Ankerberg Show

Narrator: Today, we will take you to Peru, high up in the Andes Mountains of South America, to where the Inca Empire existed and spoke the Quechua language. Years later, a Quechua Indian named Romulo became a Christian and began to translate the Bible that he loved into his own language, which is now spoken by over 21 million people in six different countries.

Morgan Jackson knew Romulo personally and will tell us how he finally translated his language on this edition of the John Ankerberg Show.

Dr. John Ankerberg: Welcome to our program. I'm John Ankerberg, and my guest is Morgan Jackson from Faith Comes By Hearing. We're talking today about people that have given their lives to get the word of God to people and lead them to Christ. Their stories are fascinating and it's very emotional for Morgan because they have become personal friends.

We're talking about audio Bibles as well because this is a very unique machine. They're tough little machines that actually hold the Bible. You have put the languages—there are 7,140 languages in the world. How many of the languages have you put on the audio Bible of the entire Bible?

Morgan Jackson: Well, today we have over 2,700 languages that Wycliffe Bible Societies, Pioneer Bible Translators, and Seed Company have translated. Then Faith Comes By Hearing has 15 national teams that go out and will spend up to two months in a village, in the jungle, or in the mountains.

They convert a mud hut into a studio and then they'll do a drama recording. We'll try to take 15 to 24 voices. They'll give us 180 voice parts, and then we add sound effects and music.

Dr. John Ankerberg: You come in and you just give this to people that have never had a Bible in their own language. By the way, how many people in the world right now do not have a Bible in their language?

Morgan Jackson: There are about 2,000 languages left that have nothing now. When you and I first started talking, it was 4,000. But those 2,000 languages only represent 3% of the world's population.

God has created a storehouse of scripture where we have scripture in the mother tongue for 96.5% of the world—at least one gospel. So Faith Comes By Hearing, our audio scriptures, will provide scripture for about 90% of the world's population. We have it in their mother tongue.

Dr. John Ankerberg: And you're working with over 2 million churches that are nationals. They're the ones that are bringing it in. We're doing this program because they're asking for a ton more of these audio Bibles. But give them a sample of what happens when all they do is press a button.

Audio Bible: For God so loved the world that He gave His only Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life.

Morgan Jackson: This device can be loud enough that 1,000 people can hear it. It's generally recharged from the sun. The hand crank allows you to charge it; ten minutes of cranking provides a charge.

My dad says it's an end-time gift; it's an eternal gift. Because 10 to 15 years later, you go back into the village and it still plays. So people, week upon week, day upon day, can hear the word of God in their own language.

Dr. John Ankerberg: We want to talk about one of the first people that you met that really got you going. His name is Romulo Sauñe. Tell me the story of how you met because he was a descendant of the Quechua Indians, the Incas, and their language was Quechua. It has evolved into 28 different languages. Somebody had to translate a Bible into their language. Tell the story.

Morgan Jackson: In 1988, I was in my office. Faith Comes By Hearing was the largest producer of audio Bibles in the world. We were working with about 50,000 churches in the US every year, getting Americans who weren't reading the Bible to listen to the Bible in their cars and homes.

We were using about 20 million cassettes; some of us remember those days. A ministry called CHIEF, which was representing Native Americans, brought Romulo Sauñe to my office. I gave him a tour.

What I didn't realize is that as we were walking, his level of joy and excitement was increasing until we came back to the front. What I didn't recognize is that we were an absolute answer to his prayers because he saw all your equipment for recording.

Dr. John Ankerberg: Right. He had translated the Bible into Ayacucho Quechua. He had married the daughter, Donna Sauñe, of a translator who had translated the Bible in another language. He had translated it for his own people. He had to learn Greek and Hebrew and English.

Morgan Jackson: They then had taken the Bibles—Open Doors had helped them at this time—and smuggled Bibles up into the mountain communities because you had the Shining Path, the Sendero Luminoso, which was a Maoist terrorist group in Peru that was killing the pastors and the Indians up in the mountains.

