This is part four of Revive Us Again, a ten-part series on revival and renewal in Scripture and church history.
The entrance of Your words gives light; It gives understanding to the simple.
Psalm 119:130 NKJV
Early in October 1536, guards led an Englishman out of the castle prison at Vilvoorde, near Brussels, to a stake. He had spent about a year and a half in that prison, and one letter he wrote there survives. He asked for a warmer cap, because the cold had settled in his head. He asked for a lamp, because it was tiresome to sit alone in the dark. Most of all he asked for his Hebrew Bible, his Hebrew grammar, and his Hebrew lexicon, so he could keep working.
His name was William Tyndale, and his crime was the New Testament in English.
At the stake the executioner strangled him, and then they burned his body. John Foxe, who gathered the story a generation later, says Tyndale cried out with a loud voice before he died. “Lord! open the King of England’s eyes.”
He was praying for Henry VIII, the king whose bishops had seized his New Testaments and burned them.
A Book Inside the House of God
Earlier in this series we watched workmen clearing out a neglected temple when the high priest Hilkiah turned up a scroll (2 Kings 22:8). When the Book of the Law was read to King Josiah, he tore his clothes (22:11). Judah had lost its Scriptures inside the house of God, under the feet of priests who served there every day.
The church of the late Middle Ages had a different problem with much the same result. Its Bible was never lost. Monks copied it by hand, and priests read from it at Mass. But it was in Latin, and most people in the villages of England could not understand Latin or read anything at all. Few households in England could ever have owned a whole Bible copied by hand. Plenty of priests loved the Scriptures they read aloud. Still, the plowman in the field had never heard the Gospel of John in his own tongue.
Psalm 119:130 tells us what that cost. The word translated entrance is pethach, an opening or unfolding, and it appears nowhere else in the Old Testament. God’s words give light when they are unfolded, laid open where a reader can look inside. Then the verse names who receives that light, the pethayim, the simple, ordinary people with no schooling and no Latin.
Bones in the River
John Wycliffe spent most of his life at Oxford. In the 1370s he began to teach that Scripture holds all the truth a believer needs, and that God gave it to the farmer and the weaver as surely as to the priest. His followers produced the first complete Bible in English in the 1380s and 1390s, translated from the Latin Vulgate. Poor preachers carried it along the roads, and their enemies called them Lollards. A chronicler at Leicester complained that Wycliffe had cast the pearl of the gospel before swine by opening it to lay men and women who could read.
The bishops pushed back hard. In 1409 Archbishop Thomas Arundel issued rules forbidding anyone to translate Scripture into English, or to read a translation made since Wycliffe’s day, without a bishop’s approval. In 1428, more than forty years after Wycliffe died, men came to the churchyard at Lutterworth with spades. They dug up his bones, burned them, and threw the ashes into a little river called the Swift.
The historian Thomas Fuller later saw what the bishop had missed. “And thus the ashes of Wickliffe are the emblem of his doctrine, which now is dispersed the world over.”
A Goose at Constance
Czech students carried Wycliffe’s writings home from Oxford, and in Prague they found a preacher named Jan Hus. His last name means goose. From 1402 he preached in Czech at the Bethlehem Chapel, and the crowds came. Hus held that Scripture stands over popes and councils, and he said so from the pulpit.
In 1414 a church council met at Constance, and King Sigismund promised Hus safe passage if he would come and defend himself. Weeks after he arrived, they locked him up. At his trial he said again and again that he would take back anything they could show him to be wrong from Scripture. The council wanted him to submit to its own judgment instead. On July 6, 1415, they condemned him and burned him, and threw his ashes into the Rhine.
The Gate of Paradise
A hundred years after Hus, the fire reached Wittenberg.
Martin Luther was a monk and a doctor of theology who taught the Bible at Wittenberg. He was also a man in torment. He confessed his sins for hours at a time and still went away afraid of God. On October 31, 1517, angered by the sale of indulgences, he sent ninety-five theses for debate to the archbishop of Mainz. But the change that remade him came from one verse.
For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ, for it is the power of God to salvation for everyone who believes, for the Jew first and also for the Greek. For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith; as it is written, “The just shall live by faith.”
Romans 1:16–17 NKJV
Luther had come to hate the phrase “the righteousness of God.” He had been taught that it meant the justice by which God punishes sinners. He kept pounding at that verse, by his own account meditating on it night and day, until he saw how the words fit together. The righteousness revealed in the gospel is the righteousness God gives, received as a gift by faith. Late in life he wrote, “Here I felt that I was altogether born again and had entered paradise itself through open gates.”
Paul was quoting Habakkuk 2:4. That is the same Habakkuk we met in the first post, the prophet who prayed for revival with Babylon already on the road.
Accused of teaching what Hus taught, Luther went home and read Hus. In 1520 he wrote to a friend, “We are all Hussites without knowing it.” At Worms in 1521 he refused to recant because his conscience was captive to the Word of God. Hidden afterward in the Wartburg castle, he turned the New Testament into plain German in about eleven weeks. It came off the press in September 1522.
