One daring claim that the Bible makes is that it cannot be destroyed. This claim is made with the same finality as the claim that God is its Author. By this claim of indestructibility, the Bible makes an irreversible committal. It “burns its bridges” behind it. It risks it all. At this point its truth – or its falsehood – can easily be demonstrated.
Prophet Isaiah says, “The Word of our God shall stand
forever.” Isaiah 40:8.
Jesus, during His elaboration of the signs of the
Destruction of Jerusalem, the signs of His coming and the end of the world,
says, “My words shall not pass away.” Matthew 24:35.
John recorded Jesus’ words too, “The Scripture cannot be
broken.” John 10:35
And Paul makes it clear in Hebrews 4:12: “The Word of God is
living and powerful.”
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What answer does history give to this bold claim to
indestructibility?
In old American pioneer days, when a white man was captured
by the Red Indians, the savage warriors would sometimes play with their victim
as a cat plays with a mouse. The captive would be told that he could have his
freedom if he could run between two rows of Indian braves, all of whom were
poised and ready to beat him with stout sticks.
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| alamy.com |
This meant almost certain death, but on rare occasions a man might escape by running like the wind, or dodging like a hare. The grim ordeal was called “running the gauntlet.”
It is a graphic picture of the hazards through which the Bible has passed during the centuries of the Christian era!
Consider a few notable
examples:
In A.D. 303, Diocletian,
an emperor of Pagan Rome, concentrated all the wealth and power of his empire
against the Bible. Christianity was outlawed. Diocletian’s persecution was
probably the most devastating onslaught ever made against a single book.
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| thefamouspeople.com |
All meeting-places of the Christians were demolished; their property was confiscated and their Bibles committed to the flames. A systematic attempt was made to destroy every single copy of the Scriptures in existence. Death was decreed for any person who owned a copy of the Word of God.
After years of ruthless persecution, in which thousands of
Christians and their Bibles perished, Diocletian struck a medal to commemorate
the complete destruction of the Scriptures, and erected a column of triumph
bearing the boastful inscription: “EXTINCTO NOMINE CHRISTIANORUM” (The name of
the Christians has been extinguished).
A.D. 1530. The
State-Church of the Middle Ages, in the days before the beginning of the
Reformation in the 16th Century, wage a relentless warfare against
the free use of the Bible by the common people, in almost all parts of Europe.
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When her efforts to keep the Bible locked away in a dead language(Latin) proved futile, the Church did not hesitate to confiscate and burn the Book.
In 1530, the Bishop of London burned William Tyndale’s
printed English Testaments outside St. Pauls. Tyndale himself was strangled and
burned on the Continent. In the same century, Martin Luther’s translations of
the Scriptures into the tongue of the common German people were publicly
committed to the flames.
A.D. 1750. Here
comes Voltaire, the brilliant and
witty French literary genius, was one of a group of writers who helped prepare
the soil and sow the seeds of the French Revolution.
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| history.com |
Voltaire boasted that he, alone, could demolish the Bible! “I am weary,” he is reported to have said, “of hearing people repeat that twelve fishermen founded Christianity. I will show the world that one Frenchman is sufficient to overthrow it!”
Voltaire was a prodigious writer. The flood of infidel works
that flowed from his pen absorbed the full capacity of a printing-press.
He rashly predicted that in one hundred years the Bible would have ceased to exist, except for a
few copies to be found in museums!
A.D. 1795. Thomas
Paine, the notorious English Free-thinker, fought the Bible with sarcasm
and ridicule. The Age of Reason is
one of his best-known books.
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This arrogant boasts from page 127 of Paine’s book, still finds an echo in some publications of the present day: “I have now gone through the Bible, as a man would go through a wood with an axe on his shoulder, and fell trees. Here they lie, and the priests, if they can, may replant them. They may, perhaps, stick them in the ground, but they will never make them grow.”
MODERN EFFORTS TO
DESTROY THE BIBLE
A.D. 1925. Modern
Atheism perpetuates the age-old tradition of malicious opposition to the
Bible. Since 1925, there has existed in New York a regularly-chartered
organization whose sworn purpose is to promote Atheism in the United States. This
is the “American Association for the
Advancement of Atheism.” (otherwise known as “The 4A’s”).
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| economist.com |
The following is a statement of their aims: “The 4A is here to ensure a complete job in the wrecking of religion. We offer no apology for our tactics. Religion was born of fear, reared by fraud, and kept alive by lies. Falsehood cannot be refined into truth. The supernatural does not exist. There is no God. Religion deserves no more respect than a pile of garbage. It must be destroyed.”
The “4A’s” is but one of the many energetic groups which
exist in every land for the express purpose of undermining faith in, and
eventually destroying, the religion of the Bible. High schools, colleges, and
universities are deliberately chosen as the special targets for such
organizations.
The announced purpose of one of these groups of godless
militants is, “to destroy and mutilate Bibles in hotels, distributed by the
Gideon Society.”
A.D. 1935. Nazi
Germany, a mortal enemy of the Bible, focused all the brains of its
shrewdest thinkers, and all the resources of its vast monopoly in a prolonged
attack upon Christianity and all that it stands for.
