02.07. IS MY BIBLE A DIVINELY INSPIRED BOOK?
IS MY BIBLE A DIVINELY INSPIRED BOOK?
“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, thoroughly furnished unto all good works.” (2 Timothy 3:16).
“For many years there has rested upon a shelf in my library Dr. L. Gaussen’s book “Theopneustia.” It is a plea for the plenary inspiration of the Holy Scriptures, “deduced,” as the author says, “from the internal evidences and testimonies of nature, history, and science.”
It was favorably reviewed by Charles H. Spurgeon in England, James M. Gray in America ,and by others too numerous to mention in both countries. The title is taken from the text in Greek—the term “Theopneustos” meaning “God-breathed.”
It would be a bit difficult to find a stronger defense of plenary, yea, even of verbal inspiration, than exists in the employment of this meaningful word. In Genesis we have the record of man’s creation in these words:
“The Lord God formed man of the dust of the earth into his nostrils the breath of life and man became a living soul.” The Bible became a Living Book after the same manner. Its vitality is the product of the Divine breath. To accept that statement would be the end of controversy on the subject of inspiration; but many refuse so to do; and, for their sakes, we introduce what we trust will prove convincing evidence.
Turning, then, to the plain teaching of the text, we call attention to the Premises of Inspiration, the Proofs of Inspiration, and the Profits of Inspiration. THE PREMISES OF INSPIRATION The Scriptures make such a claim for themselves.
We have proven this statement in the previous chapters by somewhat copious quotations from Moses, David, Jeremiah. Ezekiel, Daniel, John, and others. Their further multiplication is not necessary at this point. No less an authority than Dr. Howard Kelly, of Johns Hopkins University, speaking before the Princeton Theological Seminary, February twenty-fifth, 1927: said: “I went through the book, through the Old Testament and through the New, and I found hundreds, yea, thousands of times that it claims to be the Word of God.” But the critics come and say, “Why; even the men who were reputed to have made this claim probably never lived; or, if so, they did not write the books.”
Driver and Kirkpatrick, in their volume, “The Higher Criticism,” fourth edition, page twenty, said: “The historical books are now seen to be not, as was once supposed, the works (for instance) of Moses, or Joshua, or Samuel, but are compiled out of the writings of distinct and independent authors, characterized by different styles and representing different points of view, which were combined together and otherwise adjusted, till they finally assumed their present form.”
And, of course, if these men, whose names are quoted, did not write the Bible, then the claims of Divine Inspiration for its contents may the disputed. But who consents with these critics? What process of reasoning could reach such an absurd conclusion? A book is its author’s adequate certificate, and in proportion to its greatness the author’s name is immortalized. How, then, does it happen that we have such matchless volumes as the historical, poetical and prophetic books of the Bible, and yet know so little of how they came into being, and what minds God employed as the womb, through which they arrived? In a volume published in 1909, now out of print, we employed this illustration—
“The story of how, after the repulse of the great Persian invader, Greece enacted a law that no one, under penalty of death, should espouse art, except free men. On one day all Greece was at Athens to behold an exhibit in the Agora. Pericles presided, with Aspasia at his side; while Phidias, Socrates, Sophocles, and others acted as judges. A group far more beautiful than the rest challenged universal attention, and excited the envy of all artists. But to the herald’s repeated question, “Who is the sculptor of this group?” there came no answer, and the conviction settled upon them that it must be the product of a slave. Amid the commotion, a beautiful maiden, with torn dress and disheveled hair, was dragged into the Agora, and the officers cried as they came, “This woman knows the sculptor.” To all their questions Cleone was silent. She thought if she should speak she would seal her brother’s doom. When Pericles could get nothing from her, he said, “The law is imperative; take the maiden to the dungeon.”
Then a youth, with emaciated face and flowing hair, rushed from his hiding place and cried, “Oh, Pericles, forgive and save the maiden. She is my sister. The group is the work of my hands, and I am but a slave.” The crowd cried out, “To the dungeon with him!”
