The Christian and His Comfort Zone: Endurance, Reformers, and the Arena (Part 2)

(Continued from Part 1)

We leave the New Testament. Now the question is: did any more of those kinds of men ever materialize? And the answer is yes. The Roman Catholic Church has made heroes of some of these people. I’m going to skip the Roman Catholic story because they have a lot of heroes who aren’t all that good…some very devout men. Also, Bernard of Clairvaux is supposed to be one of the most pious men who ever lived, and I think he sanctioned the Albigensian crusade, and a lot of people were slaughtered.

Okay, we’re going to start with the pre-protestant era. I think everything I’ve talked to you about, I want you to keep in mind that I have visited most of these places, I’m sorry, places when I was younger than anyone in this room. I have stood in places where Christians were drowned, burned, and imprisoned. Sometimes one or two, and sometimes places where it was massive. But I want you to look at a few of these people and also at the “para” movements that followed them. You’ve never heard that term before. So let me define it. The Lord is doing something, and alongside it comes another movement. So, I just called it a para movement: that which is alongside what the Lord is doing.

Wycliffe. Where do you get a man like that? Same kind of person. No roof to his comfort or stress. He took on the entire English theological system, the government, wrote a paper, and was the first man in history to defy and condemn transubstantiation and immorality. He came up with an idea that people had never even defined, which was so closely woven: that the church and state should be separated. Where’s Scott? Scott, you might help me just a little. If there’s anything you want to say here, please volunteer it. Wycliffe did not get the idea of having a New Testament until almost the end of his life, and it finally dawned on him that maybe we should have a Bible or a New Testament to back up what we’re talking about. But there were no printing presses, so about 200 were made. We know almost nothing about where or how they were made. All we know is he died in 1384, and John Purvey took over the work.

I think there’s only one reason we know the name John Wycliffe. It has nothing to do with the New Testament. Those would have eventually been destroyed. It was the Lollards whom he started, and here is where you find those people who are…the Bible talks about “sticking by the stuff.” I don’t understand where these kinds of people come from. What is there in an Englishman’s blood that does this? He started the Lollards, and that’s something that should have been killed off very soon thereafter. It was the Lollards who ensured those New Testaments were handwritten. It was John Purvey who defied the church. He died in 1414? They passed a law that anybody who put out a New Testament without permission from the church was to be burned alive. Well, they had already been burning people for a long, long time in Europe, but the British had not done a whole lot of burning at the stake until then; but boy, it opened the floodgates for another 200 years.

I’ve never been to Smithfield, England, and I feel like it’s one of those places I’ve missed. There are four cities where you were tried and sentenced. One was for treason against the king. Another one is theft. Another one was something that you would do against the church, and the fourth one was if you’re a heretic. We do not know how many people were burned alive in Smithville, England, but it has to reach into the thousands. There is a pub in a town in England that I cannot pronounce. They have names like that, y’all. The pub is called the Lollard’s Pit, where 200 men were burned alive. Lollards standing by and preaching all over England the message of salvation, and this thunderous gospel of John Wycliffe. All this was done after he was dead, and he probably never saw one of those New Testaments. I don’t know. Scott, have you got any insight into that?

Audience: I think so. The New Testament, but I don’t know if he saw the Old.

I’m sure he never saw the Old. The Old Testament did not appear until 1394, long after he was dead, and that was something Purvey put out. But I’m sure he didn’t see the two or three hundred that were made. The Lollards, against all opposition, kept up that fire until the Reformation. There is a possibility…I have been told…I have never seen the proof… that the Lollards raised the money that enabled William Tyndale to print the first New Testament in 1525. That’s a long time after; that’s a hundred and…somebody figure it out…a hundred and some odd years they were still around. The number of people who tried to kill them off: it became an English sport to turn in Lollards and kill them. But when you read it, you think, okay, they started something wonderful, and somebody picked it up, and they were faithful.

Now, Tyndale is a close friend of mine. I guess I’ve been reading about his life on and off ever since I was saved. In 1517, when Luther nailed his thesis to the Castle Church in Wittenberg. In Smithfield, England, in 1517, a farmer, his wife, and his children were burned alive in Smithfield, England, for having taught his children the Lord’s Prayer in English. We cannot understand the depth of the darkness of those days.

I’m going to introduce to you the name of a man named Erasmus who, before Luther’s 1517, was putting together and successfully put together a New Testament in Greek. Nobody even knew those things existed until early on…when…I don’t tell you when, I want to get off on that. He put one out in 1516. It was terrible. Put another one out in 1518, which Luther got his hands on, and then Erasmus put out another one in 1522, which was really good. It was the keg of dynamite that started the reformation. People began to read the New Testament in Greek, and they were astonished. One bishop said either this book is not true or none of us are Christians.

In 1522, Luther was excommunicated, which meant that if anybody found him and killed him, he would be a hero. That’s the way it was in those days. Well, fortunately, Luther had the largest army in Europe to back him up and keep him safe. Frederick the Wise had the biggest army in Europe. It’s amazing how that affected the Pope’s feelings about what to do with Luther. We did not have a reformation without the army. Luther fled to the town of Würzburg, and the story is, and I wish somebody could help me here, that he translated the New Testament in three months, and the other one is that he did it in 11 months. Well, I’ve been working on one for 20 years, and I’ve just now gotten to 2nd Thessalonians. I don’t know how he did something like that, and he had it printed, and this was history beyond history. Here is the first time the New Testament is in a language other than Latin, and it’s in German, over a thousand years later. It’s called the German New Testament.