Duke Jeyaraj

The snail crawls of the one day openers of yester-years would be totally irrelevant in the slam-bang era ushered in by the likes of Tendulkar and Jeyasuriya Irrelevant Heard that? That's how the young one of 21st century Mars heading generation would feel about that ancient religious book the Bible. If the Bible was anything other than "irrelevant" for us, then we must assuredly have taken a break from our brains and committed intellectual suicide, this computer age, generation X-youngster would tell us, MKs. I disagree. It is relevant. It is still cool to believe in it. Going tongue-in-cheek? Hang on! You might want to read what I have spilled over the next few pages, fished out from my research locker, as punching proof that the Bible is still gold even as we set foot on century 21st threshold.

IT’S POPULARITY

You know what? The Bible is in the thick of things, in The Guinness Book of World Records-five times. Take this: it became the first book to rollout of the printing press in 1456. When one of the earliest tattering, crumpling pieces of the first edition of the printed Bible was auctioned it went for a believe-it-or not price of 6 Crore rupees, making the Bible the most expensive book in the world. Here is something over the moon about the Bible which is the first book to be read in Outer Space.

The American astronauts gave the Bible this honor when they fished their Bibles out and read it as soon as they landed on the moon. Guess what was the text of the longest telegram ever sent? It was the Revised Version of the New
 

Testament shot out from New York to Chicago. The sport star doesn't have to inform you that Tendulkar is the best batsmen in the Planet-it is outrageously obvious.

Likewise The Guinness Book doesn't have to tell us that the Bible is the best selling book in the Planet it is also outrageously obvious. I have got some news for you: the demand for the Good news Bible was so monstrous that it had to be reprinted 21 times in the year it was first published! Within three years the sales spiralled to a whooping 6 crore at a swoosh speed of a sale per 3 seconds! As a Sergei Bubka would effortlessly sail over the 6 meter mark in pole vault, the Bible sails over the 20 million mark in sales over passing year, with the same ease. The No.1 without a whiff of doubt-in sales.

This is comparable to a movie running in the same cinema hall "houseful" for eternity! Within four months the Bible topped the score of 15 million sales in China alone. Read that again-15 million! And to think the Shobha De's, the Sydney Sheldon’s of this world will sturt, "one million copies sold" on their novel covers! Time magazine went overboard to announce Stephen Hawking's book. A Brief History of Time has been translated in to 40 languages. Chicken Pickup the latest issue of The Sowing Circle and this fact will jump out from its pages: The whole Bible has been translated into 363 languages-the New Testament alone into 905 languages-covering about 80 percent of the World’s population. Can't beat that right?

ITS PREDICTIONS

While a wise would keep his fingers crossed about the future, the Bible goes on a prediction spree: 187 individual predictions-on 737 individual subjects. Hold your breath-594 of them have been already fulfilled, with bull's eye accuracy. Baggio missed the target in the penalty kick he took in the 1994 World Cup Final. But the Bible has never missed the target in its prediction game the remaining 137 concern the events of the last days and so obviously could not have been fulfilled by now.

"I'm a science student. Science can tell me about the future", Mr. Big Brains huffs. Wait a minute. Scientific predictions have been only 25% accurate. It will be curtains for planet Earth on august 14, 2126, US scientists announced after extensive research. But not before one of them-Alan Harris-honestly admitted, "It's hard to make predictions that hold out for 100 odd years".

You may even find Luther's statue in the Vatican. But not a magazine with a star sign prediction column these days. Seven out of ten people read their horoscope. It pretty certain their hopes will be dashed because astrological prediction s has been only a paltry 5% accurate. Can't digest that? Then you must certainly hear this one about America's top astrologer of yesteryears, Jeanne Dixon. She predicted, one fine day that the wife of the dead United States President, John F. Kennedy, "was not considering remarriage". She was forced to eat her words when she re-married the very next day! Amidst the ruins of slippery scientific predictions, and stupid astrological predictions the Bible's predictions stand tall. I quote few examples-just tips of a gigantic iceberg.

At about 600 BC, the Bible predict that the city of Tyre-the Mumbai of the Mediterranean-would be overrun and it's soil would be scrapped (Ex. 26:3,4,5). And boy, it happened 250 years later-when Alexander, headed a combine that pulverized this great island city. "Overrun by enemies ", yes. But "soil scrapped"? Hang on. Alexander had a bridge built from the island to the mainland to carry away the loot. To build it, he used the stones and ruins of the city. As this material still wasn't enough he scrapped the soil as well! Still shaking your head in disbelief? Hear this then: Jesus fulfilled a colossal 330 prophecies the Old Testament made about him. "Oh that was a fluke -it could have happened by chance", I hear someone whisper. Whom are you kidding? It is calculated that the probability that anyone could fulfil 20 predictions in his lifetime is 1 chance to 1 followed by175 zeroes. Jesus would have had as much chance as a blind Scuba diver will have in catching a fish, painted hot pink swimming in the Pacific Ocean to fulfil those prophecies. But he did it!

