Former Blackout Artist

…did not come about by coincidence.

Sometimes I think we overlook just how amazing it is that we can pick up the Bible and read it for ourselves.

Most of us have multiple copies in our homes. We can pull one up on our phones in mere seconds. We can read it in our own language whenever we want. But when you stop and think about everything that had to happen for that Bible to end up in your hands, it’s pretty incredible!

And more than that – it wasn’t a coincidence. It didn’t come from some sort of “Big Bang.” Long before Jesus was born, God was already preparing the world for the coming of Christ and for the spread of the gospel.

Let’s think about the Old Testament. God chose Israel and gave them His Word. But over time (because of wars, exile, and other events), Jewish people ended up living all over the known world. What at that time looked like a tragedy was something God would use for a greater purpose.

Then came the Greeks. When Alexander the Great conquered much of the known world, the Greek language spread everywhere. People from different regions and cultures could communicate with each other in different languages.

Now, let’s think about what happened next.

A lot of Jewish people living outside of Israel could no longer speak Hebrew fluently. They spoke Greek. So the Old Testament was translated from Hebrew (a language they couldn’t understand) to Greek (a common language they could understand). This happened several hundred years before the birth of Jesus.

That meant that by the time Jesus was born, God’s Word was already available in the language that many people understood. Then, the New Testament was written in Greek also.

Do we see what God was doing here?

For centuries, He was putting the pieces into place. He was preparing the world for the arrival of His Son and for the message of salvation to spread far beyond Israel.

What about the Roman Empire? Great question! Think about all the roads they built that connected cities across huge distances. Travel became easier, which meant that communication became easier. So when Paul and the other apostles began preaching Christ, they were able to travel throughout the empire, carrying the gospel from place to place wherever they went.

So the next time you read Genesis 12:2-3, where God tells Abraham, “Go, and I will make of you a great nation… and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed,” – we can better see how God providentially kept His promise to Abraham. The Lord spent centuries preparing the stage before Christ appeared in what Paul goes on to later call “the fullness of time.”

“But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons.” – Galations 4:4-5

But the story doesn’t stop there.

After the New Testament was written, the Bible continued to be copied, preserved, and passed down from generation to generation. In many parts of Europe, however, most people couldn’t read the Bible for themselves because it mainly existed in Latin, a language most ordinary people didn’t speak. As many people started speaking in different languages, some believers became convinced that everyone should be able to read God’s Word in their own native language.

But there was a problem. Not everyone agreed with that, especially those in authority.

Nevertheless, men like John Wycliffe and William Tyndale worked very hard to translate the Bible into English so that ordinary people could read it. Their efforts brought fierce opposition! In fact, Tyndale would eventually give his life for that important work.

Yet God continued to preserve His holy Word.

Today, the Bible has been translated into thousands of languages, and people all over the world can read the same message of salvation through Jesus Christ. That said, there are some regions in the world where the Bible is expressly forbidden, especially in the Middle East. But even there, there are people who find the Message it conveys much too important to keep a secret. This is why we should be praying for the protection and blessing of our fellow Christians everywhere in the world.

And sometimes I need to think about the sacrifice involved… and how so many people sacrificed so much of their lives just so I could receive this enormous blessing of being able to read my Bible. There were many, many years when it was little more than a dust collector sitting on a lonely nightstand, opened maybe once or twice per year. But today I realize that the Bible in my hands isn’t the result of luck or coincidence. It’s the result of God fearing men who persevered under enormous threat, and ultimately the result of God’s providential work through centuries of true and factual history.

Empires rose and fell, nations were scattered. Languages were developed and spread, and translators labored tediously. Missionaries traveled great distances to share the Word of God. Some believers even gave their lives just so others could read the Scriptures.

Think about that… The Lord who promised to send His Son also made sure that the world would hear about Him. And we have that blessing today, to open the Scriptures and read about our Creator and how He loved us so much that He came down to us, as one of us, to deliver us from evil.

Thanks be to God for His Word!