judges 19-20 provides a heart-wrenching, yet perfect example of what becomes of people who reject God and do only that which is right in man’s own eyes. I’ll let you read it for yourselves if you have the stomach for it.

5. Jeremiah 26:4-6

“Thus says the Lord, ‘If you will not listen to Me, to walk in My law which I have set before you, to listen to the words of My servants the prophets, whom I have been sending to you again and again, but you have not listened; then I will make this house like Shiloh, and this city I will make a curse to all the nations of the earth.’”

For those of you not familiar with the city of Shiloh, it was a town in central Israel that housed the tabernacle for 369 years until the Ark of the Covenant was lost to the Philistines in battle and the city was completely destroyed. This was a huge defeat for Israel and serves as a warning to the inhabitants to Jerusalem about God’s impending judgment.

1. By believers today
2. Do you think Christians in our country are guilty of ignoring the Word of the Lord?
3. A survey by Lifeway Publishers showed that Christians in America read the Bible this much:

19% – every day

25% – a few times a week.

14% – once a week

22% – once a Month

18% – rarely/never

1. If you are in the top 19 percent, then congratulations. I try to read from the Bible every day, but if something comes and I miss a day, then I really don’t worry about it. What I do worry about is the people who wear the title of “Christian”, maybe even occupy the church pews on a regular basis, yet do not feel the Holy Spirit calling them, or tugging at their heartstrings to pick up God’s Word and let it minster to them. How many of us are no different from the children of Israel “who stopped their ears from hearing and made their hearts like flint so that they could not hear the law or the Word of the Lord”? I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve let long stretches of time lapse without picking up my Bible, and I suspect I’m not alone in this confession.
2. The problem with biblical illiteracy is two-fold. First, when we refuse to devote time to study God’s Word, we make ourselves more susceptible to attack from the enemies of the Lord. What I mean by this is that those who would seek to lead you astray and redirect your attention away from God, will face much less resentence when their target either doesn’t know what real truth is, or just doesn’t care enough to learn the truth.

I said this in my last sermon, but it’s just so fitting here that I’ll say it again. Satan’s greatest weapons don’t come in the form of pointy pitchforks, or the atheist professors on American university campuses. That’s not when Satan wins his battles. He greatest weapons come from within the church by distorting and manipulating Scripture. And the problem is this. The problem is that too many Christians don’t know the Scriptures well enough, or don’t care, and don’t know when a false preacher is leading them astray.

1. Second, (and this second problem is worse than the first) when we refuse to offer God the attention that He deserves from us, and refuse to dwell in His Word, we are stifling the sanctifying work of the Holy Spirit in our lives. God’s Word cannot, and will not transform your life, and make you more like your Savior if it is collecting dust on a shelf. That’s not how God works. That’s not how He ever has. Throughout the pages of Scripture, God always requires effort, a show of faith and obedience from the people he uses to accomplish His will. Look at Moses. Couldn’t God have freed His people without Moses’s help? Couldn’t God have wiped out the Midianite army without Gideon and his 300 men? God never promised to do everything for you. He promises to be with you, and enable you to fulfill your calling, but He always requires effort on our part. And He can’t speak to us if we won’t listen to Him.
2. Those Who Long for the Word
3. Peter speaks to how believers are to approach God’s Word. He says in 1 Peter 2:2, “…like newborn babies, long for the pure milk of the word, so that by it you may grow in respect to salvation…”
4. I recently heard a pastor from another church say that he believes that we are in the last days because the gospel has been preached throughout the whole world, and the Bible has been translated into almost every language. I hate to break it to him, but that just isn’t the case.
5. The Bible is translated into 550 different languages, yet there are 7,000 languages in use in the world today. There are currently 2,300 translation projects underway, yet still 180 million people (4,200 languages) in the world who don’t have even a verse of Scripture translated into their language.
6. I hope you see the point I’m trying to make here. As literate English speakers, we have more access to Scripture than anyone in any other period of history, yet we turn our backs and refuse to devote ourselves to God and His Word. Peter says, “…like newborn babies, long for the pure milk of the word…” yet most American Christians roll their eyes and treat the thought of meaningful meditation of Scripture as a chore and a hassle that can be postponed for another time that we all know will never come. And all the while, millions of lost people remain lost, and don’t know that they’re lost because they can’t read the Bible even if they wanted to.
7. A Challenge
8. One of the most effective things I’ve ever done in encouraging my daily devotions and study of Scripture is to pray for a people group, by name, who doesn’t have access to God’s Word in their language. The people group who I pray for daily are the Baudo River people. They are not even on the list of people groups who still need Scripture in their language because they live in an area of Columbia controlled by the FARC guerrilla army, who controls access to the indigenous tribal people in their territory. I first heard of this group in July 2014, when I spoke with a Bible translator who spent over 20 years translating Scripture in the jungles of Panama and Columbia. UPDATE: Since writing this sermon in November, the Columbian government has been working to negotiate a peace treaty with the FARC guerillas, and I think that God is already putting the infrastructure in place to take His Word to these people in the very near future. So, you may have to pray for years, I’ve prayed for this group for the last 3 years and continue to pray for them, but God is answering my prayer and tangibly working to save those people, and it is a really exciting thing.
9. It is in that spirit that I want each person here to pick a people group from the list that I’ve set up down below in the family center and commit to praying for them by name. When you pray, pray that God would remember those people and raise up men and women to answer His call to preach the gospel to all of creation, and open the heart of the people to recognize that their creator loves them, provides for them, and desires an everlasting relationship with them.
10. Conclusion

A translator of the 1769 King James Version once said that, “There is no greater good a scholar can do than to give God’s Word, to God’s people, in a language that they can understand.” May all people in all places be blessed with the Word of the Lord.