A Church That Will Not Be Destroyed

“And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.” — Matthew 16:18 (KJV)

In 1554, a young English scholar named John Foxe climbed onto a ship and fled the country, only just ahead of the officers sent to arrest him. A new queen, Mary, had come to the throne, and she was determined to stamp out the Protestant faith in England. Soon people were being burned at the stake for what they believed.

Foxe ended up poor and in exile in Europe, working as a proofreader for printers. But he did something remarkable. He started collecting everything he could find about the people who were dying for their faith: letters smuggled out of prisons, records of their trials, the last words they spoke. When Mary died and he could return home, he published it all. His enormous book, nearly two thousand pages long, became known as Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. For a long time it was the most widely read book in England after the Bible.

Foxe begins with a promise of Jesus. When Peter said that Jesus was the Son of God, Jesus said he would build his church, and “the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.” Foxe pointed out three things in that promise. First, that Christ would have a church. Second, that the church would be fiercely attacked. And third:

“That the same Church, notwithstanding the uttermost of the devil and all his malice, should continue.”

That is the theme of every story in this book. Emperors, kings and courts tried their hardest to wipe out people who followed Jesus. They failed. The church kept going, often growing fastest where it was attacked hardest.

A word about what is coming. These are true stories, and many of them end in death. This edition tells you what happened without dwelling on gory details. It also tells you honestly that Foxe was a Protestant writing at a bitter time, and that sometimes Protestants persecuted people too. We will come back to that.

But the heart of these stories is not cruelty. It is courage, the kind of courage that comes from knowing Jesus so well that you would rather lose your life than deny him. Most of the people in this book were ordinary: shopkeepers, students, mothers, old men, teenagers. Foxe wanted them remembered “that the wonderful works of God in His Church might appear to His glory.”

One thing to do this week: look up and read Acts 6:8–7:60, the story of Stephen, the first Christian martyr. Notice what he saw, what he said, and how he prayed for the people who were killing him.