Trusting God’s Word

10/03/23 – 10/07/23

The Testimony of the Bible’s Preservation

By Michael Youssef, Ph D.  10/06/23

Read Isaiah 40:6-8.

Today, no matter how hard someone might try, it would be nearly impossible to scrub the Scriptures from existence. But this was not always the case. Up until the invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century, the Bible was preserved through the extremely meticulous, labor-intensive, and time-consuming process of copying it by hand. To hear the Bible read aloud in a public gathering was a tremendous privilege; to own a personal copy of the Scriptures was a luxury reserved for the super-rich.

From its earliest days, the Bible has been subjected to the most intense hatred of any book in human history. It’s been despised by despots and dictators, many of whom outlawed the Bible. Some tried to destroy the Bible through clever arguments, others by force. Some passed laws and made it a capital punishment for anyone to possess the Bible or copy it. People have died for the crime of reading God’s Word and still do. Where the church is persecuted, the Bible is as precious as daily bread. Yet despite all this opposition, the text of God’s Holy Word has survived intact.

God not only authored the sacred Scriptures, He has also preserved them. When we compare ancient manuscripts, what we discover is that the Bible we have in our possession today is 99.99 percent the same, meaning it hasn’t been changed or corrupted. And the 00.01 percent at variance affects spelling and minor grammatical issues. No doctrine or narrative is affected. We can be confident that when we pick up the Word of God, we are reading Truth, pure and unfiltered.

Had the Bible been merely a collection of man’s thoughts, it would have perished a long time ago like so many other books—even books that were ruthlessly defended by the sword. But again and again, the Word of God has survived against all odds and spread the Gospel of Jesus Christ, revolutionizing souls and whole communities with the weapons of love, mercy, and grace.

God’s Word continues to fulfill its purpose in the world today. The question we must ask is whether we are allowing the Bible to fulfill its purpose in our lives.

Prayer: Lord, help me to truly cherish Your Word as my daily bread. May I submit to Your Scripture, that it might fulfill Your purposes in my life. I pray in the name of Jesus. Amen.

“The grass withers and the flowers fall, but the word of our God endures forever” (Isaiah 40:8).