They had taken these Bibles and smuggled them in. He had gone back up into these mountains and found them hanging from the rafters to ward away evil spirits. What he discovered was that nobody could read it.

Dr. John Ankerberg: It was tonal and the only literacy was in Spanish, so it didn't transfer over. His own mother couldn't read the words that he had translated. He had recorded it on these big reel-to-reels and nobody knew what to do with it.

Nobody had any money to do anything. It cost you $70 to $80 to have a set of cassettes and a cassette player. They couldn't afford a $3 Bible. How could they afford $70 to $80 for a single person to get the player?

Morgan Jackson: Right, and then you had to have batteries because there was no electricity. He was looking at me and he started explaining this. I said, "Well, how many Quechuas are there?" He said, "Well, there's about 21 million of us speaking 28 different languages. We're the largest Indian group in all of the Americas." He said the Ayacucho Quechuas are 2.1 million people.

I was trying to figure out what I was going to do. What was he asking of me? He said, "Well, I've recorded the Bible." I said, "Where is it?" He said, "Well, it's on reel-to-reels in a missionary's garage in Los Angeles." I picked up the phone, dialed the guy, and said, "Do you have these?" He said, "Yes." I said, "If I'll pay the FedEx charges, will you ship them to me?" And he did. The next day we got them.

At that time, we didn't know John Ankerberg. We didn't know your viewers or donors, and we had never raised any money. We didn't know what to do. So we did the age-old bake sales. All of our staff got together—there were over 200 of us—and we were selling cookies and things, and we raised enough money.

Dr. John Ankerberg: I remember when I met you and I said, "Are you on television?" "No." "Are you on radio?" "No." I said, "How are you getting the word out?" You said, "Well, we're doing bake sales." I said, "Well, you know, we have a large world. It's going to take a lot of bake sales to get this out."

I said that three days later from then, I wanted our people to hear this story because I had traveled to all the mission fields around the world before I met you. When you told me what you were doing with these audio Proclaimers, I said, "That's the magic ticket and we need to help this person."

I introduced you to all of the major networks and some of the top Christian guys that are on TV who are my friends. You followed up on it, but nobody has ever invited you to come on to tell this story.

Morgan Jackson: But you have to understand something. My dad is a George Muller guy. He prays and God provides. He believed that God wanted us to be on TV somewhere to tell the story. But he was afraid of TV because it also has a bad reputation.

He went and researched your website and researched you. When you offered to make us known, my dad said, "John Ankerberg is the one person, him and Darlene, that I have absolute confidence in, that we can work with without any concern." I believe you were simply an answer to prayer, and the others turned us down or didn't accept us because God wanted those that you know to accept it.

Dr. John Ankerberg: Anyway, I just want to say thank you to our donors. I just believed this worked because when I was in Ethiopia, a missionary was dropping me off and he said, "This is a place where they've never had the gospel. I'm going to do the translation and you speak to them."

I was like 17 years old and I thought, "What am I going to say to these people?" They had never heard anything and they had never had a Bible. They knew nothing. I thought, "Lord, help." The missionary said, "Go." We had the village in a circle.

One thing I know about Ethiopia is if you look up—there's no electricity out there—you can see the stars brightly. I said, "You probably wondered who made all of these stars and how beautiful it is." Astronomers say that there are 100 billion trillion stars up there and God knows each of them by name. God is that big and He loves you.

I had their attention. I said, "He sent His son to come and He was murdered on a cross. He did it and all the bad things you've ever done were picked up and placed on Him. He paid the price for them and He holds out a gift." I said, "You all know what a gift is; somebody wants to give you something."

But what do you have to do? You have to take it, otherwise, it's not yours. I said, "You can take it by just praying saying, 'God, forgive me of the bad things I've done and I give my life to you. I want to follow Jesus.' Pray with me." So they prayed.

