Taking Ground | Week 1
Day 1
“The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God stands forever.” -Isaiah 40:8
As Isaiah writes this passage, he thinks of the beautiful green grass covering the hills of Judah after the winter rains—and how quickly the grass dies, leaving the hills brown and barren.
This is how frail and weak we are as well. Our physical appearance is fleeting and passes as quickly as the spring wildflowers Isaiah saw. As he points out our passing looks and human frailty, he contrasts them with something incredible: the permanence of God and His Word.
God’s Word has certainly endured. It has survived centuries of manual transcription, persecution, ever-changing philosophies, all kinds of critics, neglect both in the pulpit and in the pew, doubt, and disbelief—and still, the word of our God stands forever.
In his book Evidence That Demands a Verdict, Josh McDowell writes:
“Written on material that perishes, having to be copied and recopied for hundreds of years before the invention of the printing press, it did not diminish in style, correctness, or existence. The Bible, compared with other ancient writings, has more manuscript evidence than any ten pieces of classical literature combined.”
In A.D. 303, the Roman emperor Diocletian demanded that every copy of the Scriptures in the Roman Empire be burned. He failed, and twenty-five years later the Roman emperor Constantine commissioned a scholar named Eusebius to prepare fifty copies of the Bible at government expense.
Voltaire, the French skeptic and infidel who died in 1778, claimed that within one hundred years Christianity would be swept from existence and the Bible would be a forgotten book. Yet many years after Voltaire’s death, the Geneva Bible Society used his printing press and his house to produce stacks of Bibles.
“Infidels for eighteen hundred years have been refuting and overthrowing this book, and yet it stands today solid as a rock. Its circulation increases, and it is more loved, cherished, and read today than ever before. Infidels, with all their assaults, make about as much impression on this book as a man with a tack hammer would on the Pyramids of Egypt. When the French monarch proposed a persecution of the Christians in his dominion, an old statesman and warrior said to him, ‘Sire, the Church of God is an anvil that has worn out many hammers.’ So the hammers of the infidels have been pecking away at this book for ages, but the hammers are worn out and the anvil still endures. If this book had not been the book of God, men would have destroyed it long ago. Emperors and popes, kings and priests, princes and rulers have all tried their hand at it; they die, and the book still lives.”
Bernard Ramm wrote in Protestant Christian Evidences:
“A thousand times over, the death knell of the Bible has been sounded, the funeral procession formed, the inscription cut on the tombstone, and the committal read. But somehow the corpse never stays put.”
Do you want to build your life on something solid in 2026? Build it on the Bible. Begin your day with time in His Word. It’s the most solid foundation around.
And let me encourage you—you are off to a great start already.
