How Word-Centered Bible Translation Can Aid Mission

Well good evening. It’s wonderful to be with you again. Thank you for coming and I am looking forward to sharing with you on the title, “How Word-Centered Bible Translation Can Aid Mission.” Now that could sound a bit of a confusing title, and you might also think how would it apply to you because most of you aren’t Bible translators, except you are. Oh yes, did you know that? You, when you convey scripture to other people as you talk to them, and as you live your life, you are embodying the Word and so you are translating scripture. So we will think about translators who might go to far flung places and translate the Word, but let’s also remember that this applies to us and we need to see how important it is to begin with the Word of God and I want us to look at this well known verse in Matthew chapter 4 where Christ having not eaten for 40 days is being tempted by Satan to make the command that stones should turn into bread. Christ is very hungry, and Satan comes to him in Matthew chapter 4:3 and says, “If you’re the Son of God command these stones to become loaves of bread”, but he answered it is written, “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.” What a striking thing.

There is something called Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, I guess you might have heard of it, it often comes in the shape of a triangle nowadays. I can’t remember all the details, but it talks about human needs and it says that the most basic sort of needs we have are physiological needs, things like food, and what Jesus does is he says there is an even more fundamental need than food and he is saying that having not eaten for 40 days, there is something more basic to life, what we live by is some of God’s words. Now that’s not what he says, is it? He says every Word that comes from the mouth of God. And what that means is that we as people of God are to be obsessed with every Word that comes from the mouth of God, not in the sense of studying them just to know about them. There’s a wonderful word in our first hymn, it was the word heed, yes, it’s a slightly old word. It means to do and obey and that we should be thinking about God’s Words, that’s what should be our obsession. In fact, you can measure the health of church not by success, success is never commanded in the Bible, but simply by this, how much are people heeding God’s Word? That’s the thing that we’ve been told to do, our one job is to heed God’s Word. Of course that involves loving the Lord our God with our hearts, our mind and strength, worshipping him with everything that we have, but it all comes from God speaking to us and heeding God’s Word. And I think there’s a challenge for us as we think about God’s Word and every word that those details really matter and therefore, we want them to be reflected in Bible translation. Now of course, a lot of languages are very, very different than from our own, very different from Greek and Hebrew that the Bible was written in, and Bible translators are going to agonize about how to represent the detail of God’s Word in such a different situation. If they are going to a place where there’s never been a written form of language before, they are going to have to think, well they cannot put too much burden on people who are just beginning to have their own written translation, and they often go to make intuitive judgements about that.

I want to think about, say Bible translation in the west, here were we’re mainly using English and other languages, where there’s been a tradition of translation for a while. What’s interesting is that nowadays people are often wanting a Bible that’s a bit easier to read. Make it easier for me please, that’s what we want to say, but hang on, it isn’t easy to not eat for 40 days. Being obsessed by God’s Word means it doesn’t have to be easy. Whoever said anything about easiness, ease being part of the deal. No, Bible translation reading can be hard. Now, nowadays someone goes into Starbuck’s, and they speak like this, “I would like a venti iced pumpkin spice quad expresso latte”, and then someone goes off and does the magic trick and comes back with the venti iced pumpkin spice quad expresso latte or it might be they want something simpler, like I don’t know, a grade decaf mocha. Strange language, isn’t it? Utterly unintelligible to anyone even in 1990. Starbuck’s is unapologetic about the demand it makes on you to exercise your mind to get into their language, but Christians would be mortified if someone came into church and someone used a word they didn’t understand. Or think about Islam. Islam demands that young children learn the Koran in Arabic even if they don’t speak Arabic and will use all sorts of words that can be quite unfamiliar. I mean take the word Koran. It used to be in English that you spelt it K-O-R-A-N and because that wasn’t felt to be accurate enough, now it’s usually spelled Q U R and then this apostrophe in the middle of a word where we never have apostrophes, okay, and actually pause on it, and then an A N. And how you listen to world leaders, time and time again, and as they’re talking about the Koran, they will do this pause halfway through the world, why, because Muslim said that little pause halfway through the word really matters to us, the little detail really matters to us. But Christians, oh no, if, if, if we wouldn’t want to make those sort of demands on anyone. And then there are groups of people I won’t talk about too much tonight because we’ve got mixed company, but they come out with a letter alphabet soup, like LGBTQIA++. Ya know, and lots of pronouns, ze/zir, words that never people have across before, so please don’t complain that some old Bible translations are a bit hard to understand. Other groups feel really unapologetic about the fact that there may be some effort required to think about the language you need to understand scripture.

