no weapon forged against it will prosper

The Word for today:
Deuteronomy 18, 19

But the LORD your God will deliver them over to you, throwing them into great confusion until they are destroyed. He will give their kings into your hand, and you will wipe out their names from under heaven. No one will be able to stand up against you; you will destroy them. The images of their gods you are to burn in the fire. Do not covet the silver and gold on them, and do not take it for yourselves, or you will be ensnared by it, for it is detestable to the LORD your God. (Deuteronomy 7:23-25)

Then the LORD said to him, "Know for certain that your descendants will be strangers in a country not their own, and they will be enslaved and mistreated four hundred years. But I will punish the nation they serve as slaves, and afterward they will come out with great possessions. You, however, will go to your fathers in peace and be buried at a good old age. In the fourth generation your descendants will come back here, for the sin of the Amorites has not yet reached its full measure." (Genesis 15:13-16)

The truth – the Word of God -- is actively suppressed (Romans 1:18) by unbelievers who are (often unwittingly) under the direction of the rulers of this present darkness (Ephesians 6:12/RSV).

As I was driving around town yesterday morning, literally minding my own business, I got an earful of truth suppression. With my car radio tuned into a normally harmless local talk show, I was subjected to a couple examples of the attacks that are mounted against the Bible by its enemies, under the direction of their commander in chief, Satan.

I don't get too indignant over criticism of the Bible because I understand why its critics snipe at it.

They snipe at it because they are dumber than bricks about it. They are dumber than bricks about the Bible because the Bible actively hides the truth from those who approach it with a critical spirit.

The Bible is a closed book to anyone who opens it to find fault with it. The Bible is spiritually discerned, which means that the person who won't believe it can't believe it:

The man without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually discerned.  (1 Corinthians 2:14)

So as I was driving around doing some errands, I heard a caller, on a local radio talk show, call out Scripture on two issues. One was God’s command to annihilate certain peoples in the Promised Land:

But the LORD your God will deliver them over to you, throwing them into great confusion until they are destroyed. He will give their kings into your hand, and you will wipe out their names from under heaven. No one will be able to stand up against you; you will destroy them. The images of their gods you are to burn in the fire. Do not covet the silver and gold on them, and do not take it for yourselves, or you will be ensnared by it, for it is detestable to the LORD your God. (Deuteronomy 7:23-25)

What the caller did not know is that God had told Abraham that he was going to give these people (the Amorites in the land of Canaan) 430 more years to turn from idolatry.

God had promised Abraham that Israel would possess the Promised Land, but not until the sin of the Amorites had reached its full measure. (See Genesis 15:13-16, above.)

God was going to give a sin-laden people half of a millennium to turn to him. Only after it was demonstrated that they were beyond the point of no return would God command their annihilation in order to save Israel from their contagious idolatry and (historians tell us) their epidemic venereal diseases.

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Fifteen minutes later, I heard a different caller on the same show attack the Bible for being pro-slavery.

While it is true that the Bible (particularly Paul in his epistles) speaks of slavery matter-of-factly, it is only because slavery was a matter of fact!

At the time a great percentage (some estimate more than 50%) of the people in the Roman Empire were "slaves." But it wasn't racial slavery like the US once had, and it was temporary. For the most part, they were more like indentured servants who were paying off a debt.

Slavery, then, was just a fact of their circumstances. For Paul not to matter-of-factly mention slaves would be to remove the cultural background out of any picture he painted. That he dealt in real terms with the prevailing conditions of his time did not mean that he condoned them.

Furthermore, biblical principles and the Christians who espoused them (Wilberforce, etc.) have done more to end slavery than all other factors and forces and philosophies combined.

But, of course, the caller never mentioned these matters of fact.

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Those are but two examples of the invective and ignorance that are constantly being hurled at Scripture. We include these examples only because we want you to know that for every criticism there is an irrefutable defense.

Stand in the Rain doesn’t major in apologetics (a branch of theology which is devoted to the defense of scripture and doctrine) because we do not believe the Bible needs defending. We know that it will eternally prevail:

Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will never pass away. (Matthew 24:35)

So our concern today is not for the Bible but for inexperienced believers who have begun to trust God's Word, only to hear it ridiculed and demeaned.

If you are one of them, do not dismay. You will eventually see the undefeated Word take on all of its detractors and triumph over them. Ultimately, no weapon forged against it will prosper.

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