Pericles answered, “No; behold that group! Apollo decides by it that there is something higher in Greece than an unjust law. The highest purpose of law should be the development of the beautiful. If Athens lives in the memory and affections of men, it is her devotion to art that will immortalize her. Not to the dungeon, but to my side bring the youth.” And that day the youth was crowned by Aspasia’s hand and his name immortalized. He had wrought so great a work that with the utmost care he could not escape detection. The work itself compelled the knowledge of him and created a place in history for him. But if the conclusion of the scholars, from whom I have quoted, is correct, we face this strangest fact of history, namely, that men, the authors of such institutions, such laws, and such a religion as the world has never known besides, the men who accomplished a work that only gods might ever be expected to complete, did it, and disappeared, leaving no name behind, not a footprint by which we can trace them to their homes; and this escape was accomplished without an endeavor. Such fictitious characters as Moses, Joshua, Samuel and David, they immortalized and while about it, effected, forever, a personal oblivion. What thinking man can believe it?”
Christ repeatedly confirmed this claim for inspiration.
He defended the Scriptures as authority. He quoted them as final. “Have ye not read this Scripture; The stone which the builders rejected is become the head of the corner.” Mark 12:10.
“He came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up: and, as his custom was, he went into the synagogue on the sabbath day, and stood up for to read. And there was delivered unto him the book of the prophet Esaias. And when he had opened the book”—and finished His reading from Isaiah 61:1-11—”he closed the book, and he gave it again to the minister, and sat down.” “And he began to say unto them, This day is this scripture fulfilled in your ears.” Luke 4:16-21. Did not Jesus also say of the Bible of His day, “The Scripture cannot be broken”? John 10:35. To the two, on the journey to Emmaus, did he not declare, “O fools, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken: and beginning at Moses and all the prophets, he expounded unto them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself”? Luke 24:25-27. In fact, consecrated and scholarly men have more than once called the attention of thinkers and students to the circumstance that not one book or incident of Scripture has been made the object of criticism or ridicule, but Christ had, at some time, defended, approved and even profitably applied that very portion. To Him the Bible was not a book of “fables” or “old wives’ tales.” It was not a philosopher’s meanderings, or the speculations of Psuedo-scientists. It was “the sure word of prophecy— God-breathed!
Experience has often and abundantly attested this claim.
There is a right way and a wrong way of approaching worth while study. Dr. Howard Kelly brought out this fact in the Princeton address, to which a former reference was made, in making a plea for a scientific study of the Bible:
“I do not read newspaper discussions about the Bible. Some doctors form their medical opinions from newspaper and magazine articles.
I prefer, rather, first-hand investigation. So I asked, ‘What does the Bible say of itself?’ * * *
I have seen it confirmed by research times without number, and I believe concerning the Bible that it is all that it claims for itself.”
There are all too many people who get their evidence second-hand. They try to know Christ by reading of Him or hearing about Him. But there is a better way—His way—”come unto Me.” And there are people who try to know the Bible after the same manner; but here the same procedure applies. Good old Joseph Parker said, when people came to him with questions about the Bible, “I never begin by giving the Bible a reputation: I simply say, ‘Read it. Read it all. Read it with as little interruption as possible; then tell me what you think of it’.”
It may be candidly questioned whether, in the twenty centuries since Christ visited our world and died on Calvary’s cross, there has been one single man, out of the millions on millions, who ever went unprejudiced to the Bible and pursued his way through its pages from book to book until he had gone from Genesis to Revelation, and who was willing to give thought to its teachings, without coming to the same conclusion with those other millions of his fellow-students; namely, this Book is surely “God-breathed”. It has about it a Divine aroma! It has in it a strange convincing power. It has over the men who study it a heavenly influence. The world has its convincing speakers—its orators of high order—but even profane history has never attempted to name them in the same catalog with Moses, Isaiah, David, John, Peter, and Paul. The unprejudiced find in these sacred authors wisdom of such height, truths of such importance, convictions of such depth, that they can but exclaim—This Book, like its author. “cometh down from above.” THE PROOFS OF INSPIRATION
One might imagine that what we have been saying would suffice, but the unregenerate man is a confirmed skeptic. He must have line upon line, precept upon precept.” With him argument must be added to argument and demonstration to demonstration if his doubts are to die. And so we proceed with what might be called further proofs. Here is a most important one:
Unity in multiplicity strongly argues the inspiration of Scripture. As we have seen, there are sixty-six books and about forty authors. These books were written at “different times, under different circumstances, in different countries, and yet this multiplicity of persons, of places and of conditions, did not destroy its unity. One could easily imagine that the same man wrote each of the sixty-six books of the Bible. So continuous is this love story, so historically related is one book to another, so normally do we move in the sacred history it records, so definitely does each book look to one final objective—the glory of God and the good of man—that a single master mind could be suspected of thinking it all.
