To state that the Bible is a remarkable Book is to put it mildly. For it is a Book which, ever since printing was invented, has consistently proved to be the world’s best seller; a Book which, year by year, is being translated by dedicated men into one language after another, so that soon there will scarcely be a tongue or dialect in which it will not be possible to read it; a Book which, without dispute, has done more than any other to mold fundamental philosophy, social habits, ultimate hopes, art, architecture, literature — in a word, the entire culture of the peoples of the West. Without the Bible there would have been no Ten Commandments; no Sermon on the Mount: no Lord’s Prayer; no tenacious persuasion in the hearts of so many that one day goodness will triumph over evil. To bring matters closer home, there would have been no Pilgrim Fathers urged by their faith to set forth for the New World in search of religious freedom, imbued with the high ideals which must still be the inspiration of all right-minded men and women today if justice and decency are to survive. Indeed, “remarkable” is scarcely an adequate word to describe this Book, or more properly, this collection of Books (seeing that there are sixty-six in all within its covers) which has had so dynamic an influence on the course of human events down through the ages. The only appropriate word is “unique.”
But the question at once arises as to why this work should have had so fundamental an effect upon men. We have but to open the Bible to find the answer. It starts with the bare assertion: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” As it begins, so it continues to its close. With a positiveness which permits of no dispute, it everywhere claims to recount the acts and purposes of God; regarding itself as qualified, both to speak about Him and to speak on behalf of Him. This it does without making either a formal statement of its right to do so, or providing any explicit assurance that what it records is the absolute and undeniable truth. It simply sees no need for doing either, for presupposed throughout is a readiness, in fact a positive obligation on the part of the reader to accept its accuracy as beyond reproach, and its authority, in consequence, as unquestionable. Thus in all its parts it presents the reader of every age with one consistent challenge—to regard it unequivocally as the authoritative revelation of God to man. It is this which explains its powerful influence in the past. Accepting the authority of the Bible, men and women have believed its message and surrendered to its guidance.
Tide flowing away
But today the tide is flowing ever faster in the opposite direction. Never have the claims of the Bible been altogether unresisted, but in no age have they been more strenuously and arrogantly opposed than in our own. In fact we live in the days when it is becoming increasingly the fashion to either ridicule those claims or to ignore them altogether. And, what is worse, even those who profess reverence for the Bible are sometimes to be found in the ranks of those who question its inspiration and authority. Since, therefore, its promises of salvation and its credentials as the authoritative revelation of God stand or fall together, an emphatic restatement of its claims is clearly necessary. In fact, the case of the Bible and that of Jesus Himself are in this respect identical. For the Bible is either the Word of God, or it is not His Word. Likewise, the claim of Jesus that “no man cometh unto the Father but my me”, is either true or false. In neither case are half measures possible; it must be all or nothing. Now if, as indeed should be the case, Jesus is everything to us, there is no doubt as to what our attitude should be. It should be the same as His. And what His attitude was the Gospel records make abundantly plain, all four of them. So let us look at them, each in turn, beginning with the Gospel of Matthew.
Matthew, early in his record, portrays Jesus under trial in the wilderness. Famished, He experiences the urge to use His newly acquired miraculous powers for the satisfaction of His hunger. But at once there comes the answer to this temptation: “It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone . . .” So also in the case of the temptation to use His powers spectacularly for His own self-advancement, His answer is: “It is written again, Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God.” And again in the case of the temptation to fall down and worship evil. His answer is: “Get thee hence Satan: for it is written, Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and Him only shalt thou serve.” The spirit behind this threefold appeal to the Old Testament is one of reverence, and an unquestioning respect for its authority.
The same attitude by Jesus to Old Testament Scripture is to be seen repeatedly in other incidents recorded by Matthew. Challenged by the Pharisees on the issue of divorce, He asked them: “Have ye not read that He which made them at the beginning made them male and female?” There was a record to be consulted, the book of Genesis. But, for Jesus, if it was Moses who wrote it, the authority behind it was nevertheless that of God Himself. So, too, in the case of David when he wrote: “The Lord said unto my Lord, Sit thou at my right hand till I make thy foes thy footstool.” It was, insisted Jesus, “in spirit”, that is, under divine inspiration, that David here spoke of the Messiah as his Lord. Everything in the appeal of Jesus to this statement of David hung on the meaning of a single word. That made no difference; in fact it was all important, precisely because for Him every single word in the Old Testament record had divine authority behind it.
