Peter Witkowski Memos

An Appreciation of Mr. Sam Ruble

My first conversation with Mr. Sam Ruble revolved around the topic of cows and stoplights and how the cows outnumbered the people and the people the stoplights in Rappahannock county. In the four years since that first meaningful conversation, I have come to realize that our brother truly knows more than a thing or two about wrangling cows, taking down bucks, and rebuilding limbs. Sam knows the outdoors well, but he knows people even better. 

He knows how to make the forlorn and neglected feel welcome. He knows how to love those who have lost a loved one and readily sheds a tear here and there for the many fishing buddies, family members, and friends who have already transferred their membership to heaven. He also stands ready to rejoice with those who get good medical news or who take the first steps towards adulthood or career success. A large hug, a quick joke, and a warm smile are never more than a moment away. Our brother loves us well.

 I can say this as both his pastor and his friend. It was Sam who drove us around when April and I first came to the hills of Rappahannock county. It was Sam who took me on my first hospital visits. And it was Sam who helped my son catch his first fish and visited us when cancer raged in April’s body.  

In one sense, the loving character of our brother and of his bride, Mrs. Karen, needs no description. Without fail every new member going through our membership classes since I arrived has made reference to you guys. Some perspective members struggle to recall your name. But once they start talking about how this one slightly older couple welcomed their family the moment they walked in the door and how this couple was so nice, friendly, and kind, I need only say, “Oh, you mean Sam and Karen,” before I hear, “Yes that’s the couple, I really like them.” Sam and Karen, thank you for loving us well. 

I know that your love for us has cost you a few gray hairs. If nothing else my inability to spell your last name correctly in the bulletin and on official church documents has surely added at least one extra gray hair. 

You have also weathered some of the darker days of this congregation’s history. But instead of leaving, you both stood firm and do what you do best. You loved fiercely. You faithfully made phone call after phone call, brought meal after meal, pumped out water system after water system, visited member after member, and went to doctor’s appointment and after doctor’s appointment. Whenever the phone rang, you stood ready to serve. Undoubtedly, you earned some of your grey hairs at ABC. But these little reminders of times past are not a curse but a sweet blessing, a testimony of how well you have loved the men, women, and children of ABC. Proverbs 20:29 reminds us that,

The glory of young men is their strength, but the splendor of old men is their gray hair.

Sam and Karen we are thankful for those gray hairs that crown your head. I am here because you guys loved well. Pretty much everyone at ABC today and watching online is here because you loved the Lord your God with all your heart soul mind and strength and your neighbor as yourself. Thank you! 

Thank you for pressing on and for making the most those opportunities to do “good to everyone especially of the household of faith (Gal 6:9).” Sam and Karen as you look out on the congregation today full of happy faces, I believe you are seeing the first fruits of your labor. Our church is what it is today because hundreds of people have been able to identify you with the hands and feet of Jesus. Thank you!

Though Sam is stepping down from our deacon board today, I still affirm that he possesses the heart of a deacon. He has not grown weary either of us or of our great God. But our Lord has placed physical limitations on our brother that prevent him from continuing on as a deacon. No ministry is forever. We are all but stewards. We must all step aside at some point.  Brother you have steward your time on this deacon board well. You leave behind a legacy of care and compassion. We will miss you.  

Yet, we will not leave you adrift on the pond of boredom to watch the Sunset. God still has much for you to do and we will look forward to ministering beside you in the days ahead. The parameters of your service will change. But I fully expect you both to go on deaconing and serving the church until Jesus calls you up yonder. Sam, I also suspect you will rightfully be one of our deacons most trusted advisors in the days ahead as you know both this congregation and our Lord and savior well. As Paul told Timothy,

For those who serve well as deacons gain a good standing for themselves and also great confidence in the faith that is in Christ Jesus (1 Tim 3:13).

Brother by God’s grace, you have achieved such a standing at ABC.

Thank you for standing firm in the faith. Thank you for loving my family well. Thank you for loving all of us well.  

Brother, there may be more cows than people and more people than spotlights in Rappahannock county, but I would be hard pressed to find either a cow, or stoplight or even another person who has loved us as well as you and Mrs. Karen have. 

Thank you, Sam and Karen for your 18 years of faithful ministry. May God bless you richly in the days ahead!

Peter Witkowski Discipleship

Why Did Jesus Stop Doing Miracles?

The story of how Jesus brought Jairus’s dead twelve-year-old daughter back to life resonates with our souls (Matt 9:18-23). The deep sorrow of associated with burying a child has few equals. It is a special kind of anguish that brutalizes the heart. What parent would not run to Jesus as Jairus did, longing to hear his child laugh again?

The story also presents us with a problem of eternal proportions: Where is Jesus now? What about today’s children who are wasting away in hospitals? Why does Jesus not come to our homes?

