I just read a friend’s latest email about her trip to Nigeria, November 21- December 17, where she is going to be doing more things with mobile technology and getting the Scriptures out to the people and the tribes of Nigeria. These people live in remote areas of Nigeria and they may not even have a written language, but many of them have access to mobile phone technology, so they are in this way accessible to the gospel.

The reason that the people in remote and unreached places are so fascinated by the Bible and are so interested in the Bible is that they have nothing else in their language or in their experience that is remotely like the Bible. There are no books or magazines or songs or poems in their language, and then the Bible explodes onto their eyes or into their ears. In fact, in many of these remote and unreached areas, the very first book written in their language is the Bible. Can you imagine how wonderful this is, that the first book, and at least for a time the only book in their language is the word of the living God! And so the Bible or a portion of the Bible appears in their language. Suddenly in the Bible the people have access to fascinating stories about how our great God has related to and interacted with real men and women since the beginning of the world. For centuries the living God revealed Himself to ordinary men and women and the Bible tells these stories to us in the pages of Scripture. There is story after story of God reaching down from heaven and acting in the lives of men and women like you and me. Then in the New Testament there are the amazing narratives about the Lord Jesus Christ Himself, who does miracles and accomplishes deeds of power before being crucified and then rising from the dead. And simple people read these stories and believe them, for they are not “sophisticated” enough to reject them, and they come to faith in Jesus Christ. They see Jesus as He is, the Son of God and the conquering King, and they want to worship this great conquering King who has risen from the dead. Who would not want to worship a King who has conquered death and has provided for the forgiveness of sin and who promises His followers heaven and who gives to His followers the privilege of knowing the Most High God of the universe? And so the simple people of Africa and of South America and of Asia read the Bible and they believe and are saved. Here in this context Satan’s strategy is to prevent the Word from ever getting there in the first place. He wants to keep the people ignorant and in the dark, benighted in their illiteracy and not knowing that there is a Book that tells of how God has reached out to man in the Person of the Lord Jesus Christ and has offered them eternal life with Him. Satan wants to keep the Bible from ever getting to their ears.

But Satan’s scheme in America and in the “West” is different. Instead of doing everything that he can to prevent the Word from getting to the people, he floods all the available media outlets with meaningless media and books and noise so that people will not heed the Bible or see that the Bible is unique in all of the world, the only book that contains all truth and nothing but the truth. Since the Bible is already released and is readily available in every imaginable form, Satan must now make the Bible appear simple and unsophisticated and outdated. Satan floods the bookstores with all kinds of fantasy novels and fictions and competing voices that sound cool and that appeal to the fallen flesh, and his plan is to drown out the voice of God in the Bible and to create so many distractions that the people remain in the dark. Because of so many other books and media outlets, the Bible, the very word of the living God, is lost in obscurity. That is Satan’s plan here in America, and that plan is largely working. SDG rmb 11/27/15