Dear Friends,
Eternity itself will alone reveal the debt that the Church of Christ owes to those individual men and women who, seeing the low condition that religion had sunk to in their day, resolved before the Lord to give their lives for the glory of the gospel.
Not least among this band was the gentle, but determined, William Tyndale, whose work of translating the Holy Scriptures into the language of the English-speaking peoples, caused the river of evangelical Christianity to burst its banks and overflow until, as it was later said, there was “a face of Godliness upon the whole nation.”
Tyndale’s famous resolve was made in the home of one John Walsh of Little Sodbury Hall, in the Cotswolds. Appalled at the abysmal ignorance of spiritual things even among the religious leaders of his day, William Tyndale’s voice one evening echoed through the rooms of the old Manor House, “If God spare my life, ere many years I will cause a boy that driveth the plough shall know more scripture than thou doest.” This resolve came on the back of a conviction that had already begun to form in his heart and mind; “I have perceived by experience,” he told a friend, “that it is impossible to establish common people in any truth unless the scripture be laid clearly before them in their mother tongue.” So began the work that was to cost William Tyndale his devoted life.
These few words of this letter are not intended to give any kind of an outline of that life, but simply to draw our hearts out in appreciation to the God of our salvation, who was pleased to raise up such a man in His own good time to lay the foundations of an open Bible for our land today. Tyndale, of course, enjoyed the reception that many have experienced who sought only the good of the Lord’s Church and the prosperity of Zion, and he was hounded from pillar-to-post, complete with manuscripts and a few printed pages of the New Testament in English. The bloodhounds of the Bishop of London were constantly on his trail, and though he had little care for his own safety he was more than anxious for the precious work that he had already carried out on the Word of God. “I perceive,” he wrote again – (he was always perceiving!) – “I perceive,” he wrote, “that not only in my Lord of London’s palace, but in all England, there was no room for attempting a translation of the scriptures.” Accordingly, in the year 1524, Tyndale set sail for Europe complete with his two years of work and a hope of peace and safety, to give England a true rendering of the Word of Life.
However, the devil has two ploys with regards to the Word of God: he will either corrupt it by sowing his imitation “tares” in the same field, or else he will snatch it away, as our Lord told us in another parable. Being very much the angel of light in our own day, he is very much employed in sowing the corrupt among the good; but in Tyndale’s day the devil was very much the roaring lion seeking those he would devour. Europe, therefore, proved only slightly better than England for Tyndale’s work and again, we find him having to constantly fly from danger to preserve his life. “When they shall persecute in one city, flee to another,” might well be the motto-text for Tyndale’s work; but in spite of all, that work did flourish and abound to God’s praise, and whichever way we look at it today we are eternal debtors to it.
The debt that we owe to the likes of William Tyndale is, perhaps, nowhere better seen than in the final letters that he wrote from his prison at Vilvorde, just north of Brussels. Remember the stature of the man; remember his gentle and gentlemanly background; remember the intellectual capabilities and powers of the man now imprisoned so that we might have an open Bible in our day. “I beg your Lordship,” he writes to one of his friends, “that if I am to remain here through the winter, you will request the commissary to have the kindness to send me from the goods of mind which he has, a warmer cap, for I suffer greatly from cold in the head, and am affected by a perpetual catarrh, which is much increased in this cell. A warmer coat also, for this which I have is very thin. A piece of cloth, too, to patch my leggings. My overcoat is worn out; my shirts are also worn out … and I ask to be allowed to have a lamp in the evenings; it is, indeed, wearisome sitting alone in the dark.” And then there comes what must be one of the most self-less utterances recorded anywhere in the history of Christ’s Church; “But most of all,” he writes, “I beg and beseech your clemency to be urgent with the commissary, that he will kindly permit me to have the Hebrew Bible, Hebrew grammar, and Hebrew dictionary, that I may pass the time in that study.” A few patches for his trousers, if possible; a warmer coat and cap, if possible; “But most of all,” the books, that he might continue his work and fulfil his resolve. The debt we owe; the debt we owe.