Some Essentials of Religion

by Unknown

3.—The rest of the Old Testament is the history of God's dealing with the nation, a story gathered under the guidance of God's providence in many generations, from many sources since the far back childhood of the race. The historians were evidently men with the prophetic instinct. But I make no appeal on the score of their being prophets. The appeal is made by the history itself. Was ever national history so extraordinarily written? It is the history of an evil and rebellious people, yet everything is looked at in relation to the God of Righteousness. Records of other ancient nations tell what this or that great king accomplished, how the people conquered or were conquered by their enemies. In these Jewish records everything is of God—a righteous, holy God. It is God who conquered, God who delivered, God who punished, God who fought. There is no boasting of the national glory, no flattering of the national vanity; their greatest sins and disgraces and punishments are recorded just as fully as their triumphs and their joys. In the records of other nations the chief stress is laid on power and prosperity and comfort and wealth. In these strange records goodness seems to be the only thing of importance. To do the right, to please the holy God is of infinitely more value than to be powerful or rich or successful in Life. "He did that which was right in the sight of the Lord." "He did that which was evil in the sight of the Lord," are the epitaphs of their most famous kings.

Therefore the national history of Israel also holds its position by its appeal to the religious instinct. No author's name, no theory of its composition affects its position. Whatever its imperfection, it has impressed itself upon us as the simple story of God's dealing with men.

III.—THE WITNESS OF CHRIST.

I now point you to the chief ground for every Christian man of his belief in the Divine origin of the Bible. It is this. That it all centres in Jesus Christ Himself. It cannot be dissociated from Him. It is closely, inseparately bound up with His life.

The Old Testament tells of the preparation for Christ. The New Testament tells that when that preparation was complete "in the fulness of time God sent forth His Son." Jesus Christ, as it were, stands between the Old Testament and the New and lays His hand upon them both. The Old Testament contains the Scriptures which He told men were of God and which bare witness of Him. The New Testament is the story of His words and works, and the teaching of apostles and early disciples sent forth by Him as teachers with the power of the Holy Ghost. It is this fact that Christ is its centre which accounts for the striking unity of this collection of separate documents. The parts belong all to each other. And surely for us Christians our conviction as to the authority of the Bible is increased a thousandfold by the attitude of Christ Himself towards the only Bible that He had, the Old Testament.

It was the Bible of His education. It was the Bible of His ministry. He took for granted its fundamental doctrines about creation, man, righteousness, God's providence and purpose. He accepted it as the preparation for Himself and taught His disciples to find Him in it. He used it to justify His mission and to illuminate the mystery of the cross. Above all He fed His own soul with its contents and in the great crisis of His life sustained Himself upon it as the solemn word of God. And I cannot help feeling that the Bible which was good enough for Christ on earth should be good enough for me.

IV.—THE WITNESS OF ITS POWER.

1.—Need I remind you of that practical conviction of every earnest Bible student, the conviction which Coleridge expresses when he speaks of the way in which it "finds me". Men feel by their own spiritual experience that the Book witnesses to itself. "The Spirit itself beareth witness with their spirit" that the Book is the Book of God. It "finds them" as no other book ever does. Its words have moved them deeply; it has helped them to be good; it has mastered their wills and gladdened their hearts till the overpowering conviction has forced itself upon them, "Never book spake like this Book."

Need I point you to the world around, to the miraculous power which is exercised by that Bible, to the evil lives reformed by it, to the noble, beautiful lives daily nourished by it? Did you ever hear of any other book of history, and poetry, and memoirs, and letters that had this power to turn men towards nobleness and righteousness of life? Did you ever hear a man say, "I was an outcast, and a reprobate, and a disgrace to all that loved me till I began to read Scott's poems and Macaulay's History of England?" Did you ever hear a man tell of the peace and hope and power to conquer evil which he had won by an earnest study of the Latin classics?

You can get a great many to say it of the study of the Bible, ten thousand times ten thousand, and thousands of thousands. You can see the amount of happiness and good that has come to the world even from the miserably imperfect following of it. You can see that the world would be a very paradise of God if it were thoroughly followed. Misery and vice would vanish forever, purity and love and unselfish work for others would hold their universal sway on earth. The millenium would have begun.