The Plowboy
Back in Gloucestershire around 1521, Tyndale was tutoring a gentleman’s children and arguing at dinner with visiting clergy. Foxe tells us that one learned man said it would be better to be without God’s law than the pope’s. Tyndale answered, “If God spare my life, ere many years I will cause a boy that driveth the plough shall know more of the Scripture than thou dost.” Some historians doubt he said it in those exact words. Whatever he said at that table, the boy at the plow became his life’s work.
Cuthbert Tunstall, the bishop of London, refused to sponsor a translation, so in 1524 Tyndale left England for good. In 1526 a printer at Worms ran off the first complete New Testament ever printed in English, and the first translated from the Greek. Copies were smuggled into England, and Tunstall had them seized and burned. Only three survive.
Then came the betrayal in Antwerp, the cell, and the stake. God did not wait long to answer the prayer he prayed there. In 1537 an English Bible built largely on Tyndale’s work went on sale in England with Henry VIII’s own license. In 1538 Thomas Cromwell, the king’s chief minister, ordered every parish to set up an English Bible where the people could read it. The Great Bible followed in 1539, and people crowded around the chained copies in their parish churches to read or hear them read.
The church had the Scriptures all along. The plowman got them when someone was willing to die opening them.
The Ash
The men God used were sinners, and some of them did not obey the Book they opened. In 1525 Luther urged the German princes to cut down the rebelling peasants without mercy, and late in life he wrote vicious tracts against the Jews that Lutheran churches have since repudiated. Every side in that century reached for fire. Catholic authorities burned Protestants. Protestant Zurich drowned the Anabaptist Felix Manz. Calvin’s Geneva burned Michael Servetus.
And God used more hands to open the Book than either side likes to admit. The Greek New Testament that Luther and Tyndale both translated from was published by Erasmus, a Catholic scholar who stayed in the Roman church all his life and wished the farmer would sing Scripture at his plow. In 1965 the Second Vatican Council declared that easy access to Scripture should be provided for all the faithful.
Josiah’s Story on a Larger Map
Post 2 traced the pattern of Old Testament revival, from decline and a grieving leader to the Word recovered, repentance, restored worship, and joy. The Reformation followed that same road across a continent. Luther set out to stop an abuse and to understand a verse. Tyndale wanted a plowboy to read. Where the Book was opened in the people’s own language, sinners repented, congregations sang, and fathers taught their children the faith at the kitchen table.
Kindling
Before you read your Bible this week, thank God by name for the people who put it in your language, from Wycliffe’s translators and Tyndale in his cold cell to the scholars behind the translation on your nightstand.
Then open to Romans 1:16–17. Read it slowly, out loud, twice. Ask what each phrase means, from “the righteousness of God” to “the just shall live by faith,” and stay with it until it opens.
Tyndale prayed for a king’s eyes. Before you open the Book, pray for your own.
Open my eyes, that I may see Wondrous things from Your law.
Psalm 119:18 NKJV
Word Study
| Term | Original | Strong’s | Meaning | Key text |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| pethach | פֵּתַח | H6608 | an opening or unfolding, used only here in the Old Testament | Ps 119:130 |
| pethi | פְּתִי | H6612 | simple, untaught, open to influence, from a verb meaning to be open | Ps 119:130; Ps 19:7 |
| dikaiosynē | δικαιοσύνη | G1343 | righteousness, right standing before God, in Romans 1:17 the righteousness God gives | Rom 1:17 |
| pistis | πίστις | G4102 | faith, trust that rests its whole weight on another | Rom 1:17; Hab 2:4 (Greek OT) |
Discussion Questions
- Judah lost the Book of the Law inside its own temple. In what ways can a church own plenty of Bibles and still keep the Word shut?
- Jan Hus asked to be corrected from Scripture and was told to submit to the council instead. Where do you see people today trusting an authority over the text itself?
- Luther found the gospel in the very verse that frightened him most. Which passage do you tend to skip, and what would it look like to stay with it?
- Erasmus stayed Catholic and still helped open the Word. Why is it worth telling the full story of who God used?
- Tyndale prayed for a king who let his books burn. Whose eyes are you praying God will open?
Going Deeper
- David Daniell, ed., Tyndale’s New Testament (Yale University Press, 1989). Tyndale’s 1534 translation in modern spelling. Read a few chapters and you will hear how much of your English Bible he wrote.
- David Daniell, William Tyndale: A Biography (Yale University Press, 1994). The standard modern life of Tyndale.
- Roland H. Bainton, Here I Stand: A Life of Martin Luther (Abingdon-Cokesbury, 1950). Still the most readable life of Luther, warm toward him without hiding his faults.
- Matthew Spinka, John Hus: A Biography (Princeton University Press, 1968). A careful scholarly life of Hus.
This post is drawn from The Fire Shall Never Go Out, my book in progress on two thousand years of revival and renewal.
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