37. The Plan, Purpose, and People of the History of Redemption Offer a Reasonable Basis for Belief

The Plan, Purpose, and People of the History of Redemption Offer a Reasonable Basis for Belief The attitude of one who believes that God spake to man through the prophets to whom he gave a message for his people is also fundamentally different from that of one who disbelieves this hundred-times repeated statement of the Old Testament. A believer in Theism can accept the statements of the Old Testament books, especially in the light of the New, as being what they appear on the face of them to be. If any statements of the Old Testament are proved to be false, he lays the blame to a corruption of the text or to a wrong interpretation of the evidence. For he is convinced that the Bible contains the revelation of the divine plan for the redemption of humanity from sin unto holiness and everlasting life. All that he wants, or needs, to have established, is that this plan has been handed down to us in a sufficiently reliable form to insure the purpose of the divine author. The reasonable Christian can rejoice and believe that the Bible has thus been handed down. The plan is there in the documents of the Old Testament and of the New, as clear as day. The purpose is there. The Jewish people existed and exists, according to the Scripture, as an ever-present evidence that the plan and the purpose were of God. The Christian church in like manner exists as an evidence that the Gospel of salvation was really meant for the whole world. This Gospel has met and satisfied the need and the hope of human nature for pardon and communion with God, and it is meeting them to-day. Millions exult in their present faith and die at peace and in hope of a blessed and an everlasting life. The Bible and the church are the foundation of this faith and peace and hope. The history of Israel is continued in the history of the Christian church. He who attacks one attacks both. United they stand; divided they fall. Unitedly they present a reasonable foundation for the belief that God has never left himself without a witness that he loves mankind and will have all men to believe and to come to a knowledge of the truth. Looked at in the light of the whole world’s history from the beginning until now, the history of the religion of the Old Testament as given in the books themselves, unrevised and fairly interpreted, is rational and worthy of trust. In this faith we live; in this faith let us die.