Our debt to spiritual ancestors

Series: Why Should I Encounter Persecuted Christians?

I need to encounter persecuted Christians because they challenge me to realize my debt to the heroism of my own spiritual ancestors.

It was in the early 1980s in a village in Czechoslovakia, and I had just given the pastor of the rural church a Bible in his own tongue. It was leather bound, with a gold zip, and was the first complete Bible he had held.
I remember him sniffing it, marvelling at the leather smell, playing with the zip and being almost afraid to touch the thin, precious pages.
Then he began to talk to the members of the church. Pointing at me, he said: "This gentleman is your heroic spiritual ancestor. Every time the Bible comes into a culture, it is a threat and is opposed. So it takes men and women to risk all to bring it to us. This man has taken such a risk."
I was embarrassed, but he went on to say to me: "The Bible also came into your culture. It was also a threat. Tell me, who are your heroic spiritual ancestors?"
I am ashamed to say I did not have a clear idea of who these men were in my country of the United Kingdom. I remembered vaguely the names of John Wycliffe and William Tyndale, but I had no real recollection of the details.
So I returned to my country with his challenge ringing in my years: "Find out the story of how your Bible came to you, and you will discover your heroic spiritual ancestors."
Amazing discovery
What a dramatic story I uncovered, full of spies, deaths and power politics.
This is not the place to go into it all, but I learned so much about John Wycliffe, the first man to translate the Bible into English in the 1300s, when most clergy could not even recite the Ten Commandments.
Wycliffe formed a cadre of guerrilla preachers - armed with hand-copied versions of the Bible - whose purpose was to spread the true Word of God throughout the country. Most were arrested. The Bible was banned by Parliament.
Wycliffe died of a stroke from the strain.
Even after he died, he was not left alone. In 1428, his bones were disinterred from consecrated ground, and with the Primate of England looking on, his ashes were scattered from a bridge into the river Swift, a tributary of the river Avon.
But a prophesy sprang up:
The Avon to the Severn runs The Severn to the Sea And Wycliffe's dust shall spread abroad Wide as the waters be.
That came true in the 1500s with William Tyndale, who benefited from the invention of the printing press.
He said to a cleric who was dissuading him from his task of translating: "Ere many years, I will cause the boy who drives the plough to know more of the Bible than thou dost."
He had to leave England to do it, though, never to return. While only 29 in 1524, he settled in Cologne, Germany, and by 1526 was ready to smuggle 6,000 copies of the Bible in English into Britain.
The whole British naval fleet was put on alert, and boats were stopped and searched. First tens and then hundreds of the Bibles got through.
The bishop of London tried another tack. He sought to buy the entire print run through an intermediary. His intention was to burn them all.
Tyndale got wind of it and approved the sale, saying: "Oh, he will burn them. Well, I am the gladder, for I shall get the money from these books, and the whole world shall cry out upon the burning of God's Word."
And so it was. The bishop burnt them, and Tyndale used the money to improve the translation and print more - at the church's expense.
Tyndale's work formed 85 per cent of the Authorised version of the bible.
"The noise of the new Bible echoed throughout the country," said Tyndale. It was pocket-sized, easy to conceal, and thus went everywhere.
The theological heavyweights of the church railed against it. Thomas More scorned it as "putting the fire of Scripture into the language of plough boys."
Tyndale was captured by assassins and then strangled and burnt at the stake in August 1536 for "heresy."

Dying man's prayer
His last words were: "Lord, open the King of England's eyes."
This prayer was swiftly answered, and the English reformation was fuelled by a spate of translations.
The Coverdale Bible (translated from a German Bible) in 1535 was the first legal Bible.
In 1537, the Matthew's Bible was published, an amalgam of the Tyndale and Coverdale Bibles.
Then in 1539 came the Great Bible, placed in every church.
Three Bibles in six years.
There were so many that King James had to authorize a special standard version in 1611.
So persecuted Christians spurred me to connect afresh, and respect all the more, my spiritual ancestors. We forget them at our peril.
The world still has need of the likes of Tyndale. Who knows, perhaps you or I might be called to such an illustrious ministry.
 
Other articles in this series:

• Achievement or Sacrifice?
• Stop Complaining
• Hope for Hard Times
• The Battle for Religious Freedom Never Ends
• Seeing the Bible through Persecuted Eyes
• Death Loses its Sting
• The Power of Song
• Simple Faith
• Key Ingredients in Hospitality
• The Beauty of Mystery
• Awakening to Struggle
• Obstacles to Instruments
• God is Not Safe
• Deliverance Comes Through Endurance
• Imperfect People Do God's Will