Since no Christian can see into the secret mind of God, we should not speculate about the intent of God’s secret will. We do not know it. We do not know why some live to 80 and others die at 8 weeks.

Why Jesus Left

But we do know why Jesus left earth. He could have set up a permanent health clinic in Judea and healed the sick without end. People today could still be talking of that time when Jesus spoke over Fred and his cancer disappeared. But they don’t because Jesus understood that such healings were temporary. Everyone whom Jesus healed in the New Testament has long since died. Had Jesus hung up a shingle and gone into the professional healing business, his ministry would have never ended. Such a healing ministry would have addressed the symptoms of humanity’s problem (though not in a universal since as Jesus was bound by the limits of time and space) without addressing the root cause of our problems: the curse of sin and death. In other words, Jesus goes and dies on the cross so that humanity can spend eternity in a world with no sin, death, and misery. The empty tomb addressed the root cause of all our problems. In short what is even greater than an extended life on earth is an eternity in heaven.

In 1929, the famous preacher Martyn Lloyd-Jones reflect upon a similar dilemma when he had exchanged the doctor’s stethoscope for the pastor’s pulpit in 1925. People would have easily understood and celebrated Lloyd-Jones had he given up being a bookie to preach. But giving up medicine…surely the healing of the sick was a noble profession. Lloyd-Jones responded:

I want to heal souls. If a man has a diseased body and his soul is all right, he is all right to then end; but a man with a healthy body and a diseased soul is all right for sixty years or so and then he has to face an eternity of hell…We have sometimes to give up those things which are good for that which is best of all – the joy of salvation.

Jesus no longer walks among us because he wanted to free us from the whole tragedy of death and dying once and for all. Because he died, we get to live forever without sickness. As Jesus tells us in John 14:3: “And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, that where I am you may be also.” Jesus left to conquer sin and death for us.

Does God Still Heal?

Though Jesus ascended into heaven, Christians should continue to take their health concerns to Jesus. When their children feel the weight of illness, mom and dad should ask Jesus to heal their precious child for he instructed his followers to ask him to “Give us this day our daily bread.” No one can doubt that health proves to be one of our must urgent daily needs. God still dispenses the gifts of healing sometimes supernaturally and sometimes through normal medical means. Jesus still heals.  

What About My Loss?

But when he does not heal, we should not despair for as Jesus told Jairus and later those who mourned the death of Lazarus, death proves not to be the permanent end of human existence but rather to be a type of sleep, a transition to eternity (Matt 9: John 11. In other words, the goodness of God reigns even during and after death. The puritan, pastor John Flavel beautifully encapsulated Jesus’s sentiment when he wrote:

Look not upon the dead as a lost generation; think not that death has annihilated and utterly destroyed them. On no, they are not dead, but only asleep; and if asleep, they shall awake again. You do not…make outcries and lamentations for your children, and friends, when you find them asleep upon their beds. Why, death is but a longer sleep out of which they shall as surely awake as ever they did in the morning in this world.

The dead in Christ are not lost. The end goal of Jesus’s ministry was not an eternal life of misery here on earth but rather an eternal life of glory in the new heavens and the new earth. Those who trust in Jesus though they die reside with him forever.

As for those of us left behind, we too need not despair. The Jesus who responded kindly to the simple and slightly misinformed faith of a woman with the flow of blood who touched his clothes invites us to bring our problems to him. Even those who struggle with fear, anger, and fractured theology will find deliverance and life if they will but make Jesus the object of their faith. As the Puritan Richard Sibbs helpfully reminds us, “God can pick out sense out of the confused prayer (50).” No problem is too great for God and no amount of faith is too small. If we will but go to Jesus as Jairus did, he will come to our home and deliver us from our griefs and sorrows. Jesus reigns.  

Final Thoughts

Do not begrudge, Jesus for going back to heaven and removing the miracle shingle. In doing so, he did something far greater than extending our loved one’s life for a few years. He made it so we could all spend eternity with him in a world forever free from sin and death. God is Good. May God help us all trust him more.

Peter Witkowski Apologetics

1 Corinthians, KJV Pitfalls, & the Need for a Readable Bible

The church should value a Bible translation’s readability as much as its fidelity to the intent of the original authors. For a translation of God’s Word to change lives, it must be understandable. Paul makes this point in 1 Corinthians 14:9: “If with your tongue you utter speech that is not intelligible, how will anyone know what is said? For you will be speaking into the air.” Though Paul addresses the ability to share the gospel in a foreign language through divine inspiration, the passage can be easily applied to the topic of Bible translations. Just as witnessing proves useless if no one can understand you what you are saying, a Bible translation proves useless if people cannot understand it.

Understandability proves to be the great downfall of the view that King James Bible is the best Bible translation of all time. Most readers simply cannot understand the Old English of the KJV as they don’t use “thee” and “thou” when grabbing a soda at their local gas station.

