Christ’s Words Shall Never Pass Away (5)

The church of Jesus Christ confesses that the Holy Scriptures are a wonder. Almost 2,000 years ago, Jesus uttered these famous words: "Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away" (Matt. 24:35), and His words have not passed away. You are a witness to this marvel, the preservation of God’s Word, OT and NT.

This is all the more remarkable in that the Bible has frequently and fiercely been attacked. In the fourth century, Diocletian, a Roman emperor, ordered all Bibles to be handed over to the civil authorities to be destroyed. The so-called Enlightenment of the eighteenth century disparaged the Scriptures as a book written in a "pre-rational" age for childish or adolescent man who had not yet attained to maturity. Higher criticism of the Bible entered the mainstream in the nineteenth century. Yet even then the nineteenth century became the century of Bible Societies translating the Scriptures into many languages and distributing them all around the world. Today there are more translations and copies of the Bible than any other book. After 2,000 years of desperate efforts, the unbelieving world has still failed to prove one error in God’s Word.

We must thank God for the Bible and its preservation. It is rightly said that verbal inspiration is only a significant doctrine if verbal preservation is also true. Without the preservation of the Bible, the church would be unable to fulfil the great commission. How could we go into all the world to preach the (pure) gospel if the Scriptures are hopelessly corrupted? Moreover, the preservation of the Bible and the preservation of the church are closely tied together. Without the Bible, there would be no church, for the Word—preached and read—creates the church. On the other hand, without the church there would be no one (humanly speaking) to preserve the Bible.

We can be sure that our Bible (Authorized Version) is a trustworthy and faithful translation of God’s inerrant and preserved Word—a Word breathed out by the Spirit in Hebrew and Greek thousands of years ago. Christians have nothing to fear from unbelieving textual critics or new discoveries of ancient manuscripts. For Jesus said, "Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away."