Then I thought, "I haven't got a Bible to give to these guys. There is no Bible to give to these guys. They don't have a Bible in their language." Where do they go from here? They might have invited Jesus into their life, but the fact is there was no way for them to go on. When you came in and told me about these, I thought of that story and I thought, "We need this in that village in Ethiopia."

Now, Romulo is coming along. He already knows all of this and you're catching on.

Morgan Jackson: I had no clue, John. At that time we were working in the US; we had Spanish and English. We had just begun to feel God calling us. Wycliffe had come to us and told stories about how they had translated the Bible, but Bibles would come back with no pages. They'd want a new Bible and they'd say, "Well, where did the pages go?"

And they said, "Well, pastor, we don't know how to read and you told us man cannot live by bread alone, so we tear a page out every day, put it in the soup, and eat it." In Nigeria, they would buy four Bibles and put them in the cement.

Romulo's people were hanging them from the rafters to ward away evil spirits, but they couldn't read them. As Romulo was talking to me about his 2.1 million people, I was thinking, "How am I going to get an audio Bible to 2.1 million people?" I was thinking of the dollars and I thought there was no way—$180 million, no way. Then I thought, "What about families?" So I asked him how big the families were.

Pretty soon he saw where I was going and he said, "No, Morgan, no, we're oral communities. We make decisions communally." A lot of oral communities don't even have a word for I, me, or mine; it's us, we, our. He said, "We come together as a village every week and decide who's going to harvest the potatoes and who's going to go to the market."

He said, "If you provide one of these, the whole village will come together to listen." He said, "We'll sell a sheep to buy the cassette player. We'll sell some potatoes to buy the batteries if you'll provide the cassettes." So through our bake sales, we raised enough money for 300 sets. We shipped them down to Lima.

It took three days to get a plane to go up to Ayacucho. This area was then dominated by the Luminosos; people were afraid. Word had gone out that the audio Bible was coming. Seven hundred villages had sent an elder or a pastor, many of whom had traveled three to five to seven days to get to Ayacucho.

Because it took three days for them to get the audio Bibles up there, these guys were sleeping in caves and in the fields for fear of the Luminosos. The audio Bibles came and the joy was immense. But there were only 300 and there were 700 people. We had this joy of recognizing the excitement and the sorrow of knowing there wasn't enough.

But when these men went back over their mountains and up into the passes and the valleys, when they came to the village, a village bell would be rung and the whole village would gather—100 to 300 people. They would take the audio Bible out and everybody for the first time in their history heard the word of God in their own mother tongue through Romulo's voice.

Over the next four years, we started getting stories out of the mountains. We started trying to raise more money and sending more audio Bibles. We were hearing stories about one village that would get a set and they would plant 31 churches.

You think, "How are they doing that?" Well, there were 31 cassettes. What was happening is when they came communally, the grandfathers and the uncles from other villages would come to help harvest the potatoes or shear the sheep. This village would be listening to the Bible every night.

They would hear scripture for the first time and they would demand that they bring it to their village. So they would get a cassette; they were rotating the cassettes. They called them "blank villages." These were villages that had no church and no believers but were hearing the word of God.

Because nobody has heard the Bible in their language, the whole village comes. It's not like one person or two; the whole village comes and they hear it, they listen, and they talk about it. When they're out grinding corn, they're talking about what the word of God did. Villages are coming to faith in Christ. Not only that, they're being discipled because they're hearing from Matthew to Revelation.

When Romulo came, he talked to me about how the pastors were being targeted. His grandfather was one of the leading voices. When he had come, two weeks before, his grandfather had been surrounded at 15,000 feet in the mountains in his village.

Men came on horses, knocked him down, and got off. They told him, "You're preaching the gospel. If you'll deny Christ, we won't cut off your fingers." They cut one finger off at a time. With each finger, they would say, "If you'll deny Christ, we won't," until all of his fingers were gone.

Romulo said then they scalped him. He still would not deny Christ. So they said, "Well, with your tongue, you preach the gospel." They pried his mouth open and they sawed his tongue out of his mouth. Then he said while his grandfather was still living, they held him down.

