A CLEAN SWEEP

THE GOOD NEWS BULLETIN

A CLEAN SWEEPTHE WONDER OF THE BOOK

-By Dyson Hague, D.D.

“Thy testimonies are wonderful!” is the enthusiastic outburst of the 129th verse of the 119th Psalm. It has been echoed from soul to soul through the centuries, for the Book grows on us as experience is enlarged. The more deeply we search it, the more we feel that the Bible is not merely a book, but The Book. Sir Walter Scott in his dying hour asked his son-in-law t o read to him out of the Book. And when Lockhart asked him a question, “What book? The great man replied, “There is only one Book, the Bible. In the whole world it is called the ‘Book’” Yes. All other books are mere leaves, fragments. It is the perfect Book. It is the eternal Book. It is the voice; all others are merely echoes.

Of course, we all know that the Bible literally means the Book. It is a translation of the Greek title of the Bible, He Biblos; in English, the Book. In the Greek New Testament it is the first word of the first chapter of the first book, Bibles Geneses, which almost be rendered the Bible of Genesis, the Bible of the beginning, or origin, or source, a curious counterpart to the first words of the first chapter of the Old Testament. It is the Book that stands alone; unapproachable in grandeur; solitary in splendor; mysterious in ascendancy; as high above all other books as Heaven above the earth, as the Son of God above the sons of men. Compare JN.1:1-3; JN.3:31; JN.17:17.

THE WONDER IN ITS CONSTRUCTION

Now, one of the first things about this Book that evokes our wonder is the very fact of its existence. Any one who has history and origin of the Divine Word must be overwhelmed with wonderment at the mysterious method of its information. That it ever was a book, and is today the Book of the modern world, is really a literary miracle. Think of this. There never was any order given to any man to plan the Bible, nor was there any concerted plan on the part of the men who wrote, to write the Bible. The way in which the Bible gradually through the centuries grew, is one of the mysteries of time. Little by little, part by part, century after century, it came out in disconnected fragments and unrelated portions, written by various men without any intention, so far as we can tell, of anything like concerted arrangement. One man wrote one part in Syria, another man wrote another part in Arabia, a third man wrote in Italy or Greece. Some writers wrote hundreds of years after or before the others, and the first part was written about fifteen hundred years before man who wrote the last part was born, for the authorship of the books of the Bible ranges over a period of nearly sixteen centuries.

Now take any other book you can think of on the spur of the moment and think how it came to be a book. In nine cases out of ten a man determined to write a book. Then he thought out the thoughts. Then he collected the material. Then he wrote it, or dictated it. Then he had it copied or printed; and it was completed within two or three or more months or years. The average book, we may suppose, takes from a year to ten years to produce, though a book like Gibbons’ “Decline and fall of the Roman Empire,” or Tennyson’s Poems, took longer to complete. But, generally speaking, any book you can think of has been produced by one man within his own generation. Now here is a Book that took at least one thousand five hundred years to write, and spanned the span of sixty generations of this famous old world’s history.

It enlarges our conception of God; it gives us new ideas of His infinite patients; we think of the wonder of His calm. Quite waiting as He watched the strain and the haste and the restlessness of man across the feverish years, while slowly and silently the great Book grew. Here a little and there a little of it came on; Here a bit of history, and there a bit of prophesy; here a poem, and there a biography; and at last in the process of time, as silently as the House of the Lord of old ( 1K.6:7) it came forth before a needy world in its finished completeness.

When Moses died there were only five small portions. When David sat upon the throne there were a few parchments more. One by one princes and priest and prophets laid on the growing pile their greater and smaller contributions, until in proces of time the whole of the Old Testament Bible was written in its entirety; word fore word, letter for letter, sentence for sentence, book for book, precisely as we have it now, intact and complete. As Josephus, the famous Jewish historian declared: “Never, although many ages have elapsed, has ever any one dared to take away or add, or to transpose anything whatever, for it is implanted in all the Jews from their earliest childhood to speak of them as the decrees, or statutes, of God.”

But if the construction of the thirty-nine books of the Old Testament is wonderful, the formation of the twenty-seven books of the New Testament is equally superhuman. For the New Testament is even a greater miracle from the literary standpoint than the Old Testament. The Jews, we know, were not a writing people. One hardly knows of a Jew who ever wrote a book, except Josephus, and we doubt very much if the average man or woman could mention two. The training, as Bishop Wescott once said, was exclusively oral and they had a disinclination for literary work. Everything in the national and spiritual position of the apostles was unfavorable to the formation of a written word.

