There are events that occur in a life time, or in history that mark a change in time.   When those events occur you know that nothing will ever be the same again.  

You may have felt it at the assassination of JFK, or the landing on the moon. It may have been the first time you saw Elvis or the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan show. It may have been 9/11. It may be something close to home like the birth of a child, or getting fired from a job.  For many of us it was the euphoria of getting a driver’s license.  Nothing will ever be the same again!  Good-bye bicycle, hello Mom’s car. 

God takes Moses up Mount Nebo, in the land of Moab.  It is there that Moses looks upon the Holy Land.  All his life, Moses was longing for a land for his people.  For the past 40 years he was on a holy quest to release his people from slavery in Egypt and form them into a community who would fight and survive on their own. 

Moses must have known that he was standing on the precipice of greatness, looking into another era of Israelite history.  His life’s goal was to get his people to this point, but the future would be in the hands of another.     

Interestingly, it is this very passage that helped spark another revolution.  Today we call it Historical Criticism, but then it was simply called “heresy.”  It was believed for centuries that Moses wrote the first five books of the Bible.  But then someone came along and said, “Wait- Moses dies at the end of the fifth book.  Moses wrote a pretty good obituary for himself. How could he write about his own death? And how could he write, “Never since has there arisen a prophet like him…”  That implies the passage of time, a lot of time.  There is no way that Moses could have written that! 

That sparked a revolution!  It challenged the church’s tradition and called into question the authority of the church and Scripture. 

People began to wonder, ‘Has the church been lying to us all this time.” It inspired many to want to read the Bible for themselves.  The only people who could read were really smart people or priests, university trained scholars.  They read the Bible and shared its content for the ignorant masses. 

There was a radical idea brewing around this time that the ignorant masses should be taught to read.  At the same time Guttenberg came up with a movable type printing press.  This meant that multiple copies of one document could be made at one time.  It was radical and revolutionary- and it changed the world. 

The Bible would be the number one book seller!  People learned to read- reading the Bible.  They wanted to read the Bible- they wanted to know for themselves what the Bible really said.  Then people wanted to read The Bible in their own language.  This was a radical idea- and it was frowned upon by the Church, that people should read the Bible. 

There was a monk and a town priest who thought that his own people should be able to read the Bible.  So, he spent ten years of his life translating the Bible into German.  Crazy as this may seem, that was not that monk’s greatest contribution, or greatest heresy.  That happened many years before…