Once more we take a leaf from my former volume entitled “The Finality of the Higher Criticism,” now out of print:
“The Bible seems to be the only literary structure the world has yet produced after the plan of the Cathedral at Milan, requiring generations of workers and many centuries in laying its foundations, perfecting its walls, and completing its cupolas. Men have long been surprised that the name of the original architect of Milan’s Cathedral should have been lost, but have not disputed that Amedeo was the author of many of its most beautiful designs, nor yet that Tibaldi conceived the ornamentation of doors and windows, while Napoleon saw to its finishing touches. But in the Bible we have a literary cathedral beside which every other output of mind and pen pales as the stars fade before the rising sun.”
How account for it? Reason must agree with revelation; it is “God-breathed,” or else bring against herself the charge of being unbalanced.
Again historical and scientific accuracy attest Inspiration! As to the historicity of events, up to this good hour no plain statement of Old Testament or New has ever been proven false, or even questionable. Its prophetic utterances stand solitary and alone in their matchless fulfillment, revealing a revelation from an Omnipotent one. The evidence from prophecy fulfilled is just such that its careful study results in a coffin for skepticism. “One thousand prophetic statements mark the pages of the Old and New Testaments; and it is estimated by careful scholars that over seven hundred of these have been fulfilled to the very letter; and history is still running in the mold of prophecy.
These prophecies relate to cities, Babylon, (Isaiah 13:19-22), Ninevah, (Zephaniah 2:13), Tyre, (Ezekiel 1:14), etc.; to Israel and Judah (Deuteronomy 28:64-67); to the nations, ancient and modern, (Daniel 2:31-46); to the First and Second Coming of Christ, Genesis 3:15, Isaiah 9:7, Micah 5:2, Matthew 1:1-25, Acts 1:11, 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18); to the rise, progress and apostasies of the Church. to wars, rumors of wars, false prophets, false christs, famine and earthquake (Matthew 24:1-51); to the coming anti-Christ (Revelation 13:1-18); to the coming Armageddon Revelation 9:1-21 and Revelation 20:7-9). The remaining prophecies are, at this moment, so clearly in evidence as to cast their shadows before them. All of this is a supernatural proof of a supernatural Book.
There is one class of men who give their lives to evidence, and that is not as is supposed, the professional scientists. If they are worthy of their names, they spend the majority of their days and hours in investigation and theory. But jurists train their ears to evidence and their minds to righteous judgment. How remarkable, then, that the greatest names ever known to that profession have found the arguments for inspiration sound and convincing. I speak of such outstanding individuals as Grotus, Bacon, Sir Matthew Hale, Oliver Cromwell, Blackstone, Selden, Sir William Jones, Lord Littleton, Lord Erskine, Edmund Burke, William Pitt, Wilberforce, W. E. Gladstone, John Bright, Lord Cairns, George Washington, Chief Justice Marshall, Chancellor Kent, Judge Story, Chief Justice Parsons, Greenleaf, Clay, Daniel Webster, Sewell, and an overwhelming majority of the members of the Supreme Court of the United States, and no less than eight out of ten of those who have been President of the United States, not to speak of an innumerable company worthy to be mentioned in this glorious galaxy of statesmen and judges.
Still further, the ethical and spiritual effects demonstrate inspiration.
