Chapter 1
CAN THIS BOOK BE TRUSTED?
“The truth is that the light which shines in this incredible Book simply cannot be put out.” ~ Malcolm Muggeridge
Gilbert Keith Chesterton was someone I would like to have met. He was a giant of a man, a brilliant intellectual, writer and critic. This larger-than-life British journalist had a voracious appetite, smoked cigars, and weighed nearly 300 pounds. He was also a heavyweight in the literary world. He had a keen grasp of human nature and a sharp tongue that often cut to the bone. People either loved him or hated him. No one was indifferent towards him.
On one occasion he was asked, “What book would you like if you were to be cast adrift on a lonely island in the Pacific and were permitted to have only one book?” A friend, knowing him to be a religious man, volunteered, “I suppose you would choose the Bible.”
“No, not this time,” he smiled.
Another friend ventured, “I’d wager you would take a copy of Shakespeare.”
“You are wrong,” said Chesterton.
“What would you choose then?” they pressed.
“If I were stranded on a lonely island in the Pacific, the book I would choose of all the books in the world would be one entitled A Manual on How to Build a Ship.”
Yet Chesterton, an intensely practical and devout Christian, would no doubt have agreed that when it comes to navigating the turbulent, dark waters of life in the 21 st century nothing compares with The Bible. The Bible is the only book in the world that shows us how to escape the gravitational pull of our old natures that drag us into a quagmire of human failure.
In his book Alone, first published in 1938, Admiral Richard E. Byrd tells of spending a long arctic winter at Latitude 80 ˚ 08΄ South—on the Ross Ice Barrier, on a line between Little America and the South Pole. Spending three months there in a nether twilight wasn’t an exciting thought. Byrd’s original plan was to have three men do the scientific experiments while living near the South Pole in a small hut. Two men he thought could argue, “leaving the mark of Cain in the heart,” as he described it. When logistics prevented the execution of the original plan, Byrd took it upon himself to be the sole person who would man the small base.
No one was ever more alone than Richard Byrd during that grueling four-and-a-half months, with temperatures hovering 50 to 60 below zero and ferocious storms with strong winds threatening his very survival.
On one occasion Byrd had been cooped up in the small hut through a terrible storm, and having “cabin fever,” he felt that he would go crazy if he didn’t go outside for a breath of air. Little did he realize at the time that a vent pipe from a stove that was malfunctioning was producing carbon dioxide that left him with delusions and mental fatigue.
Bundling up against the cold, he dressed as warmly as possible, took his walking stick and began briskly striding across the snow-crusted ice. Snow was falling, covering his tracks almost as quickly as his boot marked the footprint. Suddenly Byrd realized that he had gone far enough that the hut could no longer be seen and there were no tracks in the snow to retrace.
He quickly realized that should he fail to find the hut, he would wander aimlessly for a few hours at the most and then fall to the ice in the perpetual sleep of death. No one was within hundreds of miles to come looking for him. He had instructed the last of his team, “I give you a hard-and-fast order not to come for me until a month after the sun returns.”1
The true measure of the man was that he did not panic. Using the heel of his boot, he chipped away shards of pack ice known as sastrugi. Then he stacked them one on top of the other, making a tower that could be a reference point. Using his flashlight as a stick, he scratched an arrow in the snow pointing the way he had come. Only then he did an about-face and began walking in the direction from which he had come (or thought he had). Byrd knew that without a fixed point of reference, he could miss the tiny shack, and he would be lost.
He would walk until the ice tower was about to fade from his sight. Then he’d stop, retrace his steps and change directions ever so slightly. He did this several times, each time with anxiety growing in his heart. “That miserable pile of snow was nothing to rejoice over,” he wrote, “but at least it kept me from feeling that I was stabbing blindfolded.”2 He tried again—nothing! “You’re lost now,” he told himself. He made another pile, then took 30 steps more. Finally, faintly in the distance, he saw the hut. Never did a king’s palace look as good as the little hut where there was food and warmth.
For centuries the Bible has been a fixed point of reference, and no matter how far society and individuals have strayed, the Bible has yet served as a point of reference. It is a guide for human conduct, a moral framework producing a sense of right and wrong, a source of truth, an inspiration for the world’s great art, music, and literature, and guidelines for personal behavior. Whether or not its directives were followed or ignored, it was still there—a kind of Rock-of-Gibraltar-bulwark-of-truth against which almost everything is measured.
The Book has been translated into literally thousands of languages. A knowledge of this book has been an integral part of the erudition of western education and has played a prominent part in society and civilization. A portion of the book of Psalms was the first work to be printed with movable type by the German inventor Johann Guttenberg in Mainz, Germany around the year 1450.
In 1971 when Astronaut Ed Mitchell went into space as part of the crew of Apollo 14, he took with him the first book to go into space—a Bible. A King James version of the Bible—a small piece of microfilm about 2 ½ inches square, having been reduced 62,000 times, containing 773,746 words, could be easily read, provided the reader wore glasses with the ability to magnify the text 100 times.
American Presidents take the oath of office swearing to uphold the constitution as they place one hand on the Bible and raise the other hand affirming, “…so help me God.”
In the Holocaust thousands of men and women went to their deaths quoting the words of Psalm 23, “The Lord is my shepherd…” or Psalm 91, “He who dwells in the secret place of the most high shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty.” Untold millions of people pray, “Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name…” or quote the great chapter on love found in 1 Corinthians 13.
Chapter 1: Can This Book be Trusted?
1 Richard E. Byrd, Alone (New York: Kodashana International, 1995), . 50.
2 Ibid., 118.
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Note: The preceding material is excerpted from the book Why You Can Have Confidence in the Bible and is copyrighted by the author, Harold J. Sala. It cannot be copied or reproduced without written permission of the author who may be contacted at guidelines@guidelines.org
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