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Not Just Any Bible
As told by Andrea Wolfe
"Can anyone hide out in a corner where I can't see him, declares Yahveh. Am I not present everywhere, whether seen
or unseen?" Jeremiah 23:24
In the 1930's Stalin ordered a purge of all Bibles and all believers. In Stavropol, Russia, this order was carried
out with vengeance. Thousands of Bibles were confiscated, and multitudes of believers were sent to the gulags (prison
camps) where most died for being 'enemies of the state.'
We once sent a team to Stavropol. The citys history wasn't
known at that time. But when the team was having difficulty getting Bibles shipped from Moscow, someone mentioned the existence
of a warehouse outside of town where these confiscated Bibles had been stored since Stalin's day.
After much prayer
by the team, one member finally got up the courage to go to the warehouse and ask the officials if the Bibles were still there. Sure
enough, they were. Then they asked if the Bibles could be removed and distributed again to the people of Stavropol. The answer
was, 'Yes!'
The next day the team returned with a truck, and several Russian people, to help load the Bibles. One helper
was a young man - a skeptical, hostile agnostic collegian who had come only for the day's wages. As they were loading Bibles, one
team member noticed that the young man had disappeared. Eventually they found him in a corner of the warehouse, weeping. He
had slipped away hoping to take a Bible for himself. What he found shook him to the core.
The inside page of the Bible
he picked up had the handwritten signature of his own grandmother. It had been her personal Bible. Out of the thousands
of Bibles still left in that warehouse, he stole the one belonging to his grandmother - a woman persecuted for her faith all
her life.
No wonder he was weeping -- God was real -- and this was his introduction to the Sovereign El,
the Creator of the universe!
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