Christopher Columbus

Christopher Columbus (1451–1506) was an Italian navigator and explorer whose voyages across the Atlantic Ocean ushered in the first period of sustained contact between Europe and the Americas. Though he was preceded by hundreds of years by other explorers, such as Leif Ericson, Columbus initiated widespread contact between Europeans and indigenous Americans in the Western Hemisphere.

When Columbus sailed from Spain in 1492, his motives may have been many. To open a trade route to the untapped wealth of the Orient would win glory and vast riches. He may have also felt it would secure a way to diminish the power of the Ottoman Turks who were threatening Europe at the time. But there certainly was a Christian motive as well that underlay his mission.

Columbus was a devout Catholic who felt predestined, chosen for a mission. He felt his name, Christopher, which means “Christ-bearer,” was evidence of his destiny. He searched the Scriptures and thought he found assurance for a call to sail to the far reaches of the globe with the Christian message. Zechariah 9:10 said that “He shall speak peace to the nations; His dominion shall be ‘from sea to sea, and from the River to the ends of the earth.’ ” And Psalm 107:23, 24 promised that “those who go down to the sea in ships, who do business on great waters, they see the works of the LORD, and His wonders in the deep.”

Describing his motive, Columbus stated: “Who can doubt that this fire was not merely mine, but also the Holy Spirit who encouraged me with a radiance of marvelous illumination from his sacred Scriptures, . . . urging me to press forward?” He felt that Almighty God had directly brought about his journey: “With a hand that could be felt, the Lord opened my mind to the fact that it would be possible . . . and He opened my will to desire to accomplish that project. . . . The Lord purposed that there should be something miraculous in this matter of the voyage to the Indies.”

Although Columbus has come under criticism in recent years, his sense of having a mission from God eventually opened the way for millions of unreached people to hear the good news of salvation through Jesus Christ. As Pulitzer-Prize-winning biographer Samuel Eliot Morison wrote, “This conviction that God destined him to be an instrument for spreading the faith was far more potent than the desire to win glory, wealth, and worldly honors, to which he was certainly far from indifferent.”

Taken from The American Patriot’s Bible