Nana Yaw Aidoo
The Bible is a very ancient book. Its earliest books were written about 3500 years ago. Most writings die a natural death after about 50 years. However, after more than three millennia, the Bible continues to exert its benevolent influence. This character of the Bible was spoken of by some of its writers. Take, for example, Isaiah. About 2700 years ago, he wrote,
The voice said, Cry. And he said, What shall I cry? All flesh is grass, and all the goodliness thereof is as the flower of the field: The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: because the spirit of the LORD bloweth upon it: surely the people is grass. The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: but the word of our God shall stand for ever (Isa. 40:6-8).
The prediction that God’s word shall stand forever tells us why, after all these years, the Bible is still here. You might ask, “Aren’t there books that have come down to us from the time of Moses?” There are. However, if those books received the kind of persecution, hatred, and concerted effort to wipe from the face of the earth that the Bible received, I am certain they wouldn’t have survived. For 1000s of years, men have tried their best to destroy the Bible and wipe it from the face of the earth, and yet the Bible somehow has managed to survive all these efforts. Not only has the Bible survived, there are more copies of the Bible today than any other extant ancient book.
I want to call attention to one such attack by a Roman emperor named Diocletian. He was the emperor who ruled just before Constantine, ruling from A.D. 284-305. In A.D. 303 and 304, he passed four laws, which made Christianity illegal and sparked the most severe and widespread persecution of Christians in the Roman Empire. One of these laws ordered the destruction of all church buildings and Bibles and the loss of civil rights for all Christians.
To put this into context, this was a man who was ruling the world and thus had at his disposal all the power to mete out the worst of punishments to any who disobeyed his edicts. Little wonder, then, that in A.D. 304 he inscribed these words at his palace: “The Christian religion is destroyed, and the worship of the gods restored.” O, bless his heart. Arthur Pink was right to wonder,
…what the emperor would think if he returned to this earth today and found that more had been written about the Bible than about any other thousand books put together, and that the Bible which enshrines the Christian faith is now translated into more than four hundred languages and is being sent out to every part of the earth (42)!
Friends, no other book in the history of the world has been singled out for this kind of persecution. The Bible was seemingly overthrown in Diocletian’s day, yet it “arose from the dead” and came back even stronger. Diocletian is dead and has been for about 1700 years. Today, he is virtually unknown beyond the walls of university history classes. Yet, the Bible is the most popular, the most read, the most owned, and the most purchased book in the history of books. The Bible’s survival is as Arthur Pink noted, “the most startling miracle connected with it” (42). This must only mean one thing. Isaiah spoke the truth when he declared, “The word of our God shall stand forever.”
Work Cited
Pink, Arthur W. The Divine Inspiration of the Bible. Bible Truth Depot, 1917.
