There’s no disputing the fact that much of humanity over thousands of years has had a love affair with the Bible. It’s due, of course, to their love affair with the God of the Bible. The Bible is viewed like a prolonged love-letter from the One Whom their soul loves. These lovers of the Book revere it as coming directly from God, through man, by the process of divine inspiration. This conviction results in man loving and obeying its contents, being edified and encouraged by them, enlightened and warned by them, comforted and admonished by them. But, their positive responses to the Bible are surely not universal. The old Book has had, and still has, its detractors and deniers.
No literary work has been so vilified, discredited, depreciated, demeaned, ridiculed, rejected, mocked, banned, and burned as the Bible. Its pages have been ripped from its binding and fed to flames the world over. Men have forfeited their life for smuggling Bibles into areas where it is forbidden. Printers of it were imprisoned and teachers and preachers of it burned at the stake by those who hated it. Yet, printing presses worldwide continue turning out untold volumes in multiple languages, translations, and versions. The more man attempts to destroy the Bible, the more it proliferates.
This alone does not prove the Bible is the Word of God, but it certainly does point to that. How so? Well, does it not stand to reason that if the Bible did originate from God, and it was His purpose that it be His desired revelation made available to humanity, don’t you think God’s preservation and indestructability of the Bible would be part of the plan? Could the God of heaven be thwarted in realizing His desired intent that His Word would not fulfill His objective? The very idea that God wished to provide the Bible for humanity but is powerless to prevent man from destroying it and eliminating it is utterly preposterous. Such would call for a very puny deity, hardly worthy of the name “God.”
God surely must have been amused when Voltaire, the famous French philosopher and skeptic, announced in the 18th century, “One hundred years from now the Bible and Christianity will be extinct.” Well, all that happened was that Voltaire became extinct, while the Bible remained hale and hearty, continuing to provide the glorious Gospel that Christ died for our sin, even Voltaire’s. And to add to what must have been God’s amusement, the very house in which Voltaire lived was purchased by the Geneva Bible Society fifty years after his famous quote. And what was the purpose of the Geneva Bible Society? To print Bibles. God has both a sense of humor and a puncheon for irony, would you not say?
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