The grass withers and the flowers fall, but the word of our God stands forever. Isaiah 40:8

 

We were flying at an altitude of about 35,000 feet. I had just picked up a book and started reading. Then I noticed that the bearded youth beside me was reading along with me. He had read the Oriental mystics, the philosophers of the ancient Middle East, and even a few college texts, but he had never seen anything quite like the book I was reading. His interest in my book amused me, but I said nothing and kept reading. Finally, he could stand it no longer and said, “What is this book you are reading?” I replied, “It is a commentary on the last book of the New Testament–the Book of Revelation. It is almost 2,000 years old. In this book God tells us of the future and what is going to happen.” It is like history pre-recorded.

 

What a book—centuries old yet it continues to be the world’s best selling and most widely printed book, surviving its critics and continuing to find a place in our libraries as well as our hearts. What’s the attraction of this book? Simply put, the Bible records the drama of God’s response to humankind’s quest to understand ourselves, and to find out what lies beyond the moment the heart monitor goes flat and we draw our last breath here on earth. So how do I know that the Bible is not just another book?

 

Scholars the world over have in their possession only 13 manuscripts of Plato, the great Greek philosopher. We possess only one manuscript of the annals of Tacitus, the Roman historian who lived during the second century. We have only a few manuscripts of Sophocles, Euripedes, Virgil, and Cicero, yet there are more than 13,000 manuscripts in existence today containing all or part of the Bible. Of these, 4,000 are ancient Greek manuscripts, 8,000 Latin manuscripts, and another 1,000 other ancient versions–making a grand total of 13,000 ancient manuscripts for scholars to study.

 

On many occasions, men have decided to destroy the Bible once and for all. Not liking what this book said, an evil, wicked king by the name of Jehoiakim tried to burn the manuscripts of Prophet Jeremiah. Jeremiah simply rewrote them. In 303 A.D., the Roman emperor Diocletian ordered every Bible to be burned in the Roman Empire, but ten years later he died and his successor, Constantine, made Christianity the faith of the Empire. In the Middle Ages, the institutional church tried to keep the Bible from the common man. William Tyndale had another idea—make the Bible so available and readable that even a plowboy could understand it. He was strangled and his body burned outside of Brussels in 1536, yet he succeeded and unleashed the influence of the Bible in the English speaking world.

 

The French atheist, Voltaire, said, “Christianity shall not survive me by 100 years.” Yet after his death, the British Bible Society bought his home in Geneva and printed an entire edition of the Bible on his press. A hundred years after his death, the British government purchased Codex Sinaiticus, a manuscript dating to 350 A.D., for the sum of $500,000 from the Russian government, and the same year a first edition of Voltaire sold for 11 cents.

 

Are these things coincidence? No other book ever written makes the claim that it will endure forever, but the Bible does. It says, “The word of our God stands forever” (Isaiah 40:8). No wonder it is still with us.

 

Resource reading: Jeremiah 36