To their Jewish minds the Old Testament admitted no rival, and seemed to require no supplement. That the New Testament should ever have been written by Jews is a moral miracle of overwhelming dignity. Not only so, but their Master was not a writer. Jesus never wrote a line as far as we know, and the idea of their writing an additional or supplementary Bible would never seem to enter the mind of His disciples. They would doubtless have sprang back with horrors at the very idea of such a thing, and for fifty years after Jesus was born there was probably not a line of the New Testament written. But then, by the mystic suggestion and overruling design of the Almighty Spirit, without any concerted collaboration or unity of plan, fragment by fragment, here a little, there a biography, the New Testament grew. But remember; there was no pre-arrangement. It was not as if Matthew, and Mark, and Luke, and John came together in committee, and after solemn conference and seeking for the leading of the Spirit, Matthew undertook to write of Christ as King, and Mark said, “I would like for my part to write of Him as a Worker,” and Luke said, “And I think I will undertake to delineate Him as the Man,” and then John said, “Well, I will crown it all by writing of Him as the Son of God!” It was not as if Paul met James one day and after talking about it, Paul agreed to write of the dogmatic, and James of the practical aspects of Christianity. Nothing of the sort. There is no trace of such a thing. They simply wrote as they were moved by the Holy Ghost 2 PE.1: 21, to meet some passing need, to express some earnest longing, to teach some glorious truth, by a letter, or a treatise, or a memoir. And so this composite of fragmentary memoirs and letters came into this miraculous unit that we call the New Testament. Yes! The Book is marvelous; it is transcendental: it is altogether unexplainable. It is the miracle in literature in its origin and construction, for as Bishop Westcott says, “There is no trace of any designed connection between the separate books, and still less of any outward unity or completeness in the entire collection. If the books combined to form a perfect whole, then this completeness is due, not to any conscious cooperation of the authors, but to the will of Him by whose power they wrote and wrought.” In one word: The very existence of the Bible is an overwhelming proof that the Book is not of man, but that it is a production of Almighty God.

THE WONDER OF ITS UNIFICATION

Another marvel: it is one book, yet made up of many books. We talk of this Bible as a book, but we seldom think of it as a library. Very few of us, save those who studied the matter, ever think of this book as whole Library in itself. It is a complete library, consisting of sixty six separate volumes, written by between thirty and forty different authors, in three different languages, upon totally different topics, and under extraordinarily different circumstance. One author wrote history, another about biography, another about sanitary science and hygiene; one wrote on theology, another wrote poetry, another prophecy. Some of the authors wrote on philosophy and jurisprudence, others on genealogy and ethnology, and some on stories of adventure and travel or romantic interest. Why, if these sixty-six books were printed separately, in large sized print on heavy paper, and bound in morocco, they could all hardly stand on one table! And yet here we have them all, the whole sixty-six volumes, in a little book that a child can carry in its little hand. And the strangest thing of all is that, though their subjects are so diverse and so difficult, the most difficult of all conceivable subjects; though there was no possibility of anything like concerted action or transfer of literary responsibility (for it was impossible for the man who wrote the first to have had the slightest knowledge what the men would write about one thousand years after he was born), yet this miscellaneous collection of heterogeneous writings is not only unified by the binder in one book, but so unified by God the Author, that no one ever thinks of it today as anything else than One Book! And One Book it is, the miracle of all literary unity.

THE WONDER OF ITS AGE OR YOUTH

Again, it is a wonder that this Book is here today. I repeat it is a wonder that we have the Bible at all when we think of its age. When we compare the Bible as A book with any other book in this respect it is a perfect wonder. I will tell you why. We all know that the greatest test of literature is time. Do you know of any book that is read by any one today to speak of that was written one thousand years ago? Books that were the rage a few years ago are forgotten today. Whoever thinks nowadays of reading “Robert Ellesmore,” or asks at a book store for Rider Haggard’s “She”? Why, poor “David Harum” is almost unsellable, and we will soon hear nothing of “The Rosary.” These books were born, were boomed, and died. The cold hand of oblivion is laid upon them. It is the echo of 1 CO.7:31. The fashion of this world passes away! Their force is spent. Their power is gone. They were literary skyrockets; they are like the popular songs of ten years ago. The transientness of the great sales of the day is almost a sign of the times. Or think of how really admirable historic novels like Charles Reade’s “The Cloister and the Hearth,” or Stanley Weyman’s “A Gentleman of France,” or Conan Doyle’s “Micah Clark,” have passes as for selling of the best sellers goes. Where is the book, after all, that is five hundred years old and read by the masses today? As we said, a book that is one thousand or two thousand or three thousand years old is read by nobody. Horace and Homer may be studied by students of the classics, and school boys may have Virgil and Xenophon crammed into them, but whoever thinks of reading them? They are dead books in a dead language. For you can put it down for a certainty that the older a book is the smaller is its chance of surviving, or being read by people of diverse nationalities.

