For then will I turn to the people a pure language, that they may all call upon the name of the LORD, to serve him with one consent, Zephaniah 3:9.
One of the first things that Ezra and Nehemiah had to do to restore the worship of God to the returning exiles was to purify their speech. And their children spake half in the speech of Ashdod, and could not speak in the Jews' language, but according to the language of each people, Nehemiah 13:24. Zephaniah tells us why turning the people to a pure language was so important; that they may call upon the name of the LORD.
God is a stickler for language. If you believe what is written, then the Lord would not have allowed the people to have called upon him and to serve him with one consent, or he knew that without a pure language they would not. Either way, a corrupt language corrupted the people's ability to call upon the name of the Lord. It is no small wonder that Ezra was so grieved that he plucked out his own beard and hair (Ezra 9:3), and Nehemiah was so grieved that he plucked out the offenders' hair (Nehemiah 13:25).
The most important question about any version of the Bible in any language is; Will the Holy Ghost use it to bear witness? What then do we mean by "use it"? If we mean filling a stadium with teeny boppers swaying to Jesus music and feeling good about themselves, then apparently any version will do. If we mean seeing former sinners consecrated to a holy life filled with the fruit of the Spirit and serving God in godly churches, I think that 130 years of experimentation should clarify what God has said all along; Now ye are clean through the word which I have spoken unto you, John 15:3.
130 years of progressive new versions has not wrought a holy people. The only way the Neo-Evangelicals can support the claim of holiness to the Lord is to downgrade the definition of holiness until they consider themselves to be holy while living lives far less consecrated than a back slid Southern Baptist in 1950. The same movement has now pretty well infiltrated Fundamental Baptist Churches. The only difference in how Neo-Evangelicals live and dress and how Fundamentalists live and dress is while they are at church.
Our nations, our people, our churches have become corrupt and unholy. Some of our churches have mastered looking good on church days, but by no means would look the same if they all met by chance at Walmart. If the people in the area surrounding your church were to be killed by gas and then covered with ash and lava as was the case with Pompeii, would future archeologists identify your people as different from their neighbors if they carefully searched their homes?
There is a vestige of Bible believing men and women who hold tightly to their King James Bibles and seek to live from within it. What is not obvious to the vast majority of them is that the text itself is being corrupted and that the Holy Ghost is grieved therewith. We will explore the issue of a pure language a little more in a subsequent post.