With an Old Man?

It hasn’t always been the case that the Bible is freely available.

And those who worked to make it so were often persecuted ruthlessly by the church of their day. The ruling church of his day tried to have Bible translator John Wycliffe condemned to the stake. During one of the several occasions he was put on trial for his beliefs, he said to his accusers, “With whom are you contending? With an old man on the brink of the grave? No! With truth —truth which is stronger than you and will overcome you.”* Wycliffe wasn’t burned at the stake while he was alive, but forty years after he died, his body was exhumed by the church, and his remains were burned. His ashes were cast into the River Swift, which flows a little more than a quarter mile south of St. Mary’s church in Lutterworth —where Wycliffe ministered— before emptying into the Avon River.† Wycliffe made a powerful point.

God’s Word is truth, and God’s truth will triumph.

Critics of the Bible have many times proclaimed its imminent demise. German philosopher and atheist Friedrich Nietzsche famously declared that “Gott ist tot” (God is dead). While a philosophical statement rather than a theological position, Nietzsche’s 1882 proclamation expressed his view that philosophy had demonstrated not that a living God had died but that governments no longer needed to be organized around the idea of the existence of God. Nietzsche claimed God was no longer needed as the source of morality or order.‡ The famous English scientist Stephen Hawking had an IQ of 160, yet he was an avowed atheist. He said belief in heaven was a “fairy story for people afraid of the dark.”§ Hawking died in 2018. While he believed there is no God, what is incontrovertible is that there is now no Stephen Hawking. As Isaiah wrote, God’s Word stands forever. Stand on the Bible, and you will stand forever too.