And here is another thing. No book ever has had much chance of being circulated widely amongst a people from which it did not originate. No book, for instance, written by a Spaniard has much chance of being read by Russians. German works are read by Germans; English works by Englishmen. I know of people who never could enjoy “Old Mortality,” for they are Scotch. What work do you know of, with few great exceptions, such as Dante, Cervantes, Goethe, Dumas, Shakespeare, Tolstoi or Bunyan, that has been able to overleap the bonds of nationality? And as to Turkey, China, or Mexico, or Brazil, what man out of a hundred could tell you whether they had any authors, or if they had, the name of one of their works. But the marvelous thing about the Bible is that it is the only book in the world that has not only overleaped the barrier of time, and is possesses of an agelessness that is central youth; that it shows no sign of the decrepitude of advancing years; It is the only book in the whole world that has been able to overleap the barrier of nationality.

Sir William Jones pointed out long ago that all other Oriental books, be they ever so political, or be they ever so wise, in order that they may be made intelligible and palatable to the Western mind, require to be transfused. Passage after passage has to be omitted, and large sections have to be modified. Curious, is it not, that this Oriental Book, this Bible of ours, whether taken to Greenland, Madagascar, South Africa, or India, is the Book that appeals to the mind and heart of those that hear it. Or take the Koran. Carlyle said of the Koran that it is regarded with a reverence by the Moslem, which few Christians pay even to their Bible. The whole of it is read daily in certain mosques by thirty relays of priest. There are Mohammedan doctors who have read it 70,000 times. “But,” he adds, with his dry humor, “nothing but a sense of duty could carry an European through the Koran. I must say, it is as toilsome reading as I ever undertook. There is in it unreadable masses of lumber; a wearisome, confused jumble; endless iterations; long-windedness; entanglement; insupportable stupidity; in short, it is written, so far as writing goes, as badly as any book ever was” (Heroes, p. 59)

Or take the other so-called Bibles. The Veda of the Hindus dates 1,000 B.C. The Zendavesta of the Parsees dates 500 B.C. The King or Confucian text of the Chinese dates 500 B.C. these have been translated into at least one language beside their own, but their circulation has been so infinitesimal as to be quite unknown. As books they excite no general interest whatever.

Now the Bible was written mainly in a dead language, for the Hebrew language is, technically speaking, a language that is scarcely spoken or written today; and yet that Book, written in a dead language, written by men who died two thousand or three thousand years ago, is not only living today, but it is the most widely circulated book in the world.

THE WONDER OF ITS CIRCULATION

This is another marvelous thing. The old Book is easily the best seller of the day. There are perhaps people who think that the Bible is a book of the past, and not sold now. Yet think of its circulation today. An influential citizen of Toronto, who has devoted a vast amount of time and attention to the subject, has made the extraordinary computation that through thirty Bible Societies (British and Foreign Bible Societies by itself publishes over 10,000,000 copies of the Scripture a year), and the various publishing houses in many lands, that there are probably published over 30,000,000 copies of the Bible a year. You may sometimes see an advertising circular of a typewriting concern asserting that its machines are used in all parts of the world and in all languages. But when you investigate, you find the languages used are at the outside about seventy in number. Here is a book that has been translated in over 900 languages, and is not only found in every great center of the world, but is read from the snow hut of the Eskimo to the last lone village of the South Sea islander. A remarkable thing about its sale is its Purchase by the Yiddish ragman, the Polack axe man, the Chinese laundryman, the Arabian boatman, the Hottentot miner, in order that they may learn their own tongue in this wonderful Book. You can quite understand then what a leading bookseller said when he was asked what book had the largest circulation. He did not mention a recent novel or the latest scientific work. He said that the book, which outsells all the other books in the world was the book called the Bible. Other books compute their circulation by thousands; the Bible by millions.

