Christ, Christianity and the Bible

“How may we know the Bible is the Word of God?”

The question need not make us tremble.

The answers are at hand.

The evidence is so great, its very wealth is an embarrassment.

That evidence stated, detailed, analyzed and elaborated, would require – not a few pages – but whole libraries.

One broad and general proposition may be laid down.

It is this:

The Bible is proved to BE the Word of God when it is shown to be NOT the word of man; and it is proved to be not the word of man when it is shown to be – not such a book as a man WOULD write if he COULD; nor such a book as a man COULD write if he WOULD.

That it is not the word of man – not such a book as a man would write if he could, is made clear enough by the picture it paints of the natural man.

This picture is so sharply drawn, the figures stand out in such living and apt delineation, that no one can mistake the import.

According to the Bible, man came direct from the hand of God. God created him body, soul and spirit – a tripartite being. The soul was the person, the seat of appetite and passions. The spirit was the seat of the mind, the centre of reflection. Spirit and body were the distinct agents of the soul. The spirit, the agent to connect the soul with God – the body, the medium of the soul’s manifestation or materialization in this world, and the instrument for its use and enjoyment. The mind, seated in the spirit, was intended, under the influence of the spirit, to be the governor and regulator of the soul – enabling the soul rightly to use its appetite and legitimately to satisfy its passions.

Thus organized, God set man up in the world to be his constitutional, moral, spiritual and governmental image – his likeness morally – his image (his representative) administratively.

Man turned his back on God, listened to the appetite of his soul, and surrendered to the demands of sensual hunger.

The soul, at once, sank down into the environment of the body. The mind sank down into the environment of the soul and became, henceforth, not a spiritual mind, but a mind “sensual,” “devilish,” a mind continually suggesting to the soul fresh and unlimited gratification of its desires. With the breakdown of soul and mind, the spirit lost its vital relationship to God, lost its function as a connecting link with, and a transmitter of, the mind and will of God; so that it could no longer enable man to know and understand God; and feeling the influence of the mind, instead of influencing it, followed it in its downward course into the environment of the soul.

Out of this dislocation the soul came forth dominant over mind and spirit. Soul appetite and soul desires became supreme; the body, the willing and active agent thereof. From this period on, man was no longer a possible spiritual being, but a “natural” man. The word “natural” is “soulical.” In Scripture it is twice translated “sensual.” The much-used word “psychological” is a derivation of it. In the Bible sense of the word, a psychological person is just the opposite of a pneumatical or spiritual person.

Man was now psychological, soulical, sensual. He had been transformed into a being no better than an intellectual animal, and the slave of his physical functions. Instead of being the master of his appetites, he was mastered by them. His passions intended, under right use, to be blessings, became curses; instead of angels, they became as demons. Instead of dwelling in the midst of his endowment in harmony with it and able to direct it, he found himself at its mercy, incessantly smitten by it and suffering his own equipment. Repudiating faith, walking by sight, talking of reason and governed by his senses, he threw himself open to invasion by the world, the flesh and the Devil.

As a result of his fall, man has become a degenerate, full of the germs of evil, “every imagination of the thoughts of the heart only evil continually” – an incurable self-corrupter.

In him there is not one thing that commends him to a holy God; and even should he succeed in living a life of perfect morality, his best righteousness in the sight of God would be no better than a bundle of filthy and contagious rags.

There is no power within him by which he can change the essential character and determined trend of his life. Men do not gather grapes of thorns, nor figs of thistles. All the effort that the most devoted and laborious of men might give to the culture of a hedgerow of thorns would not succeed in producing one grape. Though men spent life and fortune in cultivating a field of thistles, they would not gather a single fig. No sooner (says the Bible) can the natural man bring forth the fruit of righteousness unto God. The Ethiopian may change his skin, the leopard his spots, before a natural man can change himself into a spiritual man. “The carnal mind is enmity with God; for it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be.” “The natural man (the word ‘natural’ is ψυχικὸς, soulical) receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually (πνευμτικῶς, pneumatically) discerned.” “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?” meaning thereby that God alone can sound the depths of its measureless capacity for sin and iniquity; therefore, he says: “I the Lord search the heart, I try the reins.”

