One of the best personality profiles I've read this year in the New York Times appeared in its Oct. 1 issue.

It was on 72-year-old Viktor Sukhodrev, a Russian man who for three decades was the Kremlin's chief language interpreter, including at superpower summit meetings and other occasions involving seven American presidencies, ranging from Eisenhower to George Bush Sr.

"Throughout the cold war, Mr. Sukhodrev was there in the middle—low-key, reliable, professional, the English-language voice of every Soviet leader from Krushchev to Gorbachev," writes Seth Mydans in the Times article. ". . . He was present but not present, emptying himself of ego, slipping into the skin of the man who was speaking, feeling his feelings, saying his words."

According to the article, Viktor first learned English as a young boy living in London during the 1940s. His mother, who was separated from his father, was a member of the Soviet Trade Mission, and while she was at work during the day, six-year-old Viktor would tag along on the walking route of a postman who lived upstairs.

"It was from the postman and his wife, he said, that he learned the British manners that gave him his special grace as an interpreter," reports the Times article. ". . . When at the age of 8 he entered the Soviet Embassy school in London, he found himself translating for school officials on public occasions, and he liked the feeling."

Viktor says of this time, "That is when I really believed, and never lost that belief, that when I grew up I was going to be the man in the middle. I was going to be an interpreter. And if I was going to do that, I felt, I was going to be damn good. Maybe the best."

He returned to Moscow at age 12 and later went on to graduate from the city's Institute of Foreign Languages, quickly climbing to the highest level of the Kremlin.

"He found that the interpreter, as cool as he may seem, is often sweating much harder than the men on either side," writes Mydans of the Times. "Here at the pinnacle, where every nuance has a nuance, the mind is a constantly whirring computer, cleared of thought, making instant decisions."

Most importantly, there's no margin for error on the job, as Viktor testifies: "An interpreter at that level cannot—not 'should not'—simply cannot make a mistake. He cannot. No way. Well, if he did he'd be out and rightly so."

Even though Viktor is now retired, living with his wife, Inga, in their country home near Moscow, he says translating has become so much a part of him over the years that he can't seem to stop unconsciously translating even when reading or watching TV. When he witnesses an inexact translation made by a lesser interpreter on television, for example, he says wants to shout out, "No! No!"

The most fascinating part of the Times profile, for me, was learning that one of Viktor's pastimes is to take his English Bible (in this case, a Gideon Bible he stole from a hotel room on a trip to the U.S. with Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, "breaking both Christian and Communist commandments," as the Times article puts it) and randomly open it to compare passages with a Russian translation of the Bible.

"It's been stunning!" Viktor's quoted saying. "I've been stunned by the magnificence of the translation. I feel that the Bible is perhaps the greatest work of translation that ever appeared in the world."

As the Times article revealed, "The Bible may have held other hidden treasures for him. Formally, he was an atheist like everyone else in the Kremlin. But, perhaps, not alone, he said, 'I was not an unbeliever, let's say.' "

What made me suddenly think of this article, which I clipped from the newspaper to save in my files, was a sermon by my pastor just this past Sunday in which he examined issues of preservation and translation of God's Word through history.

As my pastor, Richard Jordan (Shorewood Bible Church, Rolling Meadows, Ill.), pointed out, one the keys to the Protestant Reformation was the popular belief that God not only wrote His Word and preserved it through time, but that He intended for it to be translated into the languages of the nations.

While there are many who either say that Scriptural authority lies only in the "original manuscripts," or in the extant Hebrew and Greek manuscripts, and therefore only language scholars can interpret the "inerrant" Scriptures, Jordan showed through Scripture itself how this is simply not the case.

"God's Word is designed to be translated into the languages of the people reading it and when someone says you can't successfully, perfectly translate from one language to another, you can say back, 'Well, God did!' " said Jordan in his sermon.

Among the many examples Jordan gave, from both the Old and New Testaments, was one, in particular, from Matthew 22 that he says "kept him from becoming a modernist" when he studied the Bible as a young college student under liberal theology professors at Mobile College (affiliated with the Southern Baptist denomination and now known as the University of Mobile).