Now, we as Christians, we don’t want to put barriers in anyone’s way. It’s really important we want to speak simply, but we also wanna say this, we have an amazing message and it’s so special we might want some special words to talk about it. Just like Starbuck’s says, our frappuccino is so special we might want some special words to talk about it. We say we’ve got something way, way classier than anything you can find in any coffee place anywhere. We’ve got the words of life and that’s what I what I want us to go away with, a sense of passion and a sense of confidence and a realization that we can really sometimes actually get more intrigue by using difficult vocabulary. I mean that’s basically how Starbuck’s does it, and all sorts of other groups and it’s an interesting thing. When you think you’re losing influence in the culture, and I think Christian’s often feel very lacking in confidence about the Gospel, then you suddenly start saying, oh I wonder what everyone else is doing out there. We need to listen to the way people speak, and we need our Bible translations to sound just like that. That isn’t how Apple thinks, that isn’t how Coca-Cola thinks, that isn’t how anyone else thinks, but somehow, we feel that’s what we’ve gotta do. So, let’s make things simple, let’s be winsome, but let’s also be really confident that we have something utterly amazing to share. I wanna share with you about Jesus and his study of the scriptures.

Now, Jesus is the son of God and that means he knows all things and yet mysteriously twice in Luke’s Gospel, in Luke chapter 2 he told us he’s growing, that he grew in wisdom. And over in Hebrews chapter 5:8 we are told that the son, though he was a son learned obedience through suffering. Now, that’s a bit of a mystery. How can the one who knows all things learn, but that’s what scripture clearly tells us, and what I want to say is Christ knew the scriptures really well and I’m gonna show you that in a moment, did he get that just by a sort of download, so he just knew it and he didn’t need to make any effort. We have to make effort to learn scripture, but Christ didn’t. Well if you look at what he’s doing when he’s age 12 in the temple, he’s asking the top folk, the priests there questions seeking to find out things and I believe we can show that Christ was the most amazing student of the scriptures and for that I am going to take you unapologetically to one of my favorite passages in scripture which is Luke chapter 15 and we’re going to do a deep dive there for 20 minutes, okay? Luke chapter 15. Jesus’ longest story is Luke chapter 15 and the story of two sons and it’s really long, it’s three minutes long. I mean, that’s amazing isn’t it, that it’s Jesus’ longest story, but I want you to see how much he does in just a three-minute story and we’re gonna see how this shows his knowledge of the scriptures.

So, Luke chapter 15. I wanna start with the first two verses where it says now the tax collectors and sinners were drawing, all drawing near to hear him. That’s the really important word, they wanna get the Word of God, and the Pharisees grumbled saying, this man receives sinners and eats with them.” So, he got two lots of people. The Pharisees are described as grumbling like Old Testament Israel, and tax collectors and sinners hear it. Two groups of two if you like. Tax collectors, well they’re people who take the money you are about to donate to the temple, and they give it to Rome incorporated to hire themselves just to oppress you. So, you don’t expect they know much about the Bible. Sinners, okay everyone’s a sinner, but like these are classy sinners. This is their identity; they spend their time sinning. Okay, don’t expect them to know much about the Bible. Then you’ve got the opposite of sinners, the Pharisees. That means separators, they’re spending their time separating from sin, a bit of a problem, it’s like running away from your shadow, it just chases you around, sins within, so that’s the problem with the theory of, I can separate from sin, but they had to try at least.

And then you’ve got the scribes. They spend their time copying out the Bible by hand. Jesus tells a story in response to them, in fact it says in verse 3, he told them this parable, verse 3, and then we have three stories. One parable and three stories. And it goes like this. The first story is a shepherd who has 100 sheep and one of the sheep goes away from home, one of the hundred goes away, shepherd goes after it, leaves the 99, finds it, brings it back and is rejoicing, has a big sheep finding party, okay? Then there’s the story of a woman who loses 1 out of 10 coins at home. She lights a lamp, she sweeps and finds the coin, then she has a coin finding party. I’m sure you won’t be invited to coin finding parties, you know that’s totally normal, okay, and then you have a story of two sons, one of whom goes away from home and one of whom is at home and the interesting thing there is, well, some of you may have played Sudoku and you know that in Sudoku you use the numbers you have to fill in the numbers you don’t have and this is how Jesus’ story works. Because when the sheep goes away from home and is found and brought back there’s rejoicing. When the coin is lost at home, it’s found, there’s rejoicing. When a son goes away from home, comes back, there’s a huge party and then there’s a son at home and then a missing ending. You never hear how the son at home responds, but you realize using Sudoku principles that if he were to come in and accept the celebration that there would be a huge party, except his younger brother, there would be a huge party, you see, and so you’re actually told that that last son is lost as well. You go from 1% loss to 10% loss to implicitly 100% loss and that’s how Jesus spells this one parable.