The end of man is to die.

Such an end is not natural.

It is unnatural.

It is violent.

It is penal.

It is an appointed punishment: as it is written: “It is appointed unto men once to die.” “By one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed (literally, passed through, pierced man;” the seeds of death entered him for himself and all his posterity). When he dies, therefore, be he never so moral and upright, his death is judicial, his taking off is the execution of a criminal.

He is to be raised from the dead as to his body (in the meantime, his soul is “dragged” downward to the prison of the underworld, where in conscious suffering he awaits the second resurrection and the judgment hour), he will be raised, judged, found guilty and cast forth into the lake of fire (which is the second death), from whence there will be no resurrection of the body (the body will perish in the fire – for an immortal body belongs only to the sons of God – the participants in the First Resurrection); then, as a disembodied spirit – a ghost – he will go forth with an inward, deathless worm, and an inward, quenchless fire, to be like “a wandering star unto whom is reserved the blackness of darkness forever,” an exile from God, outside the orbit of divine grace, love and life – a hopeless, an eternally hopeless – human derelict, upon the measureless sea of night and space.

That is the Bible picture of the natural man.

Is that the picture the natural man paints of himself?

I trow not!

Man looks upon himself as a son of God by nature, having in himself all the elements of divinity, and all the forces necessary to shape his life aright. He is proud of himself, and talks of the dignity of human nature. He describes himself in panegyric, magnifies his virtue and minimizes his vice.

He flatters himself in his own eyes.

The two concepts – that of the Bible and that of the natural man – are as far apart from each other as the heavens are from the earth.

To man, the Bible concept is false, belittling, wholly disastrous and degrading, the death knell to any possible inspiration for human effort and attainment. It is a concept against which he revolts with all the nature in him, and hates with an exceeding great hatred.

In the very nature of the case, then, the Bible concept of man is not due to man; it is not such a concept that he would write if he could.

The picture which the Bible paints of sin is not such a picture as the natural man has ever painted.

The Bible declares that sin is something more than fever or disease or weakness, it is high treason against Jehovah, it is a blow at his integrity, a rebellion against his government, a discord to his being and a movement whose final tendency would be to dislodge him from his throne.

The Bible hates sin and has no mercy for it.

The very leaves of the book seem to curl and grow crisp under the fire of its hatred. So fearful is its denunciation that the sinner shivers and hastens to turn away from a book whose lightest denunciation of sin has in it the menace of eternal judgment. Like a great fiery eye it looks into the very recesses of the heart and reveals its intents and purposes. It sees lust hiding there in all its lecherous deformity and says, he who exercises it solely in his mind is as guilty in God’s sight as though he had committed the act. It looks into the heart and sees hate crouching there with its tiger-like fangs and readiness to spring, and says that he who hates his brother is already a murderer.

The Bible has no forgiveness for sin until it has been fully and fearfully punished. In this it simply echoes the law stamped and steeped in nature. Nature never forgives its violated law until it has punished it. The Bible demands satisfaction, complete and absolute, before it offers even the hint of forgiveness. It takes the guilty sinner to the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ and shows him God’s hatred of sin to be so great, that the moment his holy and spotless Son representatively takes the sinner’s place, he smites him and pours out upon him a tidal sweep of wrath in a terror of relentless judgment and indignation so immense, that the earth quivers like an aspen, rocks to and fro, reels in its orbit till the sun of day refuses to shine, and the moon of night hangs in the startled heavens like a great clot of human blood.

The Bible declares that forgiveness of sin can come to the sinner only by way of the anguish and punishment of the cross; and that no sinner can be forgiven till he has accepted the downpour of the wrath of God on the cross and the substitutional agony of the Son of God as the punishment he himself so justly deserves.

