The Alphabet combined with the Printing Press has done more to change the destiny of mankind than any other invention.
By Loren Triplett
If you read your Bible today you were helped by two devices that have indeed changed the history of the world. One is the alphabet, the other moveable type.
Probably the most powerful weapon ever devised was the alphabet. It’s a mind-blowing concept when you realize that somebody dreamed up the possibility., the daring innovation, that man could communicate from mind to mind without speaking a word. In fact, it is so daring that the idea must have come from God.
Meaningful markings finally found shape in the alphabets of the world. This has changed more geographical boundaries and altered the thinking of man more than any other single invention.
“The pen is mightier than the sword.” This has never been truer than today, when nuclear power has turned the sword into an instrument of racial suicide. There is no alternative but the pen.
Paper and ink are so powerful that they have stimulated every revolution of the last 500 years. No wonder Napoleon feared one newspaper more than 1,000 bayonets; and Ben Franklin said, “Give me 26 lead soldiers and I’ll conquer the world.” No weapon is more powerful than the 26 letters of the alphabet.
Karl Marx never dreamed that the book he wrote so furiously in a London attic in the 19th century would be multiplied a million times and sped around the world the change its destiny.
Nor did anyone suppose the ideas Adolph Hitler wrote down in his prison cell on wrapping paper would be so devastatingly influential in history. Such is the power of the printing press.
The alphabet combined with the printing press has done more to change the destiny of mankind than any other invention. It can win the battle for righteousness in the world. That is really what we are trying to do. God’s plan with paper and ink was to reveal the Word through the printed word.
It started with Moses on the mountain. When Moses came out of the presence of God, he had a manuscript in his hand. It was a book of only two crudely bound pages, but it was written by the finger of God. Those words placed on two tablets of stone have changed the destiny of our world. Moses became the first great historian. He cared enough to write it down.
The poets came and cared enough to write their message down. The prophets came and wrote their message. The Gospel writers gave the world their story. John summed it up when he said, “These things are written that ye might believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God.”
Another of the disciples quoted Jesus as saying, “This gospel must first be published among all nations.” That word “published” can mean a lot of things, but for me it means books and periodicals, paper and ink; and the disciple told it right.
Paul was a peer among propagandists. What if he had never learned to write? Do you realize that his private correspondence file is all we have of the writings of Paul? He never sat down to write a book, but his private correspondence file has altered history and touches all of our lives.
The monks cared as they painstakingly copied the sacred manuscripts. The stopped when they got to the name of God, and wiped off their pens; and tried to record without an error the message of heaven.
Martin Luther cared enough to write over 100 books. He threw an ink pot at the devil in more ways than one.
Samuel Zwemer, apostle to the Muslins, cared. He said, “No other agency can penetrate so deeply, witness do daringly, abide so persistently, and influence so irresistibly as the printed page.”
The modern missionary movement began about 200 years ago. William Carey, the father of modern missions, cared enough to see that God’s Word, or a portion of it, was translated into at least 40 languages.
Robert Morrison went to China and spent 16 arduous years there, consulting 10,000 books in one of the most ambitious missionary projects ever done. I wonder what the people at home thought when they found out his missionary project was to compile an Anglo-Chinese dictionary! Yet he provided hundreds of missionaries a tool that opened the alphabet of the Chinese world. thank God for Robert Morrison.
So wherever beachheads have been set up by missionaries, wherever penetrations have been made into the inner band of heathendom, the printed page has been crucial in carrying God’s revelation.
Who is caring today? Thank God, the Boys and Girls Missionary Crusade is caring. The 55 district Sunday school directors in the U.S. have pledged, under God, to provide nearly a third of a million of dollars for BGMC in 1977 to underwrite the cost of communicating the truths of eternity to people in far-off places.
Our world is full of new literates. New literates tend to believe the first thing they read. Just try to talk a man out of what that paper says the first time it reaches out and grabs him. Nobody can take it away from him. Now the most poignant question is, who is going to arrive first? And with what?
Who is going to put what in their eager hands? The Bible says, “The Lord gave the word: great was the company of those that published it” (Psalm 68:11). We must enlist very boy and girl to join this great publishing company of heaven whose job it is to see that the power of the printed page is moved into the front ranks of all we missionaries are trying to do around the world.
It’s more than a poignant piece of rhetoric. The fate of a lost world is at stake. The fate of a lost world is at stake. With these simple tools — the alphabet and the printing press — we can arrive with the right thing for the eager hands of those who wait to know the truth.
The superintendent of the Costa Rican Assemblies of God was saved when the wind, blessed by the breath of God, blew a piece of a Gospel portion into his tailor shop. Out of curiosity he picked it up. It was his first exposure to the gospel.
A man walking down a sidewalk in Brazil was handed a gospel tract. He ripped it into fragments and threw it on the sidewalk. When he went to change his clothes he discovered a fragment of that tract had stuck in the opening of his coat pocket. He pulled it off and read three words. They were, “And God said.” The Holy Ghost penetrated his heart. For 24 years curiosity burned in his soul. He tried to imagine what those people in that church really believed that God had said. The next day on his way home from work he went inside the church, asked for one of the tracts, read it, and was led to the Lord Jesus Christ.
Let me say it one more time. The printed page is the most powerful weapon on earth. It is a bridge between hearts and minds over which either error or truth will travel. Let’s give this divinely inspired device its full dimension for a dynamic demonstration of caring in 1977.