Mark makes this as clear as Matthew, not only in his own account of this incident, but also elsewhere. He refers to a dispute between Jesus and the Pharisees over the matter of purification, and quotes Jesus as saying: “Moses said, Honor thy father and thy mother.” But in the very same context he also records Jesus as referring to these words of Moses as “the commandment of God” on the one hand, and “the word of God” on the other, thus revealing that for Jesus the precept had an authority far higher than that of Moses himself. So, too, in the case of the words of Isaiah which Jesus quoted when He cleansed the temple: “Is it not written, My house shall be called of all nations the house of prayer ?” He was here appealing to a known body of Scripture, recognized by Him and the Jewish people alike as possessing the authority of a divine revelation.
Such examples can be paralleled from the record of Luke, but his Gospel has the added advantage of providing us with details of the instruction given by Jesus to His disciples after His resurrection from the dead. It is common today for some who are avowed believers, but who do not concede the full inspiration of the Scriptures, to argue that Jesus, in the incidents which we have just examined, was merely accommodating Himself to the beliefs and mistaken assumptions of His own time. Some even dare to affirm that He was as mistaken as those whom He sought to instruct! In that case, what of Luke’s account of the guidance given by Jesus to His disciples after His resurrection? Is it conceivable, now that He was in possession of complete knowledge of all things, that He would deliberately mislead His disciples and convey to them a wholly false attitude to Scripture when He affirmed: “Ought not Christ to have suffered these things, and to enter into his glory”, and then, “beginning at Moses and all the prophets” expounding unto them in all the Scriptures the things concerning Himself? To any fair minded person the significance of this incident is obvious: Jesus appealed in this way to Scripture as possessing final divine authority, precisely because such authority did in fact reside in it.
Luke certainly understood this to be the case, because he went on to portray Jesus as addressing all His assembled disciples on yet another occasion, and saying once more in reference to His crucifixion: “These are the words which I spake unto you, while I was yet with you, that all things must be fulfilled, which were written in the law of Moses, and in the prophets, and in the Psalms concerning me.” Luke even goes on to comment: “Then opened He their understanding, that they might understand the Scriptures, and said unto them, Thus it is written, and thus it behooved Christ to suffer, and to rise from the dead the third day.”
Language could not be more explicit, nor its meaning more obvious. In keeping with it, John in his turn represents Jesus as fulfilling one Old Testament prophecy after another in the things which He did and suffered, and on occasions informing His disciples of the particular Scripture which was being fulfilled, or which had to be fulfilled in what was happening before their eyes.
Consistency of witness
The consistency of witness by the Gospel writers is amazing, and leaves us in no doubt as to what their attitude toward Scripture was. The evidence of the remainder of the New Testament is an emphatic confirmation of theirs. In the Acts of the Apostles and in the Epistles alike, the authority of Scripture is constantly invoked. The writers in their turn follow in the footsteps of their predecessors, the prophets, claiming divine inspiration and authority for their own writings. The Apostle Peter who, in his Second Epistle, affirmed that “prophecy came not in old time by the will of man; but holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Spirit”, had no hesitation in affirming also in his First Epistle that the Gospel had been preached to his readers by witnesses provided “with the Holy Spirit sent down from heaven.” Paul claimed calmly and unpretentiously, in his first letter to his Corinthian converts: “The things that I write unto you are the commandments of the Lord.” To his Thessalonian converts he said: “When ye received the word of God which ye heard of us, ye received it not as the word of men, but as it is in truth, the word of God, which effectively worketh also in you that believe.”
These words are worth thinking about, worth believing in, and worth acting upon, not only as referring to the Gospel message in particular (to which they especially apply), but also because of their fitness as a comment on the Bible as a whole. And the same is true of Paul’s assurance to Timothy that “all Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness: that the man of God may be perfect, throughly furnished unto all good works.” We thus see that ultimately it is only intimate personal experience with the unique qualities of the Bible when it is approached reverently that can bring that depth of conviction of its divine origin which can withstand all the assaults of the enemy. Such experience is demonstration in itself that the Word of God is indeed quick and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart. Having had such experience, a man can truly say with the Psalmist. “Thy word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path.”
Let us honor the Bible then for what it is, the inspired Word of God, and allow its light to guide us to His kingdom.
The Origin of the Organic World – Part One