The Bible teaches that in the awful cry, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” the sinner should hear the echo of his own agony, as of one forsaken of God and swept out of his presence forever; and that the only ground of approach to this righteous God is the atoning blood of his crucified Son; that he who would approach God, find forgiveness and justification, must claim that crucified Son of God as his sin-offering, his vicarious sacrifice, his personal substitute. By the hell of the cross alone can he find the heaven of forgiveness and peace.

Is this man’s attitude to, and definition of, forgiveness and peace?

It is not.

Man does not hate sin. He loves it. He rolls it as a sweet morsel under his tongue. He condones it in its worst form. To him it is genital weakness or an overplus of animal life – an exuberance of the spirit. It is a racial inheritance and not an individual fault. It is temperamental and not criminal.

The Bible concept and the natural concept of sin contradict each other; both, therefore, cannot have the same author.

The Bible concept of holiness is not the concept of the natural man.

In the Bible, holiness is not goodness and kindness, nor even morality. Holiness as the Bible sets it before us is the correspondence of the soul with God, the soul reflecting the intent, desire and innermost character of God; so that, were God to enter into the soul, he should find himself as much at home as upon his own exalted throne.

Such a definition as that makes human perfection and all its claims to holiness seem no better than a painted wanton dressed in the garb of purity and mouthing the words of virtue and chastity.

Whence comes this wisdom of holiness which makes the loftiest ideal of man no higher than the dust of the roadway, his best righteousness criticizable goodness and altogether a negligible quantity?

If it is from man, it must arise from two sources – human experience or human imagination.

It cannot come from human experience! no natural man in the past has experienced it – none today experience it.

It cannot come from imagination; for a man cannot imagine what he has not seen, known or experienced. As he has not experienced holiness he cannot imagine it.

In the nature of the case – the Bible concept of holiness did not originate with man, and that much of the Bible, evidently, is not of man.

That the Bible is not the word of man is shown by its statements of accurate science, written before men became scientific, and while as yet natural science did not exist.

The record of creation is given in the opening verses of Genesis.

Whence came the wisdom which enabled the writer in a pre-scientific age to set forth a cosmogony in such a fashion that it does not contradict the latest findings of the geologist?

The Bible says the earth was without form and void.

Science says the same thing. Over a hot granite crust, an ocean of fire, and beyond that an impenetrable atmosphere loaded with carbonic acid gas.

Cuvier, the founder of paleontology, says in his discourse on the revolutions of the globe, “Moses has left us a cosmogony, the exactitude of which is most wonderfully confirmed every day.”

Quensted says, “Moses was a great geologist, wherever he may have obtained his knowledge.” Again he says, “The venerable Moses, who makes the plants appear first, has not yet been proven at fault; for there are marine plants in the very lowest deposit.”

Dana, of Yale College, has said that the record of creation given by Moses and that written in the rocks are the same in all general features.

Whence came the wisdom which kept Moses from hopelessly blundering?

Moses places the account of the original creation in the first verse. In the second, he states the earth fell into chaos. “It became (not was) without form, and void.”

Isaiah, the prophet, declares definitely that God did not create the earth without form and void – God never was the author of chaos – he made the earth habitable from the beginning.

The first verse of Genesis records the creation of this original and habitable earth. The second verse shows, as the result of some mighty cataclysm, that the original earth fell into a state of chaos. The second verse, and the verses following, are the record of the making over of the earth after it had fallen into a state of chaos.

Whence the wisdom which taught Moses what science in our day is only beginning to spell out, that the present earth is not an original creation, but a remaking; that the original creation goes back beyond the time of shifted crust, of tilted rock, of ice and fire and mist and formless chaos?

Whence came the wisdom and knowledge which led Job to say that it is impossible to count the stars for number, when it was possible in his day, and is equally possible in our day, to count them with the naked eye?

How did he know, what the telescope alone reveals, that the number of the stars as flashed forth in the field of these telescopes is utterly beyond our computation; and that in the attempt to number them, figures break, fall into dust, and are swept away as the chaff of the summer’s threshing floor.

