Bible Man

Thinking back, I have always been a Bible man.

I once remember being quizzed by our church minister. I was probably not even converted by that time. “What do you believe?” he asked. “I believe in the Bible,” was my decided reply. An unmistakable frown of concern crossed his face. I have often wondered about it since. He surely wouldn’t have thought that I treated the Bible as God. Obviously, what I meant was, “My faith is based on the reliability of the Bible”.

So why would he have looked so troubled? Maybe his whole training led him to believe that there were flaws in the Bible, as in any other “human” book. He would have been warned that there were naive “fundamentalists” out there hoodwinking others into believing that the Bible was infallible. This supposed menace needed putting straight, along with the victims of such warped ideas.

This is guesswork, of course. The minister didn’t say why he looked worried. He may simply have found my prompt and clear answer to his question rather disconcerting. He would not want to let any faulty thinking I had go unchallenged. On the other hand, was it the right time to be putting roadblocks in the way of a young man starting out on Christian service? It was a dilemma for the clergyman, and no mistake.

It seems I carried on being a thorn in the side of the Bible’s liberal critics. I understand that, many years later, my old arch-liberal ex-college tutor commented ruefully, “I never was able to bring Timothy Demore round to my way of thinking”. I continue to believe today that the Bible is on a different plane from ordinary human writings.

I’ve been exposed in my time to the whole sweep of French literature. French is the language with probably the longest continuous literary output of any in the world. Yet nothing in it compares with the challenge, the riches and the truthfulness of the Bible. A single verse may say more than an entire book of secular writing. What book is there on earth that can communicate more than these twenty-four words:

“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16 ESV)?

The work of the Gideons worldwide is greatly to be admired. This long-established organisation is named for the Biblical character Gideon, who won victory over the Midianites in Judges chapter 7. It is dedicated to distributing Bibles round the world. The count, amazingly, is now fast approaching two billion!

Sadly, this worthy cause finds itself battling opposition where there was none before. Schools, hospitals and other organisations are now frequently timid about the placing of Bibles on their premises and bold in placing obstacles in front of the Gideons. Sometimes opposition gives way in answer to much prayer and persistence, sometimes not.

The tragedy of this opposition is that lives may be lost that would otherwise have been saved! There are frequent stories of suicidal people in hotel rooms who have picked up the Gideon Bible and been transformed. One man climbed up onto the window sill in his room and prepared to leap to his death. He steadied himself by putting his hand on a wardrobe. That hand came down on a Bible which was perched up there. Reading God’s word, the man turned away from his intended self-destruction and accepted Christ.

Surely a book by which God spares even one life, for time and eternity, should be allowed into the spaces where people gather.