Good morning. Today is Thursday, July 30th!

🥳 Congratulations on starting today with God, and thank you for letting us be a part of it.

📖 Verse Of The Day

— Exodus 20:14

🧠 Devotional

In 1631, two of England’s official royal printers, Robert Barker and Martin Lucas, were given one of the most important jobs imaginable: printing new copies of the King James Bible.

Back then, printing wasn’t as simple as pressing a button. Every page had to be assembled by hand. Thousands of tiny metal letters were placed into a frame one piece at a time. It was slow, detailed work, and even one missing word could change the meaning of an entire sentence.

That’s exactly what happened.

When they came to Exodus 20:14, one word was accidentally left out.

The word was “not.”

Instead of printing, “Thou shalt not commit adultery,” the Bible read, “Thou shalt commit adultery.”

One missing word completely reversed one of the Ten Commandments.

The mistake wasn’t noticed until copies had already been printed and distributed. Once King Charles I and the Archbishop of Canterbury learned about it, an investigation was ordered. The printers were fined £300, an enormous amount of money at the time, lost their license to print Bibles, and most of the copies were recalled and destroyed.

Today, only a handful are known to survive. And they became known as the Wicked Bible.

Here’s what makes the story so interesting.

The mistake didn’t become the new version of the Bible. People recognized that something was wrong because it didn’t match the copies of Scripture they already had. They compared the text, realized a word had been omitted, and corrected the printing error.

That should give us confidence in the Bible we read today.

Sometimes people wonder if the Bible has changed so much over the centuries that we can’t really know what it originally said. Stories like this point in the opposite direction. One missing word became famous because it stood out. It didn’t match the biblical text that Christians already knew and had preserved.

No printer or copyist has ever been perfect. But throughout history, God’s Word has been copied, compared, and carefully preserved. That’s why a mistake like this could be recognized instead of becoming the new standard.

Jesus said, “Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will never pass away” (Matthew 24:35). And Isaiah 40:8 reminds us, “The grass withers and the flowers fall, but the word of our God endures forever.”