Value every verse of the Gospel

“Then He struck the men of Beth Shemesh, because they had looked into the ark of the Lord” (1 Samuel 6:19)



Beloved brothers and sisters,

If you have read the story in 1 Samuel 6, you will know that the inhabitants of the town of Beth Shemesh in Israel had been given a wonderful blessing from God – a very valuable emblem of their faith, the ark of the covenant.

The Jews had, first of all, spiritual blessings. Those in Beth Shemesh could have from the ark also material blessings because the law obliged the Jews to make a pilgrimage three times a year to the ark of the covenant. Imagine hundreds of thousands of tourists in a little town. However, the inhabitants of Beth Shemesh did not appreciate this blessing. They wrongly handled the ark. It was meant to be kept with very great reverence, but they peeked into it to find out its secrets, which angered God and brought His punishment. They had to send the ark to another town, Kirjath Jearim.

Many men have exceptional blessings from God and don't value them. I have been in the town of Kimberley, in South Africa, which is the diamond capital of the world. More diamonds are mined there than anywhere else on earth. The town's museum documents that more than a hundred years ago a very poor man found the first diamond. Hw saw a big glittering stone. He gave it to his son as a toy, because he did not know its value. This child passed the stone to another child, then to a third, until it eventually arrived in the hands of the British Governor, who gave $ 10,000 for it. You can imagine what the value of this diamond would be today. The one who found the first diamond died as a beggar. The family did not have enough for the burial. He did not appreciate the jewel that he had.

That is the story of the town of Beth Shemesh. It had great privileges from God and great opportunities, but it forfeited them.

I wonder if we in the free world are not the same. We have such wonderful blessings from God, but we don't always value them. We are not thankful at times, and, therefore, we might lose the privileges.

For example, we have a Gospel. We can have as many Gospels as we like. We can hear it preached in churches. We can read it. But we don't realize this huge privilege.

More than a billion people are living under communism. They can not have a Gospel. They love the Word of God, as we do, and they can not have it. In Red China the Communists confiscated Gospels, hymnbooks, and whatever other Christian books they found. In the town of Chungking, they made a big bonfire and burned all these Gospels. They compelled the Christians to attend the burning of their holy books. Now Gospels don’t burn easily because they are thick and the oxygen cannot pass easily through the pages. It took quite some time for the Gospels to burn. Profiting from a moment of inattention by the Communists, a Christian thrust his hand into the fire and quickly, just at random, snatched one page of the Bible out of the fire. He could not choose the one page he snatched. The church in the town of Chungking gathered every Sunday and each week read the same page of the Bible. They lived for two years on one page of the Bible.

It is said about John Wesley that he preached again and again on one verse, “You must be born again”. One who had heard him preaching ten times, twenty times, got annoyed and said, “But Mr. Wesley, there are thousands of verses in the Bible… Why do you always preach about this one verse? Wesley replied, “Because you must be born again.”

So one verse of the Bible, of the Gospel, is of great value. The Chungking believers had several verses of the Bible -–a whole page. They read this page repeatedly. After two years they smuggled out a slip of paper, a small letter, to Christians in the West through Hong-Kong. They wrote in this letter, “Dear brethren, don't strive to become better Christians. Strive only to be the kind of Christians whom Christ meant us to be – Christ-like Christians.” This letter went directly to my heart, and I determined to do everything possible to find out what page of the Bible they had.

I learned that they had Matthew 16. They gathered again and again to hear the assurance of Jesus. You are Peter and on this rock I, Jesus Christ – not your bishops, pastors, deacons, evangelists – will build – not the Catholic Church, nor the Anglican Church, nor the Protestant Church, - will build My Church, and not even the gates of hell will prevail against it.

The church lived on one page of the Gospel. How much they valued it! They went to prison and to death for teaching from this one page. We have 1,200 pages of the Bible. How grateful we should be to God! How careful we should be! Does my Chinese brother have a Bible? The North-Korean people do not have many. The Bible is a rarity in the Communist camp and the Muslim country. We have it.

Those in Beth Shemesh had the ark of the covenant with blessings that could have been poured upon them. They did not know to value it, to handle it rightly, and so they lost everything.

How much do we value every verse of the Gospel?

Yours in Christ,

Richard Wurmbrand