As you know, in the Inca tradition, they used to take the heart out and eat it alive. That's what they did. While it was beating, they still ate. He said it was diabolical. But they killed his grandfather.

Romulo and I became close friends. He taught me about the oral community. He taught me that we don't have to provide an audio Bible for every person, just one for the community. In fact, that's the way the scripture has always been heard.

In '92, my brother Clay and I were in South Africa and a call came in. My wife had got a call from Donna Sauñe and Romulo had been killed. In the village where he lived, his widowed grandmother and the people there had been bombed at night by the Shining Path. They were cold and without food.

He and some of his family had tried to sneak in to bring support to the family. On the way back out, somebody had alerted the Luminosos. They had stopped them on the road, taken them out, and then killed him. His father was with him and pleaded with them to take his place. They said, "No, we're going to let you watch your son die."

Mary called me and said, "Donna has called; Romulo is dead. The Shining Path has killed him." It was like an arrow pierced my heart. My brother knelt. He's the engineer; he's the one that helped create the Proclaimer. He began to pray, but it was not a prayer—it was a declaration of war.

He just said, "Devil, you have made a mistake and you have crossed a line. We will not stop until we have recorded the Bible in every language." The death of Romulo and Romulo's blood literally created a covenant in our ministry at that time.

His story is a powerful story to us because it was his call and need for the audio scriptures that caused us now to have 2,700 languages recorded. We will record scripture and translate scripture orally in every language.

Dr. John Ankerberg: How many audio Bibles do we still need to reach the people?

Morgan Jackson: There are 840 languages in the Americas and 500 in the Amazon basin alone—100 that they haven't ever done, unreached tribes. Right now, we need tens of thousands throughout the mountains and the jungles. We need 40,000 just in the Amazon alone.

For the Quechua people throughout the mountains, we've been sending thousands. But what happens is just like the one that planted 31, every one of those churches wants their own. The Proclaimer takes the place of the cassette and it takes away the cost of the battery.

A single Proclaimer will reach, on average, 90 people in Latin America. 45 of them will be existing believers who have never been able to hear scripture in their own language. They'll hear it, they'll become discipled, and 45 will become believers.

Your donors have been providing for the last 12 years. Every time I've talked, I've been blown away. My heart has been encouraged that you have a passion for people who have never heard the word of God, who don't have a Bible, or who, when they get a Bible, can't read it. These are the least, the last, and the lost, and you've helped a lot. If you would continue to help, I think Romulo would be absolutely rejoicing.

Dr. John Ankerberg: If you give an audio Proclaimer, God's going to look at you as being the one that sent the preacher, and people will accept Christ because you made it possible for them to hear the word of God. I'm asking you to think about giving one, two, or three of these audio Proclaimers to reach people who have no Bible and know nothing about Jesus. The Lord will reward you someday.

Next week, we're going to take you to Cuba. Lots of stuff is happening in Cuba and you're going to want to hear that program. Thanks for joining us this week and please stay tuned for a moment because I have a personal word for you right now.

Can you imagine not having access to a Bible? Approximately 70% of people worldwide learn primarily through audible communication, meaning that around 5.7 billion people need to hear the gospel to understand and accept it. Shockingly, over 1 billion people still do not have access to God's Word in a format that they can understand.

Would you help provide audio Bibles to those who need to hear God's Word in their own heart language? If so, please visit JAshow.org/audiobibles or call 1-800-805-3030 to send an audio Bible today. That's JAshow.org/audiobibles or call 1-800-805-3030.

If you're in Canada, please visit JAshow.ca/audiobibles or call 1-866-746-5803. Thank you for listening to the John Ankerberg Show. We're a listener-supported ministry, and your gifts help us continue to share the gospel with millions of people worldwide.

To learn more about our resources or to support our mission, visit JAshow.org or please call us at 1-800-805-3030. If you're in Canada, please visit JAshow.ca or call us at 1-866-746-5803. You can also subscribe to us on YouTube. Your support makes a difference in spreading God's Word.