Individually, they would have been startling enough. But juxtaposed, as they were, on pages one and three of our daily newspaper made them absolutely shocking. The front page article couldn’t help but stir up joy in every Christian’s heart. “BELIEVERS?” asked the headline. With a dateline from Moscow, the piece began:
“After more than 70 years of opposition, Pravda, the giant and very official Communist party publishing house, has decided to give the masses their opiate. It plans to print Bibles.” The news item explained that business has been very bad for the publishing giant, with a five million drop in circulation in the party newspaper. But isn’t this a bit much, even for the reformers of the Socialist empire? “The money earned will go to the party anyway,” observed Mikhail Troschin, Pravda’s deputy director. However, with Pravda’s dubious stand in the recent attempted coup, they may be out of business altogether.
Whatever Pravda’s fate, it is important to hear Troschin’s explanation for their proposed plan: “Demand for the Bible is very great,” he said. He acknowledged that the desire for the Bible might always have been there, “but for some political purposes it wasn’t published.” Of course, you could look at the Bible as art, he suggested.
Of course, Mr. Troschin. What the citizens of the Soviet Union and her satellites have been suffering, bleeding, dying for, over the last seventy-five years, is an art form, pure and simple. Is that it?
Pure it is — the Blessed Book is as pure as rays of light, as pure as water from beneath the throne of God. But simple it is not. Vox Caelestis, the voice of heaven, is not simply art, or simply history, or simply anything. It is a mighty, unfathomable river from God that flows, unseen, down the ages until suddenly it burst to the surface through the heart of holy men inditing a good matter. Here it becomes a broiling torrent, cutting its way through man’s proud day, sweeping everything in its path. There it is a gentle stream of quiet waters beside which His people find their rest. His voice, heaven’s voice, when we hear it in its fullness at last, will be as the sound of many waters.
Mikhail Troschin has become more westernized than he knows. It is in the “Christian” countries that the Bible is now only an art form. Or perhaps I have fallen to reminiscing. It was an art form; but art (even the most obscene) is still allowed out in public. Not so the Bible. God’s Word, seen in Eastern Europe as a symbol of liberty, is perceived in the West as a chain of intellectual bondage. The Western world has pawned their mother’s Bible for a few coins to spend on time’s fleeting pleasures. This is Vox Populi, the voice of the people, crying for the darkness to hide them and their godless deeds.
Which brings me to the article on page three. From New York, it was appropriately short:
“A new book that tells people how to commit suicide has risen to No. 1 on a New York Times best-seller list, the newspaper reported. The book is ‘Final Exit’. . .”
I suppose I had known it for some time — that our society was in the process of committing suicide. I just didn’t expect to see it in black and white like that. But we are doing it to ourselves, aren’t we? Abortion is national suicide. What was to be the next generation is being murdered. No use hiding from it. Homosexuality is social suicide. There is no future in it. It is sterile. It can only mean death.
And what can we say of children isolated from parents, nursed on violence, and introduced to everything in life — except life itself? It is no wonder that we are already hearing, in the cry of the people, the death rattle of a civilization.
Any help? Any hope? Out of the dark, swirling waters looms one mighty refuge. Assailed by the crashing waves of human opinion and opposition, it stands unchanged. And still there are those, like you, who, in desperation, fling aside the flotsam of a doomed and sinking world, and throw themselves upon the Word of God. Poor, shivering souls we were, dressed in rags and soaked to our souls in sin. But God had said that He would take us, and we took Him at His Word.
What of the others, still in the water? Only heaven’s voice will help them now: “Faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the Word of God.”