Now we’re gonna go to the third part of that and just look at this part about two sons, and it goes like this, verse 11. He said, “There was a man who had two sons and the younger of them said to his father, father give me the share of the property that’s coming to me, and he divided his property between them.” Not many days later the youngest son gathered all he had and took a journey into a far country and there he squandered his property in reckless living and when he had spent everything a severe famine arose in the country and it began to be a need so he went and hired himself out to one of the citizens of that country who sent him into his field to feed pigs and he was longing to be fed with a pods that the pigs have, no one gave him anything. But when he came to himself, he said, “How many of my father’s hired servants have more than enough bread, but I perish here with hunger.” “I will arise and go to my father and I will say to him, father I’ve sinned against heaven and before you I’m no longer worthy to be called your son, treat me as one of your hired servants” and he rose and came to his father, but while he was still a long way off his father saw him and felt compassion and ran and embraced him and kissed him and the son said to him, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you, I’m no longer worthy to be called your son,” But his father said to the servants, “Bring quickly the best robe and put it on him and put a ring on his hand and shoes on his feet and bring the fatted calf and kill it and let’s eat and celebrate for this my son was dead and alive again.” He was lost and is found, and they began to celebrate.

Now his older son was in the field and as he came and drew near to the house, he heard music and dancing and he called one of the servants and asked him what these things meant and he said to him, “Your brother has come and your father has killed the fatted calf because he has received him back safe and sound”, but he was angry and refused to go in. His father came out and then treated him, but he answered his father, “Look, these many years I have served you, I have never disobeyed your command, you never gave me a young goat that I might celebrate with my friends, but when this son of yours came who has devoured your property with prostitutes you killed the fatted calf for him.” He said, “Son you’re always with me, and all that is mine is yours. It was fitting to celebrate and be glad for this your brother was dead and is alive again. He was lost and he is found.” And this is just an amazing story, but it’s more amazing than you know. It’s an amazing story on the surface because you can see the father as so compassionate to the younger son and it speaks therefore to people like the tax collectors and sinners who have been far away and says come back and you will be welcomed, and you may be in that position tonight, and you should know that God will welcome you, but also it speaks to people who are like that older brother who seemed to be self-righteous. That’s like the scribes and Pharisees and it’s saying to them they need to accept their younger brother. You see those two choruses, the first 62% of the story about the younger son ends, “This my son was dead and alive again, lost and found.” The final 38% about the older brother ends this, “Your brother was dead and alive again, lost and found.” That’s how it struck him and every single word in this story counts. There isn’t any flab on the story. Every single word is important. Look at what’s the first word from the son, the younger son, it’s the word father. What’s he call his father and he rehearses the speech in his head, first word is father. What’s he call the father when he gets back and sees his father, first word is father. What’s the first word from the older brother’s mouth, “Look all these years I’ve been serving you.” In other words, Jesus is such a good storyteller he can do things by missing things out. By missing out the word father and the older brother you can see that the older brother is resentful, and you can see the difference between these two and every single word is carefully chosen. Now, it’s a great story, I’d love to spend time on this story, but what I wanna do is miss out what I usually say about this story and go on to a whole set of resonances it has if you were a Bible scholar.

