Central Grace Church
3596 Franklin Street Rocky Mount, Virginia
November 26th 2023
9:30 am ---- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- ---- The Smitten Rock – Exodus 17:1-7
10:00 am --------------------------------------------- Take My Yoke Upon You – Matthew 11:29
Without the Gospel – by John Calvin
The Scripture declares the Gospel, that is to say, good news and joyful, inasmuch as in it is declared that Christ, the only natural and eternal Son of the living God, was made man to make us children of God His Father by adoption. And thus he is our only Savior, in Whom lays entirely our redemption, peace, justice, sanctification, salvation, and life; Who died for our sins, arose for our justification, Who ascended into heaven to make us an entry there, to take possession for us and in our name, and to remain forever before His Father as our perpetual Advocate and Priest; who sits at His right hand as King, Lord and Master over all, in order to restore all things in heaven and in the earth; that which all the angels, patriarchs, prophets, apostles would never have been able nor have known how to do, for unto that they were not ordained by God.
Without the Gospel we are useless and vain; without the Gospel we are not Christians; without the Gospel, all wealth is poverty, wisdom is folly before God, strength is weakness, all human justice is damned of God. But by the knowledge of the Gospel we are made children of God, brothers of Jesus Christ, fellows with the saints, citizens of the kingdom of heaven, heirs of God with Jesus Christ, by whom the poor are made rich, the feeble powerful, the fools wise, the sinners justified, the afflicted consoled, the doubters certain, the slaves free.
The Gospel is the word of life and of truth. It is the power of God unto the salvation of all believers, and the key of the knowledge of God which opens the door of the kingdom of heaven to the faithful, unbinding them from their sins, and shuts it against the unbelieving, binding them in their sins. Blessed are all those who hear it and keep it, for thereby they show that they are children of God. Wretched are those who will not hear nor follow it, for they are children of the devil.
O Christians, hear and learn this, for indeed the ignorant will perish with his ignorance, and the blind following the other blind will fall with him into the pit. The one and only way unto life and salvation is the faith and certainty in the promises of God, which cannot be had without the Gospel, by the hearing and understanding of which living faith is given, with certain hope and perfect charity in God, and ardent love toward one’s neighbor. Where then is your hope if you despise and disdain to hear, to see, to read, and to hold fast this holy Gospel?
The Geneva Bible
Prior to the printing of Martin Luther’s German Bible in 1534, and the Geneva Bible in English, the English speaking people never had a Bible in their own language. The Roman Catholic ‘church’ and kings kept all but clergy and Latin scholars from reading Scripture; in England it even became, by royal edict, a capital crime even to read the Bible in the “vulgar tongue” (the English language). In 1526, the English scholar William Tyndale attempted to translate the Bible into English and was forced to flee to Germany, where he met Martin Luther, and then to Belgium, in an effort to translate the Bible into English. Tyndale, standing before a group of Roman Catholic rulers said: “God’s Word was to be made for all the people, even the humblest: if God spare my life, ere many years pass I will cause the boy that driveth the plow to know more of Scripture than thou dost.”
Fulfilling his promise, Tyndale published the first-ever mechanically printed New Testament in the English language, in 1526. Six thousand first-edition copies were smuggled to England and lit a fire that could not be extinguished. But Tyndale was hunted, captured, and imprisoned. On March 6, 1536, he was strangled and burned at the stake. His last words were: “Lord, open the King of England’s eyes.” His prayer was answered, when God moved King James of England, to make an English Bible available to all.
Tyndale’s New Testament made its way to some English pulpits, one copy was purchased by the same king who persecuted him, Henry VIII, who became a supporter of Protestant reformers. In 1553, Mary Tudor ascended the throne, soon married the Catholic King of Spain, and set about, often with violent cruelty, to stamp out the Reformation. Determined to force the English people back to Roman Catholicism, she ordered the burning of all copies of the Bible in English. She caused more than four hundred reformers, pastors and Bible translators to be burned at the stake, well earning her for all of history the sobriquet Bloody Mary. Queen Mary’s vicious crusade drove approximately eight hundred English scholars to the Continent (Europe) but God used this exodus to assemble, in Geneva, Switzerland, some of the finest theologians and Biblical scholars in history. Here, under the protection of John Calvin’s city, this group, led by William Whittingham (Calvin’s brother-in-law) and assisted by Miles Coverdale, Christopher Goodman, Anthony Gilby, John Knox, and Thomas Sampson, produced a new English Bible not beholden to any king or ruler—The Geneva Bible,—the first English Translation from the original tongues since Tyndale’s New Testament, began in 1557 and was completed in 1560 (King James in 1611). A 1579 Scottish edition of the Geneva version was the first Bible printed in Scotland; it soon became the standard of the Scottish Kirk (church). The Scottish Parliament required that every householder have a Bible in the English language in their homes, under penalty of ten pounds.
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