The Bible and Life

by Edwin Holt Hughes

The legal portions of the Bible give us the like lesson, even though the approach to the lesson is different. Here we discover that humanity is worthy enough to call for conservation and protection. The legislation reaches to hygienic and sanitary details of minute character. The whole effort is to build a protecting fence about men. The Ten Commandments, studied in this light, become a very human document. Their harsh and negative quality is softened into gentleness. They guard the goods of man—his property, his wife and children, his body, his good name. It would be possible to regard the Decalogue as a series of prohibitions in which the word “not” occurs with forbidding frequency. In this case the appropriate accompaniment is thunder and lightning, and the appropriate scroll for the writing is stone. This viewpoint is one sided and unfair. The Ten Commandments are prohibitions only because they are protections. They have been through many ages the kindly sentinels of society. They have taken the side of God, of his dumb creatures, and of men and women and little children. Considered in any just way, the legal portions of the Bible are a tribute not merely to divine authority, but to human worth.

The prophetical books add their lesson, and from a still different angle. They are filled with protests against man’s conduct, with wrath against his insincerities, and with predictions of his coming woe. The mouths of the prophets were not filled with compliments. Those stern men were not the flatterers of their own generations. Their sayings could be so elected as to make a degrading estimate of men. But here again we must get the full meaning of the message. In their last analysis the prophecies are a marked tribute to potential man. Beyond the disturbed present they see the peaceful future. Beyond the clash of swords and the swish of spears they see the mild and productive era of the plowshare and the pruning hook. Beyond the unreal altars they see the incense of true worship arising to God. The prophets were, in the best sense, optimists, and they were optimists because they believed that all men would some day yield to the Lord. They beheld the whole earth filled with righteousness. They saw the stone cut loose from the mountain and filling the wide world. The healing river was to flow to all peoples. Jerusalem was to be the universal joy. The day would dawn when it would be unnecessary to say to any man, “Know thou the Lord.” The most dismal of the prophets foretold the perfect day. But all this means that the prophets foretold the perfect man and the perfect race. To proclaim that humanity, under the guidance of God, is so capable is to dignify human life beyond measure.

Nor are we lacking among the prophets an individual example of the power of self-respect. Nehemiah may not be the premier among his fellows, but he talks with a royal self-consciousness. When messengers come, desiring that he shall go down into the plain for a parley with Sanballat, he declines by saying, “I am doing a great work, so that I cannot come down.” Again he is told that the enemy is coming, and he is counseled to go into the temple and cling to the altar for protection. Once more self-respect comes to the rescue; the reply is, “Should such a man as I flee? and who is there, that, being as I am, would go into the temple to save his life? I will not go in.” Here the potential man, foretold by the prophet, was the actual man. He had reached such a high doctrine of his own nature that the doctrine itself became the prevention of triviality and of cowardice. The rebuilded walls of Jerusalem arose from that spirit. Those walls were likewise an expression of the prophet’s faith in the future of his people. The prophetic confidence in man was second only to the prophetic confidence in God. This form of tribute to humanity is preeminent in the books of the prophets.

In the devotional part of the Bible we should not naturally expect that tribute would turn manward. The tendency is seen in those sections of prophecy where the prophet himself has close dealings with God. When the greatest of the prophets sees the ineffable One and hears the awful trisagion of the seraphim, the prime confession is that his own lips are unclean and that he dwells in the midst of a people of unclean lips. Inasmuch as the Psalms are in large measure a liturgy of worship, their emphasis is on the greatness of Jehovah. Yet sometimes the emphasis turns toward man. The most striking illustration occurs in the eighth psalm. The writer there utters the feeling that we have all shared. The limitless expanse of the heavens, the shining of moon and stars in the far heights, the workmanship of the Lord in the vast universe—all this makes the psalmist feel that he is a mere speck in the scheme. Tried by those celestial measurements, he drops into insignificance. He is rescued from self-contempt only by a return to the message of Genesis. His despairing cry issues in a shout of personal triumph. “When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained; What is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him?” If materialism should conquer the Bible there is but one answer. The psalmist is saved by the Scripture, “Thou hast made him a little lower than God, and hast crowned him with glory and honor.” It is no marvel that the first translators lowered the tribute and substituted “the angels” for God. The reverence that so often used a sign for the divine name trembled on the verge of such a human tribute. Still that tribute was a return to the doctrine that God had made man in his own image and had given him dominion over the works of his hand. In addition to all this, the Psalms are girded with the consciousness that man can enter into the august presence of the Lord. The mutual element in worship is an exaltation of man. The greatness of Jacob is greater when he meets with the heavenly visitant by the Jabbok brook. He becomes a prince. In the devotional books man claims his princely heritage. He treads the courts of the infinite King.