How did he, looking up with that naked eye of his, how did he know that in the Milky Way there are countless thousands of suns – and these the centres of other systems? How did he know that world-on-world ranges in the upper spaces of the silent sky, so multitudinously that each increase of the power of the telescope only adds unaccountable myriads until, looking from the rim of those nightly searchers, the eye beholds reach on reach of luminous clouds, and learns with awe profound, that these clouds are stars, are suns and systems – but so far away from us and from one another that they cannot be separated and distinguished by the most powerful glasses; and that these clouds, if we really could separate them and bring them within the field of our particular vision, would reveal themselves as suns and systems so numerous, that only, the Creator himself could number them?

How did Job know all this in that far day when he sat at his tent door in the beauty of the cloudless sky and without a telescope? How did he know all this so that he could tell us with absolute certainty what we now know only by the aid of modern science – that the stars cannot be counted for number?

How did he know what only the modern telescope reveals, that the North is stretched out over the empty place? How did he know that there in the Northern sky there is a space where no star does shine – a dark abyss of fathomless night – as if, suddenly, the universe of worlds had come to an end?

How did he know, at the moment when the wise men of his day were saying that the earth was supported on the shoulders of a giant, that the giant stood on a platform made of the backs of elephants; that the elephants stood on the back of a mighty tortoise, but where the tortoise stood none of them said; how did he dare at that time to write that God hangeth the earth on nothing?

How did Isaiah know that the world is round? How did he learn to speak of “the circle of the earth,” at the time when the scientific men of his day said that it was four square and flat?

How did he know of that imponderable ether in which the stellar universe is said to float? Who taught him to say that God spread out the heavens as “thinness,” when the wise men of that hour were teaching they were a solid vault? How is it that he made use of the most scientific term when he speaks of the heavens as “thinness”? It is true in our English version he is made to say that God spread out the heavens as a “tent”; but the word “tent” in the Hebrew is דּק (dôq) and its root meaning signifies a thing that has been beaten out or stretched into thinness – an elastic thinness; it is a word accurately describing the ether which scientific men tell us is so thin that a teacup full of it may be blown out into a transparent bubble as large as the earth, and, even then, its attenuation would seem no greater than at the beginning.

How did Isaiah know all this?

Evidently his knowledge and wisdom did not come from the knowledge and wisdom of his day.

That the Bible did not come from man is seen in the fact of fulfilled prohpecy.

Page after page of this book is filled with prophetic announcements.

History and human experience record their amazing fulfilment.

The prophet Daniel gives the history of four great world empires, Babylon, Medo-Persia, Greece and Rome.

The rise and fall of these empires are foretold centuries ahead.

The total ruin and perpetual desolation of Babylon were announced when the city shone forth in the zenith of its splendor.

Daniel writes an account of Alexander the Great two hundred and fifty years before he is born, calls him the first king of Greece, describes his march for the conquest of the East, the battle of the Grannicus, his sudden death at Babylon, and the division of the empire among his four generals.

At the hour when Rome was practically passing through her travail pains of national birth, Daniel foretold its ascension to power, and described it as a wild beast, trampling down the nations, absorbing into itself the three kingdoms which preceded it, occupying the territory once possessed by them, and becoming the supreme governmental power of the earth. Centuries before it took place he foretold the division of the Roman Empire into two equal parts. He announced, also, that it should be the last universal political power till Christ the Lord should come to set up his worldwide kingdom. Centuries have passed since Rome ruled the world. From that day to this it has remained the last supreme world-power. The territory once ruled by it is filled with mighty nations – not one of them, great as it may be, is a universal world-power.

Where did Daniel get the foresight which enabled him to look on down through two thousand years of human history and, in the face of battle, intrigue and change, declare, what so far has come to pass, that Rome should be the last universal empire till Christ came?

