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Monday—April 1 • God's Enduring Word Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will never pass away. Matthew 24:35
Obviously the Bible was not originally written in a contemporary language like English or Spanish. Yet we read Bibles translated into the languages of our hearts and minds. This happened through a process of scholarship and discovery that provides an unbroken chain from the original manuscripts to our Scriptures today. The first Biblical translation of the Old Testament, called the Septuagint, communicated in Greek the passages originally written in Hebrew. This was the Bible used at the time of Jesus and His disciples. Many translations followed, from Jerome’s Latin Vulgate, which was the Bible of the Middle Ages, to Erasmus’ first printed Greek New Testament, to Luther’s
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German translation of Scripture, and the King James Version, all the way up to the many translations available today. Today’s translations rely heavily on profoundly accurate texts. Scholars agree that we have recovered just about all the words of the original manuscripts. One scholar even said all the remaining concerns about accuracy would amount to about a half page in a 500-page Bible. You can read your Bible with a tremendous level of assurance that your text is reliable. MIMBS 1 Have you ever heard people challenge the reliability of the Bible? How does it help you to know that the Bible is so reliable? Daily Reading: Deuteronomy 18:1–20:20, Luke 9:28–50, Psalm 73:1–28, Proverbs 12:10
Tuesday—April 2 • The Need for Translating the Bible But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower the people were building. The Lord said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.” Genesis 11:5-7
Genesis 11 describes a time when everyone in the world spoke the same language. They got together and decided to build a huge tower to prove how great they were. God stopped them by confusing their language. And when they couldn’t communicate anymore, they scattered and stopped building the city. We have a term to describe that kind of scattering. We call it a diaspora. We apply that term, for instance, to the scattering of the Jewish nation that happened through 70 years of captivity in Babylon. Jesus gave His disciples the Great Commission, sending them to “be my witnesses . . . to the ends of the earth” (Acts
1:8). Just as the people of the world have dispersed and become separate peoples with separate languages, so Jesus sent His disciples out with instructions to teach people God’s Word. Because of the Great Commission, there needs to be great translation. MIMBS 1 How would your life be different if you did not have the Bible in language that you can understand and apply? Daily Reading: Deuteronomy 21:1–22:30, Luke 9:51–10:12, Psalm 74:1–23, Proverbs 12:11
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