“The proof of the pudding is in the eating.” We have already shown how a study of the Bible has never failed to convince the unprejudiced of its authority, but there is a still higher fruit of such study, namely, its elevating effect upon life itself. The Bible is in no sense the book of the scholarly only. Paul, in his Epistle to the Corinthians, 1 Corinthians 1:27, says, “But God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise.” But wherever it has gone, learning and wisdom have walked in its wake. The Bible is in no sense a scientific treatise, and yet the greatest scientists that the ages have produced have acknowledged their indebtedness to it—such, for instance, as Sir Isaac Newton, Sir John Herschell, Kepler, Pascal, Faraday, Simpson, Beale, David Brewster, Professor Dana, Romanes, G. Frederick Wright, Hugh Miller, Louis Pasteur, Kelvin, Sir William Dawson, and a list that would require pages for publication. We have not forgotten that only a little while ago six hundred seventeen members of the British Scientific Society produced a paper, now in the Bodlein Library at Oxford, which pays the most glowing tribute to the Scriptures and defends them as Divine. The Bible, while written by men, many of whom were in humble life and some of whom were slaves, is not a book for the proletariate merely; and yet, wherever it has gone, it has elevated the social mudsill by lifting at the bottom of society and has carried up the whole superstructure. What other explanation of such effects than that to be found in the text of the day. “All Scripture is God-breathed”? The breath of God is a blessing upon the high and the low, the rich and the poor, the ignorant and the learned, and the Bible is the fostering friend of them all. In fact, we begin to approach now the very purpose of the Scriptures themselves, and we can do no better than to discuss that object under THE PROFITS OF INSPIRATION
Here Paul has made a clean-cut statement: “It is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness: that the man of God may be perfect, thoroughly furnished unto all good works.” Let us analyze!
It is the incomparable reservoir of truth.
“It is profitable for doctrine!” What is doctrine? Look to your standard dictionary and find: “Instruction, teaching, especially in religious knowledge.” Christ said to men, “Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free,” and the Christian Scriptures stand as the exponent of truth. It is sometimes said that Christ never answered the question, “What is truth?” But we resent that claim. In fact He gave to it two answers, and yet they are one, paradoxical as that may sound. He said of Himself, “I am the truth,” and He said of God’s Word, “Thy Word is truth.” John 17:17.
Strangely enough, in the very age that has crowned dogmatism in the uncertain realm of speculation called Science, we have a whole school of advanced thinkers, so-called, who inveigh against “dogma” in Religion. In other words, they are a concerted company criticizing certainties while indulging speculations in the name of “assured results,” and who, in the language of Paul, are “turned aside unto vain jangling; desiring to be teachers of the law; understanding neither what they say, nor whereof they affirm.” (1 Timothy 1:6-7). There is not a ‘wholly balanced defender of the Bible, as God’s Book, who has aught to say against truth. On the contrary, all such are its ardent admirers, its virile explorers ,and its willing defenders. Our claim is that in Christ we have “the truth” incarnate, and in the Bible, “the truth” in print; and those who accept Christ and believe the Bible reincarnate the same. Yes, it is “profitable for doctrine.”
It is the exacting regulator of conduct and character!
It is profitable for reproof and correction. The Bible is no engaging legend. It is no Aesopian fable; it is no Utopian dream; it is no rag-time novel. On the contrary, it is a book of standards— Levitical law combining in one, physiological, ethical, and legal standards. The Decalog, after more than three thousand years of history, has never been equalled. For moral uplift, the Bible, so far as books are concerned, is incomparable. It not only establishes high standards for ethical attainment, but it also uncovers sin that man may see its infamy!” By reciting transgressions and recording the judgments for them, by taking even the noblest of characters and painting them—as Cromwell required of Sir Peter Ely “with the warts and blemishes” by denouncing sin in all its horrid forms, and promising a “hell” as the product of its willing and continued practice it seeks to correct men.