"I had a professor who tried to convince me that Jesus Christ was a human, not God—that he made mistakes—and that the Word of God was not the Word of God, it just contained the Word of God when it spoke to my heart; what's called neo-orthodoxy," Jordan revealed.

Fortunately, though, he says he was able to see through this deception by looking at what Jesus Christ said in Matt. 22:31-32, which reads, "But as touching the resurrection of the dead, have ye not read that which was spoken unto you by God, saying, I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob? God is not the God of the dead, but of the living."

In this passage, Jesus Christ quotes a portion of Exodus 3:15, which reads, "And God said moreover unto Moses, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, The LORD God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, hath sent me unto you: this is my name for ever, and this is my memorial unto all generations."

The point is nobody in Christ's day could have still been reading from the original manuscript, or autograph, and yet Jesus Christ was certain He and those He was talking to possessed the inspired Word of God.

"Exodus 3 was written by Moses some 1,500 years before this and those Pharisees didn’t have the original copy," explains Jordan. "If they had had the original manuscript, you can bet they'd have had it in a museum somewhere under glass, with guards around it, where everybody could look at it. They had copies and yet when they had the copy, Jesus said, 'You've got that which was spoken to you by God' and, by the comparing of the verses, He's showing that's what inspiration is."

When inspiration is discussed in the context of the Bible, it means the exact words God the Holy Spirit chose to reveal in written form for everyone to read, not just what He gave orally to a certain group of people at a certain time in history.

It's the very words on the page, not the overall message, or the general thought or idea, or the context when it "strikes an individual's heart." It's the exact words God chooses to convey to say, "These are my words to communicate my thinking to you."

As my pastor points out, it's a fascinating thing to consider that in the time of Christ, Greek was a universal language (the New Testament was written in Greek) and today we have English as a universal language.

"The English language, in its structure, in the way it works in its grammar and in the way the words are formed and the ideas are communicated, is comparable to the accuracy, structure and power of the Greek language," says Jordan. "There are some reasons those languages became universal and it has nothing really to do with the power of the Greek empire or the British empire, because in the first century, the Greek empire had been done away. The Roman empire with its Latin was the world's empire and yet Greek was still the universal language of commerce."

When scholars and seminary-types say no one can really understand the Bible unless they know the Greek language, they're really just pushing the false Roman Catholic notion that, "Well, if the priest can read it but I can't, then I'll have to go to him for all my information."

"Isn't that what Rome's been saying for over 1,500 years?" says Jordan. "So it's really just another sneaky Protestant popery idea and not what the Scripture gives you to understand."

As another great example of God Himself translating languages for the reader, Jordan points to Acts 22, which makes clear at the beginning of the chapter that Paul, who was in the process of giving a speech, "spake in the Hebrew tongue to them."

"Paul speaks all the way down to verse 21 in Hebrew and yet there's never been a copy of the Book of Acts ever discovered that was in Hebrew," says Jordan. "They're all in Greek. That means God the Holy Spirit took what Paul said in Hebrew, and translated the passage into Greek, and said it’s the 'infallible and inerrant Word of God.' "

An Old Testament example in Exodus 10 is when Moses and his brother Aaron approach Egypt's Pharaoh and order him, "Let my people go."

The language was recorded in Hebrew in the Bible even though Moses and Pharaoh spoke to each other in Egyptian.

"When Moses wrote in that chapter in Hebrew something that he actually said to Pharaoh in Egyptian, that's called a translation," says Jordan. "Moses was the pen for God the Holy Spirit, who really wrote the words, so He's the one who translated it from Egyptian to Hebrew and said, 'It's the Word of God.' "

Obviously, the Bible tells us that when something is properly translated from one language to another, God still considers it His Word.

As one final note on all this, my pastor told of a guy who's been in Venezuela, translating the Bible into the languages of tribes people who don't even have a written language, but was recently expelled from the country.

"Families in Bolivia, too, have spent their whole lifetime going into a tribe in the jungle in the hills that had no written language and going in and learning the language and developing a grammar and developing a written language for them so they could then translate God's Word into their language," says Jordan. "We should never fail to appreciate the heritage of the men and women who have gone before us to put the Bible into our language."