Jesus does what might happen in a Pixar movie. Now kids you don’t know about this, but you might watch Pixar movies. They have lines that are just there for your parents and grandparents that you don’t yet understand, okay, and when you grow up you’ll be able to appreciate them, but they’ve got two levels of meaning. Jesus is such a good storyteller, he’s able to tell a story that will work if you don’t know any of the Bible you can take that story anywhere in the world, it will speak at a basic human resonance level, you get it, the contrast between the two brothers and so on, you get it. But if you’re a scribe, it triggers all sorts of other things for you. A man had two sons; that’s how it starts off. Who in the Bible had two and only two sons? Ah, the most famous person in that situation would be Isaac. He had two sons, didn’t he, and only two sons and you remember how the older son, Esau is connected with a field, younger son tricks the older son Esau who comes back saying here I am starving of hunger. That line gets into Jesus’ story, and he tricks him out of all of his inheritance. As a result older brother’s angry, younger brother has to go off into a far country and feed animals and when he comes back, do you know what happens, Genesis 33:4. Well, start off with Genesis 32. He hears that his big brother Esau is coming towards him with 400 armed men. He is totally petrified. He starts splitting his family into different groups so that if one got splattered by Esau, the others get away and then what happens is the most surprising narrative turn events in the entire Old Testament. Because we read in Genesis 33:4, that Esau ran and fell on his neck and kissed him and it’s the only time that phrase ever occurs in the Old Testament. Jesus lifts that phrase and puts it on what the dad does in his story.

Who might you have expected to run and welcome the younger son. Well, what about big brother because guess what, when younger brother went to dad and said, “Give me the inheritance”, what did dad do? You say, well he gave it to him. No, he gave it to them. Read the text. It says he divided his property between them. What country is this story taking place in? We don’t know. It’s a story but what happens if it’s under Old Testament laws, read Genesis 21:17, big brother gets double and in most countries when it’s a farm and you get the impression this is a farm big brother tends to get the farm and younger brother gets stuff you can move, right? So, the big brother does super well so he should be saying, hey little brother I am so glad you asked dad that tough question and as a result I won the jackpot and I got my inheritance early, thank you little brother, I’m so grateful to you. If ever you need me, I’m gonna be there for you. I love you so much, little brother. If you ever go away, I’ll really miss you. Of course that’s not how he is, he’s really resentful so you see how Jesus’ story is calling on this Old Testament reference and in fact we can show that that reference, Genesis 33:4, was part of the scribes curriculum at a time of Jesus, a particular verse they had to know particularly well. In other words, Jesus makes the dramatic high point of the story coincide with something the scribes had to study really hard to know and that’s so striking and there are so many other references to the Jacob and Esau story. Remember how the older brother says, “You never gave me a young goat so I could celebrate with my friends”, there’s only one young goat meal in the entire Old Testament and that is where Jacob tricks his blind father who can’t see far off that he is his older brother and what’s he wearing at the time, he’s wearing Esau’s robes. And you see in Jesus’ story the father says, “Quick bring out the robe, the best robe.” Who does the best robe belong to? Well, it’s not dad’s robe because he’s going to the party, it must be the older brother’s robe and so you see how it’s connecting in so many ways. Because it’s not just that he ran, embraced and kissed him, he ran, embraced and kissed him when he’s coming back from a far country where he was feeding animals. So, Jesus clearly has been studying the old testament rather a lot. A man had two sons. What else might that remind you of? Abraham? He had two sons, he had some more later, but yeah, he had Isacc, but before that he had Ishmael and you remember how there’s that competition and contest between, well, family conflict going on there, but what is so interesting of course is we are reminded of the Abraham story because the father runs. If you’re a scribe when’s the first time you copy the word run in the Bible, it’s when you get to Genesis 18 and who runs, Abraham. Abraham runs, three visitors some and he runs, Genesis 18:2 and what’s he say, he says to Sarah, “Quick”, like the father says in this story, “Quick three seahs of flour” he says to Sarah. Jesus takes the three seahs of flour and puts that into his shortest story which says the kingdom of heaven is like a woman who put yeast into three seahs of flour until it was all fully grown. Boom, you think what’s in that story. Guys, the story is about Sarah. She had no kids spiritually or physically at the time she entertained those guests, and she went onto have more than she could count. That’s what the kingdom of Heaven is like. So, Abraham goes to Sarah, “Quick, three seahs of flour” and then he goes and gets the fatted calf, the Bible’s first fatted calf. Genesis 18, it’s all there. So, Jesus is telling a story because he studied the Old Testament and oh, and Abraham’s the only other guy who gives away his inheritance while he’s still alive. Wow, but did he give it to both sons? No, he only gave it to Isaac. Why’d he only give it to Isaac, because he made a feast for the younger son and the older son was laughing and despising the feast and at that point Sarah said, “Ishmael’s not going to inherit.” The older brother lost his inheritance through despising the feast for the younger son.

