Satan Loves It When People Are Ignorant of God's Word!
I remembered the time I studied church history after I became a Christian. Nothing really surprised me when I realized that the Roman Catholic institution brought the world into an age of ignorance of the Word of God. Although it was a Roman Catholic named Johannes Gutenberg who invented the printing press but later, the Roman Catholic church decided it was too dangerous an invention. Hmmm so much for papal infallibility huh? Even some Roman Catholics weren't safe from the church's criticism if they ever came up with something that could end the Dark Ages!
Here's an interesting fact you might want to know. This was taken from this article called "Gutenberg's Legacy" from the Harry Ransom Center:
Censorship
The Catholic Church quickly realized the potential of the printing press as a challenge to its influence. Censorship was introduced into the print shop in 1487, when Pope Innocent VIII required that Church authorities approve all books before publication. The Church had censored books for centuries, though it became much more difficult to do so after the invention of printing. Controlling a dozen painfully copied manuscripts of a forbidden text may have been a manageable task, but controlling the thousands of copies churning off the presses every year was quite another matter. One of these forbidden texts was the Bible printed in any other language than Latin.
What may have amazed some atheists is that the Bible was really banned from the Dark Ages and not the cause of the Dark Ages. But thanks to printing press, Gutenberg inadvertently invented something that would spell the Dark Ages' end. The idea that the Roman Catholic institution give us the Bible is crazy because if it did, why forbid it? Why only make people read it in Latin? Why limit its access? The answer is simple. If people read the Scriptures for themselves, there would be a real revolution. But even before the Reformation, we had Jan Hus a former Roman Catholic priest who would foreshadow the arrival of the great Martin Luther, John Calvin, Huldrych Zwingli and John Knox. In short, before Protestantism, born again Christianity was already spreading like fire which proves born again Christians were there even before 1970, the alleged year that some Roman Catholic fanatics claim was the year born again Christianity was born. Today, the term "born again" has been so muddled like the term Christianity is so muddled.
While reading Isaiah, one can really notice Isaiah 29:11-13 is so true. Illiteracy and banning people from reading the Word of God really works to spread false doctrine like fire. When people are ignorant of God's Word they will fall for anything. It has worked after the Flood, it has worked during the Old Testament days, it worked during Jesus' ministry and still works until today! Then we have Roman Catholics who have the nerve to say that their religion gave us the Bible when they didn't because they never had any true apostolic doctrine. Banning the Bible also works it charm because it causes sin to increase. When I read about the scandals of the Vatican from other sources aside from Chick Publications, I wasn't all too surprised to why the Roman Catholic institution banned the Bible. Martin Luther's account alone on a sex party in the Vatican and priests who live sinful lives already made me think, "They have a 'good reason' to ban the Bible because if people knew about their sins, they'd see the parallelism between the Catholic clergy and the Pharisees!"
Many were killed just for spreading the Word of God. Before Luther even nailed the 95 Theses, many Christians were already telling people the Scriptures. The result was that it called for the establishment of the Spanish during 1478 to spread the Roman Catholic religion by force. Today the whole account of the Roman Catholic murders are either covered up or you have the Pope parading himself sorry for all those atrocities in the Dark Ages. The late John Paul II supposedly "apologized" but some Roman Catholics still insist that it's "just a myth". Many people were massacred for sharing the Scriptures like William Tyndale. Some Roman Catholic fanatics even say something like, "Well they deserve it! They were false prophets attacking Mother Church." which just had them confirm the atrocities were indeed very real. Many Roman Catholics are brainwashed to believe that either the Inquisition is a myth or it was appropriate. Maybe today's average Jesuit priest or Dominican priest doesn't even know the deadly history behind their dreaded orders either.
But fear not because God's Word is not bound (2 Timothy 2:9). Even if all the persecutions will arrive seeking to stop the Gospel from being preached, God always finds a way to make sure God's Word will work in the lives of people. There's that confidence that Christians can have that if Satan couldn't succeed in the Dark Ages, the Reformation was launched, the Calvinist scholars eventually gave us the King James Bible, that the Bible was certainly not compiled by Rome and that the Word of God is not bound - then there's that expectation that just keep fighting for the Word of God to be upheld. One day, all its enemies will soon be destroyed by the fullness of God's wrath!
See also:
The Importance of Reaching Out the Youth with the Word of God