Prayer: Lord, thank You for gathering us to read Your Word together. We believe that You are in Your Word. Your Word is Your expression; Your Word is also Yourself because Your Word is spirit and life. O Lord, we worship You for giving us this environment that we could meet freely and come together before You to seek You. Lord, be with us and give us the Spirit, light, the supply of life, and the rich enjoyment.
O Lord, as we are reading Your Word, we pray that Your glory may shine on each line. Give us understanding and inward knowledge. Lord, make us hungry and thirsty so that we will not be inwardly numb or indifferent. Take away our lukewarmness that we may be burning inwardly to pursue You and to desire Your Word. Also, give us the utterance that You could speak from within us into everyone, so that each one of us can be supplied.
O Lord, speak to each one of us, and speak Your word into us to enlighten us. Thank You that the entrance of Your word gives light. O Lord, care for us by visiting each one of us, and resist the power of darkness for us. Thank You that Your blood cleanses us and defeats the enemy. We thank You for being with us, and in Your name we look to You. Amen.
To us the Lord’s Word is not a small matter. If there were no Bible among men on earth, if there were no word of the Lord, then the entire world would fall into darkness. There was a period of time in history beginning from the end of the sixth century, about A.D. 570 when Catholicism was formally established and papal authority was set up, that the Bible was declared to be sealed. Only the pope and the so-called clergy beneath him were allowed to read the Bible. The excuse was that common people could not understand the Bible and, therefore, would easily make mistakes and suffer loss in their reading. Hence, the common people were not allowed to read the Bible.
From that time until around 1518 when Martin Luther was raised up by the Lord, there was a period of almost ten centuries. Those who study history all know that this period of time in history is called the Dark Ages, or the Middle Ages. Why is it called the Dark Ages? It is because during that period of time the Bible was sealed up. The common people could not read the Bible, and the result was that they fell into darkness.
The Bible was written first in Hebrew by the inspired Hebrew patriarchs. Because communication was difficult in ancient times, the influence of the Hebrew Old Testament was almost totally limited to the Hebrew people. Later, as communication and transportation progressed, the Hebrew Old Testament spread out to other lands. Around the year 400 B.C., the Greek culture spread all around the coasts of the Mediterranean Sea, especially in its southeastern part, and in Palestine and North Africa. Around the year 300 B.C., Jewish scholars living in Egypt began to translate the Old Testament from Hebrew into Greek; this was called the Septuagint. From that time on, the Old Testament came into existence in Greek. Without a doubt this caused the influence of the Old Testament Bible to increase among the Hellenized people.
After this the Lord Jesus came. By the end of the first century the New Testament was completed, written almost entirely in Greek. According to the studies of historians, when the Lord Jesus was on earth, He often quoted the Scriptures in His speaking, and His quotations of the Old Testament came from the Septuagint (meaning seventy), the Greek translation of the Old Testament. Thus, when the apostles continued writing the New Testament, they quoted the Old Testament from the Septuagint version. This spontaneously caused the revelation of the Bible to thoroughly penetrate the Greek culture. It was for this very reason that in the first two centuries, at the beginning of the church age, the Greek Gnostic philosophers brought the myths in Greek philosophy into the church. Thus, during the first two centuries and even up to the beginning of the third century, the myths in Greek philosophy invaded the church through the Greek Gnostic philosophers to the extent that many wrong and heretical things were taught concerning the person of God and the person of Christ. This created tremendous controversies within the church.
Recently, I have spent some time to study the truth of the Bible totally from the perspective of the Divine Trinity. The more I read, the more I saw that when the people of the first two or three centuries read the Bible, their scriptural studies eventually brought them into the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Most of the people were there eating that tree. Eventually, the scholars themselves did not receive the supply of life, and they harmed many others by preventing them from obtaining the real supply of life.