Moving forward into the New Testament, we find that the doctrine of man gathers more impressiveness. Jesus never cast any doubt upon the supreme place of man in the program of God. He put his harshest blame upon those who wickedly misled the children of the Father. He himself was chided because he sought the lowliest and the worst among men and women. He ate with the publican and gave his choicest lesson to the harlot. He was willing to exchange his social reputation for the privilege of associating with the humblest people. For a woman with a dark past he delocalized worship. From another he accepted the offering of grateful tears and put her conduct in contrast with that of the lordly Pharisee. He was the Prophet for the soul as such. He was the Priest who mediated gladly between the least one and the greatest One. We search his words in vain for anything that put contempt on man as man.

When he compared men to the rest of creation it was always to human advantage. He told of the care of the shepherd for the sheep, and then he asked, “How much is a man better than a sheep?” He declared that God noted the fall of sparrows, though they brought small price in the market place, and then, speaking to ordinary men and women, nearly all of them ignorant and more than half of them slaves, he said, “Are ye not much better than they?” Nor were these sayings really interrogative; they were exclamatory. Jesus knew that every normal man would feel the answer in his own soul. The worth of man was, in the teaching of Jesus, beyond debate.

He moved, also, from inanimate things to the assertion of man’s worth. The lilies and grasses were in the care of God and waited on him for their vesture. “Will he not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith?” He made the worth of man the warrant of the care of God. At last he put man on one side of the scale and the whole world on the other side, and he affirmed that man outweighed the world. Men may barter themselves for half a township; but Jesus declared that it would be a disastrous bargain, if a man should accept the world in exchange for himself. “What shall it profit a man, if he gain the world and lose himself? Or what will a man give in exchange for himself?” This is the final answer to any paltry teaching about the worth of man.

When choice had to be made between man’s interests and sacred laws and ordinances, Jesus gave preference to man. The shewbread was consecrated, but he approved the taking of it to satisfy human hunger. The Sabbath day was holy, but the Sabbath was made for man and not man for the Sabbath; so the plucked ears of corn were a testimonial to men.

The attitude of Jesus toward childhood is tender evidence of his thought of humanity. The child has not yet won any achievement, save the loving assertion of its own dependency. The child in the midst represented humanity in its freshest and most natural form. It is said that some ancient religionists were accustomed to debate whether or not a child had a soul. Jesus would have scorned such a debate. He made the child the model of the kingdom. Human life unspoiled was lifted up as an example. To offend a little one was worse than being sunk by a millstone into the sea. A cup of cold water given to a child would win a special reward. The angels of the children behold ever the face of the Father. Thus the child, in all the teaching of Jesus, was made the creditor of the race.

Jesus carried this doctrine of man on to the uttermost issue. We have never yet secured the full meaning of that “inasmuch” in the account of the final judgment. The Lord lives beyond the need of man’s overt aid. But human beings are his representatives. The righteous had so far overlooked this fact, that they were forgetful of any ministry to him; and what had been the unconscious glory of the righteous was the unconscious tragedy of the wicked. The judgment day will be filled with human tests. He who has not acted as if human beings stood for God cannot meet the final standards. Jesus’s picture of the judgment is a statement of divine authority; and it is an appraisement of human worth.