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| independent.co.uk |
Said Adolf Hitler: “Providence has ordained that I should be the greatest liberator of humanity. I am freeing man from the dirty and degrading self-mortification of a chimera called conscience and morality...”
The religions are all alike, no matter what they call
themselves. They have no future… Fascism if it likes, may come to terms with
the Church. So shall I. Why not? That will not prevent me from tearing up
Christianity root and branch, and annihilating it in Germany…
Do you really believe
the masses will ever be Christian again? Nonsense! Never again. That tale is
finished. No one will ever listen to it again.”
A.D. 1950.
International Communism, militant, atheistic, is another sworn enemy of the
Bible. It stands at the head of the forces of organized atheism today.
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Vladimir Lenin, high-priest of Communism, coined the slogan: “Religion is the opiate of the people.”
Lounatcharski, one-time Soviet Commissar of Education,
stormed: “We hate Christians. Even the best of them must be regarded as our
worst enemies. They preach love to one’s neighbor and pity, which is contrary
to our principles.
Christian love is a hindrance to the development of the
Revolution. Down with love for one’s neighbor.
What we want is hatred. We must know how to hate, for only at this price
can we conquer the universe.
We have done with kings of the earth; let us deal now with
the kings of the skies. All religions are poison. They intoxicate and deaden
the mind, they will and the conscience. A fight to the death must be declared
upon religion. Our task is to destroy all kinds of religion, all kinds of
morality.”
A.D. 1750 – 1980.
Modern Scientific Criticism. For the past two hundred years, the Bible has
been exposed to the most sustained barrage of hostile, scholarly criticism that
has ever occurred in its history.
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No other book has ever been subjected to such merciless dissection and analysis. Its text; its transmission; its history; its chronology; its scientific allusions; its miracles; its doctrines; its authorship; its composition; its world-view; its Christ, have all been subjected to microscopic examination by expert, critical minds.
THE BIBLE RISES
UNSCATHED FROM THE FIRE
In their search for a symbol of immortality, men have
repeatedly chosen the Phoenix – the indestructible bird of ancient mythology.
From the ashes of every blazing bonfire that was built for
its destruction, this legendary creature rose up again with renewed youth and
vigor.
The Phoenix belongs
to the realm of fiction – but the Bible belongs to the realm of fact. After
every fiery ordeal it rises, unharmed, from the flames of prejudice and hate.
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| biblestudytools.com |
It is the most durable Book on this planet. It outlives its most implacable foes. Diocletian is dead. Voltaire and Paine are forgotten. Lenin and Hitler have followed them into the mists of oblivion. But the Bible lives.
Said one astonished observer: “The Bible’s obituary has been
written hundreds of times, but this Book
has an uncanny habit of turning up at its own funeral!”
In our own century, in spite of all the past and present
hammer-blows of hate, the Bible has broken all records in book-production and
distribution.
No competitor comes within sight of its translation into 1808 languages (1984 total) – twice as many as in
1920 – and this number is increasing steadily.
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| joanmurrayministries.org |
The Wycliffe Bible Translators, for example, have a staff of missionary linguists working among almost 800 different tribes, reducing their previously unwritten languages into written form, in order to give them the Bible in their own languages.
It is unrivaled, also, in sheer volume of output. Its world-circulation
has now reached the staggering total of over
36,000,000 copies (i.e. complete Bibles) per year. That’s a Bible every
second!
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| chinapartner.org |
And when Scripture “portions” or “selections” are added, the total swells to almost 500,000,000 items per year.
Indeed, if all the Bibles and portions that were printed in
one recent year (1984) were gathered together and laid flat on each other, they
would make a pile many times higher than Mount Everest!
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| mnnonline.org |
And this is the Book that Voltaire said would be extinct – a dusty, mildewed museum-relic – in one hundred years after his day!
Conclusion
Suppose there should come to live in our community a man who
had been alive for 1900 years – nearly twice as long as Methusaleh lived!
And suppose we knew of this man that he had been cast into
the sea many a time, but could not be drowned. He had been thrown to the wild
beasts, but they never could devour him. He had been made to drink deadly
poisons of different kinds, but they never did him any harm. He had been bound
with strong chains, and locked up in prisons and dungeons, but he always
managed to shake off the chains and get out of the dungeons.
He had often been hung till his enemies thought him dead,
but when they cut him down he sprang to his feet, and walked away again, as fit
and well as ever! Hundreds of times they had burnt him at stake, till there
seemed to be nothing left of him; but the fires were no sooner out than he
leaped up from the ashes, as strong and vigorous as he was before.
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He had been shot at, and stabbed, and cut to pieces, but the pieces came together again, like little drops of quick-silver. His wounds healed up at once, and he was none the worse for all this hacking and cutting. How amazing it would be to look on such an indestructible man!
Would it be a great wonder to find him alive and unharmed
after all that he had passed through? It would be a great wonder, indeed!
Yet this is just the way in which the Bible has been treated.
It has been burned, and chained, and put
in prison, and buried alive, and torn to pieces, and thrown into the sea, and
yet it has never been destroyed. Here it is still, the same pure and
precious Bible that it was nineteen hundred years ago!
What is the secret of the Bible’s immortality? There is only
one rational answer: The Bible has survived the storms of the ages because the indestructible life of God is
in it, just as it claims!
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