1.D 02. Relation Bible Truth Christianity World
Relation of Bible Truth to Christianity in the World. But I am asked, “ Have we not, in the truth as it has been revealed in Jesus Christ, everything that is needed? If a man take the Gospels, and the life and sayings of the Lord Jesus Christ, and preach these, is he not thoroughly furnished to every good work, and does he need to go outside of the Bible? “Yes, he does, for no man can take the inside of the Bible if he does not know how to take the outside, The kingdom of God and of truth, as it is laid down in the New Testament, is a kingdom of seeds.
They have been sown abroad, and have been growing and developing in the world; and, whereas, when they were initiated they were but seminal forms, now they have spread like the banyan-tree. And shall I go back and talk about acorns after I have learned about oaks? Shall I undertake to say that the Infinite Truth that is in Jesus Christ is, all of it, comprised in the brief and fragmentary histories that are contained in the four Evangelists; that human life has been nothing; that there is no providence or inspiration in the working of God’s truth among mankind; no purposed connection between the history of the world for eighteen hundred years, vitalized by the presence of the Holy Ghost and those truths in the New Testament? All that Christianity has produced is a part of Christianity. All that has been evolved in human existence you may find as germ-forms in the Bible; but you must not shut yourselves up to those germ-forms, with stupid reverence merely for the literal text of the gospel.
It is the gospel alive, the gospel as it has been made victorious in its actual conflict with man’s lower nature, that you are to preach. What Christ is you are to learn, indeed, with all reverence, from the historic delineation of his sacred person and life; but also you are to read him in the suffering human heart, in the soul triumphant over suffering, in the self-sacrifice of the mother for her child, in the heroic father, in every man and woman who has learned from Christ some new development of glorious self giving for noble purposes. These are the commentaries expounded to you, through which you shall be able to know Christ vitally. All human nature that has been impregnated with a knowledge of Christ is the Bible commentary which you have to read in order to know who Christ is, and to learn that he is not shut up in the Gospels alone.