THE WONDER OF ITS INTEREST

Another marvelous thing about this book is that it is the only book in the world read by all classes of people. You know very well that literary people rarely read a child’s book, and children would not read books of philosophy and science even if they could. If a book is philosophical and scientific it commands the attention of literary people, and if it is a child’s book it is read in the nursery. A wonderful thing it is to think that there is one book that differs from all others; a book that is read to the little child and read by the old man as he trembles on the brink of the other world. Years ago I heard a nurse reading a story to my child, and I said to her, “What is it that you are reading to that little one?” :I am reading the story of Joseph in the Bible,” she answered. And the little child, in excitement, cried, “Please don’t stop her, please,” as she listened with delighted interest to the reading of a book that was written in Hebrew probably three thousand five hundred years ago. And not far away from the room where the little child was listening, there sat one of the noblest of modern minds, one of the greatest of modern scientist, our foremost Canadian scholar, the great Sir William Dawson, President of McGill University, Montreal, reading with profound devotion and a higher delight the pages of that same marvelous Book.

Here is a phenomenon. One of the ablest of modern scientists delights in the reading of a book, which is a joy of a little child in the nursery! Verily it is without a parallel in literature. Our boys and girls read and study it in myriads of homes and Sunday Schools, and great scholars like Newton, and Herschel, and Faraday, and Brewster, and great statesmen like Gladstone and Lincoln and Lord George, and ggeat soldiers like Gustavus Adolphus, and Gordon, and Stonewall Jackson, have taken this Book as the joy and the guide of their life.

THE WONDER OF ITS LANGUAGE

Another wonderful thing is that this Book was not written in Athens, the seat of learning in Greece, nor Alexandria in Egypt. It was written by men who received their inspiration from the ancient sources of wisdom. It was written by men who liven in Palestine, in Nazareth, in Galilee. Many of the writers are what we would call illiterate. Not only were they not university men, or scholars, or original thinkers; they could not speak their own language properly. There is a strong probability that neither John nor Peter could speak grammatically. You remember Peter was trapped because his dialect betrayed him. He speaks like a Galilean, with a provincial assent (MT.26:73; AC.2&; 4:13). Perhaps you remember the story of the Yorkshire man who was asked whether you should pronounce either, ither, or ether, and said, “Other of ‘em will do.” And you surely have heard the brogue of the Irishman from the green isle with his soide, and wan, and noite. Now it was probable something like that with Peter and John. They were uneducated men. It is probably that Peter at the time spoke in the Aramaic dialect, and not only the words, but the pronunciation of the Northern province differed very strongly from the cultured dialect of Judea and the city of Jerusalem. There were certain letters such as the guttural Aleph for A, for instance, which they could not properly pronounce, and his mistakes even in short sentences would be at once detected. When it was said in AC.4:13 that they perceived that they were unlearned and ignorant men, it means that they were recognized at once they were not what we call today college men, men who had studied in the schools of Jewish culture.

Now many of the men who wrote the Bible were of that character. One was a farm hand. Another was a shepherd. They were men of no literary reputation. And yet from men of that type educationally came a Book that God in His mysterious power has so divested of all provincialism that it has become the standard of the language of the most literary nations of the world. And not only so; it is a book that has gone to the North and South and East and West. It is the strongest factor in modern life today. And yet it is of the ancient world! It is the most potent factor in the influence of the great nations of the progressive West; and yet it proceeded from the narrowest and most conservative people of the unprogressive East. All its authors were Jews. And the Jews by instinct and tradition, by education and sentiment, were the narrowest of all people. The Jew was not only narrow; he had no interest in other nations. You know what a time it took to get the idea into Peter’s head that he ought to have an interest in the salvation of the Gentiles of the outside world. Only a miracle of special revelation did it (AC.10:28; Gal.2:11-14). How do you explain then the fact that these ignorant men, these most un-cosmopolitan men, with all their provincialism and exclusiveness, and insularity, were enabled to write a Book, which has become the not only Book of the Jews, but the Book of all men, and the Book of the world today. It is for only one tongue, and that is, the worlds. It is for universal man as man.

