Daily Inspiration Quote by William Tyndale

Tyndale is arguing for a Bible that operates on two timelines at once: the immediate, bodily, “carnal” world of events, and the delayed, symbolic “spiritual” world that only snaps into focus later. The line works because it doesn’t simply defend allegory; it defends suspense. Meaning is not a static property of the text but something that ripens in history, then becomes legible only after the fact. That retroactive clarity is the point: prophecy isn’t a parlor trick, it’s a structure that trains readers to see pattern and providence in ordinary narrative.

The subtext is polemical. Tyndale, the great English translator, is writing in a Reformation moment when authority over interpretation is fiercely contested. By emphasizing that spiritual signification can remain “never known till the thing be done,” he quietly undercuts the smug certainty of any gatekeeper who claims exhaustive mastery of scripture. He makes room for plain readers to encounter the text without needing a priestly decoding apparatus, while still insisting that scripture has depth beyond the literal. It’s a democratizing move that doesn’t flatten the Bible into simple moral lessons; it turns it into a layered archive whose fullest meaning emerges in Christ “and his kingdom.”

Context matters: Tyndale’s translation project and eventual execution made interpretation a life-and-death question. This sentence justifies reading the Old Testament as typology pointing to Christ, but it also justifies Tyndale himself: translating into English isn’t reckless novelty if scripture is designed to be understood progressively, in time, by people living through its unfolding.