The Morning Star

Year after year, the Bible is the best-selling book in the world.

But until the Reformers stood up and reintroduced the world to the Word of God, people were unable to access the teachings of Jesus and the writings of the prophets. England’s John Wycliffe has been called the Morning Star of the Reformation. His ministry as a theology professor and pastor was strenuously opposed by the church of Rome, which did all it could to silence Wycliffe forever.

But God had other plans for Wycliffe, who produced the very first English translation of the Bible. In the late 1300s, producing a Bible was difficult and expensive, so the creation of Wycliffe’s translation did not mean English Christians could now access the Word of God at will. But the Bible did reach people who otherwise would never have been exposed to Scripture and paved the way for later translations.* The world of Wycliffe did not immediately change owing to his work as a Bible translator.

Almost 150 years after Wycliffe’s death, bitter hostility toward the Bible was still leading people to martyrdom. In Coventry, England, a monument stands today as a memorial to a group known as the Coventry Martyrs.

One of them was a Mistress Smith, who was found to be in possession of handwritten copies of the Lord’s Prayer, the Ten Commandments, and the Apostles’ Creed. Mistress Smith was burned at the stake for her “crime.”† Religious freedom came slowly in Britain, but it eventually did come. Wycliffe’s work in bringing the Bible to the nation was an integral and important part of that change.

David wrote, “The entrance of Your words gives light” (Psalm 119:130). The world still needs light, a revelation of Jesus, a demonstration of the power of God’s Word. Political reforms cannot do for society what the Word of God can do. Scripture brought about change in the time of the Reformers.

The light of God’s Word is still the change needed by the human heart.