It is the proud boast of the Church of Rome today that it has but one language, and that a dead language, the Latin. But the Bible Societies have a prouder boast. It is their boast that they have printed the Bible in over six hundred living languages; that they are giving the living Word to every nation under Heaven, that they hear in their own language the wonderful works of God. “Is the Christian Church speaking with tongues?” asked the Bishop of London. And he answered his own question with the words: “Yes, in the Bible Society!” Yes! God has so ever ruled the history of His world that there has been born a Society which had reestablished the miracle of Pentecost (AC.2:9,11). It is truly a miracle. It is a wonder to think that an old Hebrew book written by a lot of Jews, has in God’s mystic providence been so divested of all Orientalism and Judaism, and rabbinism, that the millions upon millions of boys and girls and men and women who read it never think of it as the writing of Hebrews or the language of an ancient and Oriental race. To them they are simply the words of their own dear mothers tongue. It is the English Bible; the best that our literature can give in simple noble prose, as Frederic Harrison once said in a lecture at Oxford. Or as Huxley declared: “This Book, the Bible, has been woven into the life of all that is best and noblest in English history; it has become the national epic of Britain; it is written in the noblest and purest English.”

THE WONDER OF ITS PERSECUTION

Another wonderful thing about the Bible is that it is almost the only Book in the world that has stood age after age of ferocious and incessant persecution. Century after century man have tried to burn and bury it, Crusade after crusade has been organized to extirpate it. Kings of the earth set themselves, and rulers of the church took counsel together to destroy it from off the face of the earth. Diocletin, the Roman Emperor, in 303 inaugurated the most terrific onslaught that the world has known upon a book. Every Bible almost was destroyed, myriads of Christians perished, and a column of triumph was erected over an exterminated Bible with the inscription: “Extincto nominee Christanorum” (the name of the Christians has been extinguished). And yet how many years after, the Bible came forth, as Noah from the ark, to repeople the earth, and in the year 325 Constantine enthroned the Bible as the Infallible Judge of Truth in the first General Council.

Then followed the prolonged persecution of Medievalism. You all know how the Church of Rome denied the Scriptures to the people. The Church of Rome has never trusted the people with the Bible. For ages it was practically an unknown book. Even Luther was a grown up man when he said that he had never seen a Bible in his life. No jailer ever kept a prisoner closer than the Church of Rome has kept the Bible from the people. Not only so; in consequence of Edicts of Councils and the bans and bulls of popes were burned, and Bible readers sent by the Inquisition to rack and flame. Many of us have seen the spot in old London where baskets full of English Testaments were burned with great display by the order of Rome.

Yet perhaps the most deadly persecution of all has been during the last one hundred and fifty years. The bitterest foes of the Bible, curiously enough, were men who claimed liberty of thought, and Bolingbroke, and Hume, and Voltaire seemed so confident of the extermination of the Bible, that the Frenchman declared that a hundred years after his day not a Bible would be found save as an antiquarian curiosity. Then came the German rationalistic host, with the fiercest and deadliest of all the attacks, Baur, and Strauss, and the Tubingen School took up the cry of the children of Edom: “Down with it, down with it, even to the ground.” But He that sitteth in His silent Heaven laughed; Jehovah has had them in derision )PS.2:2-4)’ For here it is today, and stronger than ever. It stands, and it will stand. The adversaries have done their worst. They have charged their heaviest charge. They have fired their deadliest volley. Whatever unexpected adversaries appear in the future, no more destructive trios than Julian and Celsus and Porphyry, than Voltaire and Strauss and Renan, than Eichhorn, Wellhausen and Kuenen, will ever be confederate against it. Yes, in spite of these age long persecutions the Word of the Lord is having free course and is being glorified. It is being circulated at the rate of millions of copies a year, in almost every language of the globe. It has an influence it never possessed before, greater in power, greater in life, greater in freshness, and the beauty of spring. “Think of it,” said an eloquent American Bishop, “the same Word, brilliant with eternal youth, skin without scar, organ without disease, voice without weakness, step without failure, eye without dimness; the untouched, unharmed, scatheless Word of God.” Verily as we think of it we may challenge our proud age with the challenge of Moses, and cry, “Ask now of the days that are past, which were before thee, since the day that God created man upon the earth, and ask from one side of heaven unto the other, whether there hath been any such things as this great thing is, or hath been heard like it?” DWE.4:32.

THE CROWNING WONDER

But before I close I would like to briefly refer to certain other things that are on my mind the crowning wonders of his wonderful Book.