To the opened-minded person, the conclusion is inescapable: only God knows the future and the Bible-with its 100% prediction accuracy-is His Word.

IT’S PROGRESSIVENESS

Let me make a grand statement the Bible is the only book which is streets ahead of science. Sounds incredible? In other words, some of the things the scientist sweated buckets to discover in recent years were already there in the ancient book. Too good to be true. Just listen.

Romans 8:21 is the earliest form of the second law of thermo-dynamics. After centuries of giving different counts for stars, the scientists have finally agreed that they could not be counted. But that's what the Bible has been saying for century’s together (Gen. 22:17). Water cycle and its accompanying global automatic circulation have been demonstrated scientifically only in recent times. But again that ancient book has been speaking about it from ages past (Eccl. 1:6, 7; Job 36:27-29). Prophet Isaiah of the Bible spoke about the rotundity of the earth long, long before Galileo did (Isa. 40:22). The theory that the scientists have great consensus about the origin of the Universe, today is the Big Bang theory. This theory states that the Universe came into being after a high-energy "bang"-a big one. How is this one that what the Bible has been saying for millennia together! Let me explain. Read Psalm 29 and you'll get a feel of the "big bang" voice of God. I cannot imagine how loud was His big bang voice was when He spoke the world into existence (Gen.1:1).

Its story time, folks. A true one. A certain civil engineer in the US was fuming with rage when the patent for his design for a bunkhouse for construction crews who had to work in deserts was flatly rejected. He went to court protesting. Guess what the sentence of the judge was? "You are 3,500 years late to apply for patent. Moses used the very same design as you have in the designing the tabernacle of the Israelites in the wilderness!" No mean book this, eh! But we have only scratched the surface of the treasure house for modern scientific knowledge. In the Grand Old Book, how did so much scientific facts-undiscovered at the time of writing-get in there? The only feasible answer is that a God who is the fount of all knowledge even scientific knowledge-inspired them.

ITS POSITIVE INFLUENCE

We are under the influence of somebody all of the time. So sang Cliff Richards hammering an important truth. You are the air that I breathe; you are the song that I sing that's a lift form music troop, and Backstreet Boys recent hit song on the potent influence, a girl can have a boy. Influence. Let's talk about it the influence a book can have on a person.

Talk about the bad influence of books. The communistic writings of Jene Paul Satre-the guru of the sixties had such a baneful influence on Cambodian, Pol Pot, when he was a student in Paris in the forties that he massacred close to a third of his country’s population. German philosopher. Fredriech Neitche's writings inspired Hitler to crush like to toilet paper, not less than 6 million human lives. Joseph Stalin raped Russia-murdered 15 million innocent peasants -propelled by atheistic writings.

So much about some books and their destructive influence. Talk about the Bible. In stark contrast it has achieved just the opposite. The Celts of Ireland, the Wild Vikings of Norway, the Acua Indians of Equador, the Nagas of India-all ferocious tribes at one time were tamed by the Bible's message. In 1900, there was not a single Bible believing church in South Korea. When the message in large number that 35% of the country’s population, today is Christian. The result: South Korea has become an economic force to reckon with. Their companies Daewoo, Hyundai and Samsung with Bible believers in top positions have taken the world markets by storm. And incidentally, Daewoo is among the top 5 corporate companies of the world.

A Reebok shoe ad showed Dutch football star Dennis Berkamp-the guy who scored that brilliant goal in the World Cup quarterfinal in France-working in a cheese factory. It also showed Peter Schemichel-the Danish goalie who won a name as the best goalie working in a pig farm. The ad guys signed off saying, "This is what they'd have been doing if our shoes hadn't made them, what they are today". Same pinch, Berkamp and Schemichel! I would be climbing palmirah trees, clad in loincloth, tapping toddy, had not the British missionaries carried the message of the Bible to my great grandfathers!

The Bible not only has had a positive influence on societies and countries, but also on individuals. Take time to digest this: every passing day the Bible transforms the lives of some 170, 000 people. In Latin America alone about 400 people's lives are forever changed every hour by the life-transforming message of the Bible. Not bad, eh!

The New Testament because of its explosive power to change lives shares an abbreviation with a chemical explosive-Trini-trotoulene-TNT! The novel he had read-The Day of the Jackal inspired a guy to murder 10 Israeli athletes in the Munich Olympics (1972). The movie he had watched Bazzigar-inspired a boy to push his girlfriend from a multi-storeyed building.

But the Bible . . . whenever a tantalizing temptation is beaten, when someone unlovely is being loved, someone somewhere is casting another vote for the positive influence of the Bible. When it comes to this-positive influence no other book can even hold a candle to the Bible.