Ezekiel, the prophet, said that the great and populous city of Tyre should be taken, cast down, and never rebuilt; and that the Lord would make it to be like the top of a scraped rock to spread nets upon.

The city was taken and destroyed. The people moved to an island just off the mainland and there built a new city. Two hundred and fifty years after Ezekiel made his prophecy, Alexander came, besieged the new city; and, in order to take it, built a causeway from the mainland. In doing this he tore down and utterly demolished the ruins of the old city; took its stones and timber and cast them into the sea; and then, actually, set his soldiers to work to scrape the very dust that he might empty it into the waters. From the hour when it was overthrown to this, the city has never been rebuilt; and for centuries it has been, and is to-day, like the top of a scraped rock– a place where fishermen spread their nets.

Where did Ezekiel get this knowledge?

Certainly not from man.

It will not do to say he guessed it!

Egypt was a land of cities and temples. The cities were populous, the temples and monuments colossal. Avenues of gigantic sphynx led to gateways whose immense thresholds opened into pillared halls, where the carved columns seemed like a forest of stone. Pyramids rose as mountains, and their alabaster-covered sides flashed back the splendor of the cloudless skies. The land bloomed as a garden. The papyrus grew by the banks of the Nile. The fisheries of the mighty river filled the treasury of kings with a ceaseless income. Art, literature, knowledge and culture were enthroned supreme – yet was it a land of false gods and a people given over to their worship.

Speaking in the name of God the prophet announced the coming desolation of Egypt. It should be cast down. Its fisheries should be destroyed, its papyrus withered, its cities and temples overthrown and the ruins scattered over the plain, no native prince should ever again sit upon its throne, it should become the basest of kingdoms.

It has become such.

Its cities are destroyed. Its temples are roofless, its columns fallen, the statues of its kings lie face downward in the dust, the pyramids, stripped and bare, stand scarred and silent in the sun. The singing Memnon are as songless from their chiselled lips as the tongueless Sphynx half buried in the yellow sand. The fisheries are gone, the papyrus has withered; for centuries no native prince has been seated on the throne. It is a land of the dead. The dead are everywhere. At every step you stumble over a mummy, the mummy of a dead cat, a dead dog, or a dead and shrivelled Pharaoh. Its greatest asset is its departed glory, and every grain of sand blown from the mighty desert, and every wave of reflected light flung back from the Lybian hills, proclaims the terrific fulfilment of the prophet’s words.

The prophets foretold the final siege and destruction of Jerusalem. It should be trodden down of the Gentiles. The people should be carried away captive and sold into all lands. They should be scattered from one end of the earth to the other. All nations should despise them. They should become a by-word, a hissing and a scorn. They should be hunted, hounded and persecuted. Their sufferings should be unparalleled, horrible, unspeakable. The sound of a shaken leaf should startle them. They were to become the people of the trembling heart and the wandering foot.

The prophecies have been singularly fulfilled.

Jerusalem was besieged by the Romans. The city was taken. The city and temple were destroyed. Hundreds of thousands perished by famine, by fever, by fire and by sword. Titus, the Roman conqueror, drove a ploughshare over its smoking ruins. The people who remained alive after the general slaughter were carried away captive. They were scattered from one end of the earth to the other. They have found their dwelling place among all nations. They dwell everywhere and are at home nowhere. They have been a by-word, a hissing and a scorn. Every hand has been turned against them. They have been hunted on the mountains. They have been chased through the valleys. They have been walled up in the narrow and filthy ghettos of cities. Their goods have been stolen. Their wives and daughters have been ravished. They have been whipped and racked and tortured. They have been broken on the wheel, burned at the stake, buried alive, and sent to sea, thousands of them, in sinking ships. Every cruelty that the ingenuity of man and the inspiration of fiends could suggest has been practised upon them, until the heart revolts and the soul sickens at the mere recital of their blood and woe; and to this hour, through twenty long centuries, Jerusalem, as announced, has been trodden down of the Gentiles; all nations have tramped through her streets, overridden her people and torn down her walls.