The Wonder of its Self-authenticatingnes

There is, first of all, what we might call its self-authenticatingness. You need no historical critic or university professor to prove that the Bible is God’s own Word. The Holy Ghost alone is the author and giver of that conviction. If you will but hear the accents of His voice you will be assured beyond all possibility of arguments that this book is God’s own Word. The Bible is not in need of proof, says Bettex, for it does not treat of that which is relative, but establishes that which is absolute. The relative must be proved; the absolute cannot. Have you proofs that the sun shines, that the stars twinkle? Can you prove that the rose is fragrant, that bread nourishes you, that love refreshes your soul, and that hatred grieves it? Can that which is greatest,, and best, and loftiest, and most beautiful, be proved? As Pascal has finely said, “there are truths that are felt and there are truths which are proved. Primary truths are not demonstrable. Principles are felt; propositions are proved. The heart has reason, which the reason does not know.” Men have come and still come to settle and destroy; the Spirit of Christ comes to validate and confirm with a divine conviction and a divine certainty that is incommunicable by mere reason and is impervious to the assault of doubt. You have perhaps heard Spurgeon’s famous story of the poor woman who was confronted by a modern agnostic, and asked: “What are you reading?” “I am reading the Word of God.” “The Word of God? Who told you that?” “He told me so Himself.” “Told you so? Why, how can you prove that?” Looking skyward, the poor soul said: “Can you prove to me that there is a sun up in the sky?” “Why, of course; the best proof is that it warms me, and I can see its light.” “That’s it!” was her joyous reply. “The best proof that this Book is the Word of God is that it warms and lights my soul.” You cannot explain this. But it is a fact deep and real.

THE WONDER OF ITS INEXHAUSTIBILITY

Another wonder of the Bible is its inexhaustibility. It is like a seed. You might tell how many acorns are on an oak tree, but you cannot tell how many oaks are in an acorn. The tree that grows from a seed produces in turn seeds of other trees; each seed the possible germ of trees. So the Bible. Its depth is infinite; its height is infinite. Millions of readers and writers, age after age, have dug in this unfathomable mine. And its depths are still unexhausted. Age after age it has gathered with ever increasing creative power, ideas and plans, and schemes, and themes and books. Yes, books; and in many cases, books that are the only literature of the nation. The greatest minds have been its expositors. Myriads of students have studied it daily, and its readers from day to day can be numbered by millions. The volumes that have been written on single chapters or even verses would fill the shelves of many a library, and today they are as fresh, as fertile, as inexhaustible, as the day they were first written. The treasures yet to be found are as the stars of the sky in infinity of multitude.

THE WONDER OF ITS CREATIVENESS

The creative power of the Bible is one of the miracles of history. Take the history of literature, for instance. Could you name at random three creative works in the same class with Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” Bunyan’s “Pilgrim’s Progress,” and Dante’s “Inferno,” whose grandeur springs as a tree from its root, direct from the Bible? Think of the enormous volume of speeches, and appeals, and tracts, and addresses, and circulars, and books, and leaflets, and booklets that have poured out, and are pouring out, millions upon millions, flooding this might modern world every week, with their inspiration and suggestion. Think of the tremendous national and international movements that have owed their impulse to a verse or verses or words from the Bible. The transforming of modern Europe was owing to the Bible. It is a liberating Book. It has made nations free. “Here,” was the word from Queen Victoria to an African prince as the Bible was handed to him, “here is the secret of England’s greatness.” Yes. And it is the secret of American greatness.

Or take two of the greatest movements of the modern world . the missionary enterprise of the last hundred years with its unparalleled heroism, its magnificent altruism, its world comprehension and penetration, owes its impetus and energy to practically one verse in the Bible: “Go ye into all the world, and preach the Gospel to ever creature” MK.16:15. And the movement of social reform, its effort to relieve poverty, to improve conditions, to suppress misery, and generally to uplift the level of humanity, is all the result of the teaching of this wonderful Book. The most notable philanthropic achievement in the modern world, the works of Wilberforce. And Shaftesbury, and Barnardo, and Muller, and General Booth, are the effects of the inspiration of the Bible. What has atheism or infidelity done? What did they do in the Great War of God throughout the ages? Above all, what mortal tongue can tell, what mortal mind compute the number of souls that through the life-changing words of this mysterious volume have the life that is life indeed. The Bible is book of Life, and it is a book for life. This is not a mere theory of theology. It is a fact. A million souls today can echo the words of Psalm 119:93, “I will never forget thy precepts: for with them thou hast quickened me,” i.e., hast given me new life. They know by vital experience the truth of the statement of Christ, “The words that I speak unto you, they are spirit and they are life.” Yes, it saves! It saves! It saves!