Abraham ran, how old was he when he ran, scribes knew that he was 99. He’s not just the first guy in the Bible to run, he’s an old guy in the Bible running. It’s all that he is the archetypal father and so you see how Jesus layers this story with all these references to the Old Testament. A man had two sons. What could that remind you of? Adam. He had two sons, he had some more later, but the Bible’s first family conflict, Genesis chapter 4, is the conflict of an older brother, Cain, resentful of the acceptance of a younger brother. Older son connected with a field, younger son with herding animals and then you have this reasoning conversation between God and the older brother saying, “Don’t be so angry.”

Wow, Jesus does a lot with just a few words, doesn’t he? But there’s more than that. Who in the Bible says, “All these years I’ve been slaving for you?” Isn’t that Jacob talking to his father-in-law, Laban. You know I worked 20 years for your flocks, your daughters and so on. Jesus basically takes phrase after phrase in his little three-minute story out of Genesis. Or think about this, who suddenly gets given a ring and a robe in the Bible. Has anyone ever suddenly been given a ring and a robe in the Bible? Ah, Joseph, yeah, Joseph is suddenly given a ring and a robe, and he’s at a time of great famine. Remember, do you notice the great famine in Jesus’ story, quite an interesting little detail there because people think of this as a story of the prodigal son. He’s prodigal and plus unlucky. He happened to go to the one country which happened to be hit by a bounty of famine and that was pretty tough. So that’s an interesting thing about, ya know, as far as the older brother is concerned, little brother is in trouble all through his own fault, but that’s not quite the way Jesus sees it.

So, think of the story of Joseph who happens to be the only other son in the Bible that the father thought was dead and then alive again. The older brother complains, “You never gave me a young goat so I could eat with my friends.” Now of course the father replies, “You are always with me”, replying to never with always. Every single word is so beautiful. “You never gave me a young goat so I could celebrate with my friend”, but when the son of yours came who devoured your property with prostitutes you killed the fatted calf for him.” Oh, so it’s a vegetarian farm. You’re not allowed to eat goat because dad banned goats. What do we know about dad in this story? We know he gave away the entire inheritance when one son asked, he’s a super generous dad. He pays his hard workers more than the going rate. He is amazingly welcoming of the younger son, he wants a big celebration for everyone, oh but he’s banned goat eating. Not very plausible is it? “You never gave me a young goat”, dude he gave you every goat on the farm. “You never gave me a young goat so I could celebrate with my friends.” You see he wants to have a celebration with goat, which is not as good as calf I have to say, with goat and his friends away from his dad, and he can’t enjoy all the times dad’s there, but what’s so interesting goat friends, but this son of yours devoured your property with prostitutes. Think of the scribe now. It’s a difficult thing. Where is the one place in the Bible where I get friend, goat and prostitute together? Oh, it’s that X-rated passage in Genesis 38, isn’t it? That passage about Juda and Tamar where Judah from whom the Jews derived their name is misbehaving while his brother, younger brother Joseph is in a far country resisting Mrs. Potiphar. You see what’s going on? Jesus is whining all of Genesis’ greatest hits and Genesis is about four hours long, into one three-minute story because he knows the scriptures really well and he is the best teacher.

Now, what’s the last phrase in the previous chapter, chapter 14, Jesus says, “He who has ears to hear, let him hear.” You see it’s possible to listen to Jesus and be unimpressed. Oh well that’s just a simple story, not much going on there and what I want us to go away with a sense that, wow, here’s the Word of God incarnate who knows all things and is therefore the best teacher, and therefore we need to be obsessed with His Words and he’s not just the great intellectual teacher who has all the answers, but doesn’t live by it. He’s the one who is the word incarnate who came to show us God’s love by dying on the cross as a sacrifice for our sins. So, he’s not just the one who says nice things, some people are really good at grandstanding and sounding good, he’s the one who lived it. So friends, I want hopefully from tonight you to be more confident in the riches of God’s word, that is worth being obsessed over the details and thinking how we can study those and how we can translate those in our lives and in our mission because we have such amazing Scriptures given by God, and we can be confident about that. Starbuck’s are confident in their product, Muslims their confident in what they’ve got to say, the Rainbow folk they’re all confident in what they say even licking the Rainbow, yeah. Let’s be confident because we’ve got something far better than them, we have the living Gospel of the living Lord Jesus Christ who gave himself for us and is the best teacher ever. Let’s just pray.

Oh we thank you for your Word and we pray that you would challenge us to be excited about that and we pray that you will help every effort that there is in Bible translation to convey as much as possible of all of those deep truths you give us and may many people be touched through that we pray in Christ’s name. Amen.