It is not given to “smooth words.” It does not indulge in popular eloquence. It is not written to give literary form to unblemished human heroes and heroines. On the contrary, it paints life as it is; puts character into the balance, pronounces judgment against sin, destroys the spirit of egotism, and calls man to strict account. In it, “pride goeth before destruction,” “wickedness” is set for judgment, “hatred” and “envy” are assigned to the adversary, and sin becomes “a reproach to any people.”
It demands the “captivity of every thought to the obedience of Christ;” it enjoins against “fulfilling the lusts of the flesh;” it reminds us that “the natural man receiveth not the things of God;” and it puts us to shame and silences us by asking, “Where is the wise?” Truly is it asserted that it is “sharper than any twoedged 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.”
Among all the high characters of the Bible, it holds not one of them as perfect, save Jesus.
Moses, Noah and David — what marvelous names! And yet each is marred at some point as the light of God’s Word reveals alike his weakness and his greatness. We have parents who never see a fault in their children, and who never speak a word of reproof while they remain under the rooftree. Too often, they send the spoiled forth as social pariahs. God’s ways are not as man’s. His thoughts are as high above ours as “the heavens are high above the earth.” His Book is set for “reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness.” Wisdom is justified of her ways.
Finally, this Book is the unfailing source of the soul’s supplies. The greatest thing in the earth is a man; the greatest thing in man is his soul. It is the spiritual nature that lifts him as far above the beast as the work of God’s sixth day was superior to the work of the fifth. There are those who claim that man has a blood kinship with lower animal life. We do not believe it. The Bible does not teach it; science has failed to demonstrate it. Only eleven percent of monkey blood and human blood are the same. Eighty-nine percent is different. Why?—Because the truth is as Paul said, “All flesh is not the same flesh: but there is one kind of flesh of men, another flesh of beasts.”
Science once disputed this! It is now compelled to approve the statement, for blood analysis has demonstrated the Apostle’s theory and lifted it to the scientific level. The earthly tabernacle of the soul is flesh of a superior sort; hut the supreme thing is “the spirit of man.”
It has always been a strange thing to me that advocates of the evolutionary hypothesis did not employ the only plausible arguments that either reason or Revelation provides them. I have yet to hear the first of them use the flying fish to illustrate the claim” that fish became birds. Possibly, because he did not see how he could provide them with feet and land them on a limb, or with lungs to help them live on land. I have yet to hear the first of them quote the Scripture, “That was not first which is spiritual, but that which is natural; and afterward that which is spiritual.”
Possibly, because he did not know that the Scriptures made such an assertion. But I have heard them use argument after argument for “reversion to type,” and the textbooks exploit the same. But never did I hear them logically apply it to man; possibly, because they were keen enough to see that it would act as a boomerang. Why is it that sinful man, unlike the animal, is seldom or never satisfied with his estate? Why is it that wherever you find him, he has within him a feeling that there is a higher life that he ought to live, a more noble existence he ought to experience, and a more holy character that he ought to develop? This “reversion to type” we have always consented is true; but apply it in religion and what does it mean? Here, on the part of man, is the high estate in which his forefather and mother once existed, and from which they fell by the sin in the Garden of Eden, and back to which there is an inborn tendency, clamoring for expression; a yearning, a longing, an endeavor to climb back to the higher realms on life’s parental ladder. The Bible and the Bible alone offers him satisfaction, contentment, peace that passeth knowledge.” pardon of sins, salvation, paradise recovered! It is all in Christ, and the way is made plain in Scripture. As John Milton said, “There are no songs comparable to the songs of Zion; no orations equal to those of the prophets, and no politics like those which the Scriptures teach.” Or as Berridge writes: “The Bible is a precious storehouse and the Magna Charta of a Christian. There he reads of his heavenly Father’s love, and of His dying Savior’s legacies. There he sees a map of his travels through the wilderness, and a landscape, too, of Canaan. And when he climbs on Pisgah’s top, and views the blessed prospect, he is amazed at the rich and free salvation.”
“Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him. But God hath revealed them unto us by his Spirit.” (1 Corinthians 2:9-10).
“All Scripture is God-breathed!”