It’s In The Book!

By A. E. Anderson

    Up at the Victory Center one night a Jewish atheist, communistically inclined, came up the stairs and sat down for the fellowship – for want of something to do. The men talked to him about the Lord. He came back again and again. He would come up there and drink their coffee and eat their sandwiches: then he’d laugh at them and just reject everything. Their natural inclination was to pick him up and just toss him downstairs, but they didn’t.

    One evening I went up there. I didn’t know anything about him, but I saw him come in with the Daily Worker (communist paper) in one pocket and some atheistic literature in the other. I sat down beside of him, and the first thing he said was, “Now don’t you try to convert me.”

    “Why, what’s biting you?" I asked.

    “Everybody around here has been trying to convert me,” he complained.

    “Is that so?” I remarked. “Well, I wouldn’t try to convert you: I wouldn’t know how. But I would like to have you look at a verse of Scripture.” And I turned to Hebrews 9:27: “Inasmuch as it is appointed unto men once to die, and after that the judgment.”

    “I don’t believe it.”

    “I know you don’t,“ I replied.

    “I want you to know I’m an atheist,” he added.

    “Isn’t that strange!” I mused. “What kind of a working mind have you got that you are against Someone who doesn’t exist? You say God doesn’t exist and yet you say you are against Him. Why be against Him if He doesn’t exist? Why worry about it?”

    He looked at me taken aback for a second, and then he shifted to a new tack: “I don’t believe that Book.”

    “Well maybe you don’t,” I said, “but it is still in the Book that it is appointed unto men once to die, and after that the judgment.”

    For two hours or better we bandied back and forth. He would come back with his argument, and I would come back with Hebrews 9:27. Two or three times he got up and walked around. Then he would sit down again. Finally, he got so mad he got up and got his coat and his cap and started down the steps, saying: “It’s in the Book; it’s in the Book; it’s in the Book!” We could hear him spitting out the words all the way down the stairs.

    Some months later we heard that the man was studying in the Moody Bible Institute! Now it wasn’t anybody’s wisdom that converted him. It was simply the Word of God – the Sword of the Spirit. And that’s all we need to know. If we are saturated with the Word of God, if we are convinced that men are lost and that Christ died for them and that salvation is available to them, we can go out and point men to Jesus.

    – From The Baptist Bulletin.