A Brief KJV History

Admittedly, the King James Bible has not always been associated with Shakespearian or highbrow English. It has not always been hard to understand. The original translators often stated that the goal of their translation was to gift English speakers a Bible in their “vulgar” or common tongue. When the translators of the King James Bible wrote out 1 Corinthians 15:31 as,

I protest by your reiocycing which I haue in Christ Iesus our Lord, I die daily,

the average 1611 reader could easily understand the terms above.

Thankfully, the original translators understood that no Bible translation “is begun and perfected at the same time.” The translators of the KJV Bible were in large part updating the text of the Bishop’s Bible and anticipated that the KJV would need to be updated in the years ahead. The KJV would be undergo five major updates and more than 100,000 changes between 1611 and 1769. Because of those changes, 1 Corinthians 15:31 reads, “I protest by your rejoicing which I have in Christ Jesus our Lord, I die daily.” The text undoubtedly benefited from the updating. I have yet to meet anyone who carries around a first edition 1611 KJV reprint.

After 1769, the updates stopped. The translators made a more decisive break from the KJV and published the Revised Version of the Bible in 1885. Around 1930 following the teachings of a Seventh Day Adventists, the King James only crowd emerged and rather arbitrarily declared that the KJV could no longer be updated. The sentiment reflected their misplaced effort to protect the inherent meaning of the text against the attacks of Christian liberalism which had gained influence at the beginning of the 20th century. In the process of trying to protect the relevance of the KJV, KJV only crowd fossilized the text.

More Than A Dictionary

Admittedly with the help of a dictionary, readers can look up some uncommon words like ‘chapmen’ and get to the meaning of the text. But that is not the only challenge facing readers of the KJV. In addition to relying upon an antiquated vocabulary, the KJV also contains a host of “false friends“: words which meant one thing in 1611 and another in 2022. For example, 2 Timothy 2:15 in the KJV reads “Study to shew thyself approved unto God.” The word “study” in the KJV does not mean Timothy needs to grab his Bible, pencils, and highlighters and head to the library. The word in Old English meant “to do one’s best.” The KJV contains countless such illusionary words that can lead readers to false assumptions about the Biblical text. The fault lies not with the translators nor with the readers but in the span of time between the two groups during which the meaning of words naturally changes. Even academic works published in English a few hundred years ago such as John Wycliffe’s volumes require translation. Like many other old English works, the KJV no longer contains the “vulgar” language of the everyday reader.

Church History & KJV

Still some counter that the beauty and history of the KJV should compel readers to pull out their massive English dictionaries. Though well intended, the impulse to demand that Christians read the KJV as opposed to a more colloquial translations goes against the intent of the Scriptures and of the history of the protestant Church. When the apostles penned the New Testament, they used Konia Greek which was spoken by everyday merchants as opposed to the “Classical Greek” of Plato and Aristotle. The God who was the Word become flesh desired for people to readily have access to his thoughts.

Before there was a King James only camp, there existed a Latin only camp. This group of scholars, pastors, and churchmen believed that the poetic nature of the Latin Bible translated by Jerome proved far superior to the then unimaginative and modern language Bibles appearing in vulgar tongues such as English. Yet as John Wycliffe noted in 1384, those who mandate the usage of a hard-to-understand Bible unquestionably go against the teaching of Scriptures they seek to protect. He wrote,

“The Holy Spirit gave the Apostles essential knowledge at Pentecost in order to know all languages to teach the people God’s Word. God willed that people were taught his Word in diverse tongues; therefore, what man acting on God’s behalf would reverse God’s ordinance and his revealed will?”

One of the things Protestants protested was the absence of the Bible in the common language. For sinners to be saved, Christians sanctified, and pastors held accountable, men and women needed access to Bibles that they could understand.

The events of Pentecost, Paul’s comments in 1 Corinthians 15, and the history of the church reveal that God intended for people to have a Bible in their language. Since the KJV no longer contains common English, readers should be suspicious of pastors who demand strict adherence to the KJV. That sentiment resides outside the bounds of Scripture and historic Protestantism. John Calvin concluded, “Faith needs the Word as much as fruit needs the living root of the tree.” The Scriptures should be understandable.

Benefits of the KJV

Despite its perils, the KJV remains an accurate translation of the Bible. Many pastors, Christians, and historians can still appreciate the poetic beauty of the KJV. Others rightfully find a sense of peaceful familiarity in the KJV when they recite the Lord’s Prayer and other well-known passages. The KJV was a masterful translation for its time and still contains value for some modern readers.

A Readable Bible

But it was never meant to be the final English translation as all the updates to the original 1611 edition make clear. We also no longer live in a world of “thee’s” and “haveth’s” or “harts.” The Bibles in our homes and in our pews should be readable. They should use the language of today’s construction workers, middle school teachers, and doctors. A good Bible translation will be accessible to all readers.