Last Updated July 2012

From time to time, I have been asked by new missionaries which Thai Bible translation they should buy?  There are not that many available but for the newcomer to Thailand, and to the Thai language, it can be confusing to know which Bible is best to get.  Therefore, for the sake of those who are new to Thailand, or are interested in Bible translations in general, I wanted to give a brief survey of what’s available.

One of the more colorful aspects of living in Thailand is geckos.  On our walls. On our ceiling.  On our table.  Scurrying across the floors.  Converging upon the porch light in hopes of getting some yummy bugs for dinner.  However, geckos seem to have an uncanny ability to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, meeting some rather horrible deaths.   I can’t begin to tell you how many times I have opened up a door or window only to see a dried up, quite flat, gecko skeleton fall out of the space between the window/door and the frame.  Apparently when I had been closing up the house at some point, a poor little gecko didn’t move in time before getting caught in between a closing window/door and the frame.  Normally, geckos are extremely quick but unlike flies, they don’t have those compound eyes to anticipate what’s coming from behind them.  So, they get squished.  Regularly.  In anyone were to do some research, I wouldn’t be surprised to find “squished in door frame” to be one of the top causes of gecko death.

Much of modern missions literature is occupied with anthropology, sociology, strategy, culture and so forth, rather than the Bible.  And there are not a few who say that having a passion for Jesus is much more important than knowing theology.  Not long ago I listened to a message by Paul Washer that really hit the nail on the head when it came to pointing out this imbalance in modern missions.  Although Washer is perhaps a bit too harsh on contextualization, he makes the great point that missionaries need to be messengers of God’s truth - people who know God and his Word and go to tell people God’s truth.

You can download Paul Washer’s message, “A Biblical Vision and Strategy for Missions” from the website of Heart Cry Missionary Society.

Imagine this. You’re a new missionary, freshly arrived to the field.   After years of preparation, you’re finally here and you can’t wait to start telling people the Gospel.  There is just one slight problem though. The language  You can barely tell people your name.  Even after a six months or a year of language study, it still feels a bit beyond you to give a really good explanation of the Gospel to your neighbor or the lady selling fruit at the market.  But, behold!  What do I see on the literature table at the church camp?  It’s the Four Spiritual Laws - translated in the local language!  That’s the ticket.  You buy a whole stack.  Your neighbor gets one.  The fruit lady gets one.  The guy at the gas station gets one.  Even the Buddhist monk gets one.   Even though you can’t give a good verbal explanation in the local language yet, at least these folks have gotten the Gospel message in a form that they can understand.  Or have they?

The idea that “Jesus died for sinners” is a very hard one to swallow for Thai Buddhists because the idea of substitutionary atonement is absent from their religion.  The Buddha taught that you are alone in the universe and that you must someday pay for your bad karma.  No one can pay off your bad karma debt.  You’re gonna get it eventually - either in this life or some successive life.  Everything bad that happens to a person in their life is the result of some bad karma from their past.  From this point of view, as you might imagine, Jesus dying on the cross looks a lot more like Jesus getting his just due for some bad karma in a previous life rather than the selfless sacrifice of the sinless Son of God.

A fellow missionary recently sent me the lyrics of the song “So Send I You” which for many years had been hailed as the greatest missionary hymn of the twentieth century.  I read through the lyrics and knew that something wasn’t right.  The song goes like this:

SO SEND I YOU

So send I you to labor unrewarded,
To serve unpaid, unloved, unsought, unknown,
To bear rebuke, to suffer scorn and scoffing,
So send I you to toil for me alone.