THE WONDER OF ITS AUTHORITATIVENESS

The irresistible authoritativeness of the Bible; this is another wonder. The Word of God breaks upon you as a voice from Heaven. Five hundred times in the Pentateuch it prefaces or concludes its declaration with the sublime assertion, “The Lord said,” or “The lord spake”! Three hundred times again in the following books it does the same, and in the prophetical twelve hundred times again with such expressions as: “Hear the word of the Lord,” or “Thus saith the Lord,” or “The mouth of the Lord hath spoken it.” It challenges the will of every soul that ever lived with its stupendous claim: “God spake these words, and said.” No other book dares thus to address itself to the universal conscience. No other book could speak with such binding claim, or presume to command the obedience of mankind. No other book can stand as the Bible on the commanding heights and cry: “Unto you, O men, I call; and my voice is to the sons of men” PR.8: 1-4; or look over the vast spaces of time in every century, and of the globe in every continent and say: “O earth, earth, earth, hear the word of the Lord” JE.22:29. And the strange thing is that men in every age and clime acknowledge it. They know that the Book speaks to their inner consciousness with an authority like the authority of God Himself. It had the authority of God. It has the authority of the Son of God who said, “My word is truth.” Therefore we receive it. Therefore we trust it. And we find it true.

THE WONDER OF ITS REINSPIRATION

Another wonder is what might be called its perpetual reinspiration. Men think of the Bible as a Book that was inspired. But the wonder of the Bible is that it is inspired. From the far-distant heights of time it comes sweeping into the hearts of man today, and the same breath of God that breathed into it its mystic life, makes it live and energize again today. It is the Living Word, vital with the life of the Living God who gave it and gives it living power. It is theopneustic, as Paul says 2 Ti.3:16, “God breathed.” The twenty third was inspired. But again and again today it is whispered in the hush of the death chamber, or read with the hidden cry, “Open thou mine eyes, that I may behold wondrous things out of thy law,” it is reinspired, and the Spirit makes it live once more. For this is the most remarkable and unique feature of the Bible. I feel that it is mine. Its cheering words are for me. Its prayers are the cries of m y heart. Its commands are to me. Its promises are mine. As I read the 103rd Psalm, it is not ancient Hebrew, it is present-day power; and I, a living soul, overwhelmed with gratitude, cry out: “Bless the Lord, O my soul.”

The other day I took up this dear old Bible that my mother gave me, and I noticed a verse in Genesis with a date written on the margin. These floated back upon my mind a time, some years ago, when I was in great trouble. I had to leave my dear wife and children, and to travel in quest of health in distant lands; and my heart within me was sad, and one day opening my Bible, at random, as men say, my eye caught these words in GE.28:15: “Behold, I am with thee, and will keep thee in all places whither thou goest, and will bring thee again into this land.” Shall I veer forget the flash of comfort that swept over my soul as I read that verse! All the exegetes and critics in the world could never persuade my soul that was a far off echo of a Babylonian legend, or some relic of an Oriental myth. No, no! That was a message to me. It came straight down to me. It swept into my soul as a voice from Heaven. It lifted me up, and no man will ever shake me out of the conviction that that message that day was God’s own Word to me, inspiring because inspired, inspired because inspiring.

THE WONDER OF ITS PROPHESY

Another wonder of the Bible is its prophesy. It shows things to come. It declared things that were not yet done, centuries before they happened. The Old Testament as a whole is a book of prediction, anticipation, and expectation. All through its thirty-nine volumes there are predictions daring beyond human conjecture. Its predictions with regard to Maob, to Edom, to Sidon, and Tyre, to Egypt and Assyria and Babylon are to definite and have been so marvelously fulfilled that they have scoffed the mouth of scoffers, and changed the hearts of infidels. The marvelous prophesy of the second and seventh chapters of Daniels surpass all Human forecasting ability. Its prophesy in the New Testament in regard to the kingdom and the last days have been incredible fulfilled during the passing centuries. Any thoughtful reader can conclude that the great question whether there is or is not a divine revelation is satisfactorily settled by GE.3: 15; 12:2,3; 22:18,19; 49:10 alone. The incredible question that in the descendant of an Oriental sheik all the families of the earth should be blessed; that world power surpassing in their might any of the modern nations should absolutely disappear, and their capitals be obliterated from the face of the earth; that a nation that was to be the source and center of the blessings of the world should be disrupted and scattered to the uttermost corners of the earth, and that upon its ruins should arise a world filling, all-nation embracing, spiritual inheritor of the divine blessing; all these are so far beyond the reach of human prophetic power that one is compelled by this argument alone to recognize the divine hand in authorship.

