SUNDAY UTTERANCES ON THE BIBLE
The Bible is the Word of God. Nothing has ever been more clearly established in the world today, and God blesses every people and nation that reverence it. It has stood the test of time. No book has so endured through the ages. No book has been so hated. Everything the cunning of man, philosophy, brutality, could contrive has been done, but it has withstood them all.
There is no book which has such a circulation today. Bibles are dropping from the press like the leaves in autumn. There are 200,000,000 copies. It is read by all nations. It has been translated into five hundred languages and dialects.
No book ever came by luck or chance. Every book owes its existence to some being or beings, and within the range and scope of human intelligence there are but three things—good, bad, and God. All that originates in intellect, all which the intellect can comprehend, must come from one of the three. This book, the Bible, could not possibly be the product of evil, wicked, godless, corrupt, vile men, for it pronounces the heaviest penalties against sin. Like produces like, and if bad men were writing the Bible they never would have pronounced condemnation and punishment against wrong-doing. The holy men of old, we are told, "spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost." Men do not attribute these beautiful and matchless and well-arranged sentences to human intelligence alone, but we are told that men spake as they were inspired by the Holy Ghost. The only being left, to whom you, or I, or any sensible person could ascribe the origin of the Bible, is God.
Biting, Blistering, Blasting Condemnation of Sin. This Rare Photograph Shows the Tremendous Earnestness of Mr. Sunday and the Energy, Zeal and Fire he Puts into his Message which has Warmed this Cold World more than that of any other Apostle of Righteousness in this Generation.
Men have been thrown to beasts and burned to death for having a Bible in their possession. There have been wars over the Bible; cities have been destroyed. Nothing ever brought such persecution as the Bible. Everything vile, dirty, rotten and iniquitous has been brought to bear against it because it reveals man's cussedness. But it's here, and its power and influence are greater today than ever.
Saloons, bawdy houses, gambling hells, every rake, every white-slaver, every panderer and everything evil has been against it, but it is the word of God, and millions of people know it.
This being true, it is of the highest importance that you should think of the truths in it. I'll bet my life that there are hundreds of you that haven't read ten pages of the Bible in ten years. Some of you never open it except at a birth, a marriage or a death, and then just to keep your family records straight. That's a disgrace and an insult. I repeat it, it's a disgrace and an insult. Don't blame God if you wind up in hell, after God warned you, because you didn't take time to read it and think about it.
It is the only book that tells us of a God that we can love, a heaven to win, a hell to shun and a Saviour that can save. Why did God give us the Bible? So that we might believe in Christ. No other book tells us this. It tells us why the Bible was written, that we might believe and be saved. You don't read a railroad guide to learn to raise buckwheat. You don't read a cook book to learn to shoe horses. You don't read an arithmetic to learn the history of the United States. A geography does not tell you about how to make buckwheat cakes. No, you read a railroad guide to learn about the trains, a cook book to learn to make buckwheat cakes, an arithmetic for arithmetic and a geography for geography. If you want to get out of a book what the author put in it, find out why it was written. That's the way to get good out of a book. Read it.