Take for instance, the prophesies about the first coming of Christ. Centuries before Christ was born His birth and career, His suffering and glory were all described in outline and in detail in the Old Testament. Christ is the only person ever born into the world whose ancestry, birth time, forerunner, birthplace, birth manner, infancy, manhood, teaching, character, career, preaching, reception, rejection, death, burial, resurrection, ascension, were all written in the most marvelous manner centuries before He was born. Who could draw a picture of a man not born yet? Surely God, and God alone. Nobody knew five hundred years ago that Shakespeare was going to be born; or two hundred years ago that Napoleon was to be born; or one hundred and fifty years ago that Queen Victoria was to be born. Yet here in the Bible we have the most striking and unmistakable likeness of a man portrayed, not by one, but by twenty or twenty five artists, none of whom had ever seen the man they were painting. The man was Jesus Christ. The painters were Bible writers. The canvas is the Bible. Beginning with faint touches in the books of Moses, Christ’s whole career is described, the pictures becoming more and more precise as the time of fulfillment draws near.

THE WONDER OF ITS CHRISTFULNESS

But the final wonder of the Book is Christ. He is its fullness, its center, its fascination. The Bible is Christocentric. It is all about Jesus! Some time ago a young Brahman said to one of our missionaries, “Many things which Christianity contains I find in Hinduism, but there is one thing that Christianity has that Hinduism has not.” “What is that?” said the missionary, whose curiosity was aroused. “A Saviour,” was the reply. That is it. That is the one thing. That is the supreme distinction of the Bible. Their sacred books contain philosophy and ethics and poetry and history and many important truths, and here and there, possible, a holy aspiration, or petition, inculcating virtues high and beautiful. But there are no divine promises, no divine counsels, no divine answers to prayer. There is no tender. Loving, listening, gracious, holy and righteous God, who as a father pitieth His children, and is love and light; no Almighty God, Creator of all things, and of all m en, the God of love, the God and Father of us all.

Above All, there is no glorious Mediator, the Son of God, and Son of man, the Lamb of God, and the Lord of man, who is grace and truth, and light of life, and coming glory. Genesis 1:1-3, and JN.1:1-3, GE,22:18, and JN.3:16, PS.23, and John 1o, Isaiah 53, and Romans 8 1 Corinthians 15, and Revelation 21 and 22, are a challenge to the world with regards to the validity of the divine revelation. Old Testament and New Testament alike tells of Jesus, who is the great fact of history, the great force of history, the great future of history; for of this Book it can be said: “The glory of God did lighten it and the Lamb is the light thereof.” And as long as man lives upon the face of the globe the Book that tells of the supreme personality, the center of a world’s desire, Jesus; Jesus, the arch of the span of history, the keystone of the arch of prophecy; Jesus, the revealed, the redeeming, the risen, the reigning, the returning Lord; Jesus, the desire of all nations; so long will this Book draw men’s hearts like a magnet, and men will stand by it, and die for it.

THE LAST WORD

LET ME SAY THIS ONE MORE WORD. Oh, do not think and do not say, as you have heard men say they think, that we ought to read this Book as we read any other book; we ought to study it and analyze it just as we do any textbook in literature or science. No, no! When you come to this Book, come to it with awe. Read it with reverence. Regard it with a most sacred attention. “Put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground.” Never, never compare this Book in the terms of human comparisons with other books. Comparison is dangerous. They are of earth. This from Heaven. And do not think and do not say that this Book only contains the words of God. It is the Word of God. To say the Bible contains the Word of God, instead of saying the Bible is the Word of God, is inadequate and misleading as Saphir declares. Everything that is in Scripture would authenticate itself to us as the Word of God, if we understood it in its right connection with the center.

Therefore, think not of it as a book, or even as a better book, but lift it in heart and mind and faith and love far, far above all, and ever regard it, not as the word of man, but as it is in truth, the Word of God; nay, more, as the living Word of the living God; Supernatural in origin; eternal in duration; inexpressible in value; infinite in scope; divine in authorship; human in penmanship; regenerative in power; infallible in authority; universal in interest; personal in application; and as Paul declares, inspired in totality.