Is the Bible the Inerrant Word of God?

The Question, Is the Bible the Inerrant Word of God? is the most fundamental of all questions in Religion or Ethics. If the Bible is the Word of God, an absolutely reliable revelation from God Himself, regarding Himself, His nature, His character, His will, His purposes, His plans, and regarding man, his nature, his need, his ruin, the way of his redemption, his duty and his destiny, then we have a sure starting point from which we can proceed to the conquest of the entire domain of Religious and Ethical truth. But if the Bible is not the Inerrant Word of God, if it is only the result of man’s thinking, speculating and guessing regarding the great themes with which it has

[13] to do, and therefore not at all dependable, even though it be.the best result of man’s thinking, speculating and guessing in existence, we are all at sea, drifting we know not whither, though we may be perfectly sure that we are not drifting toward any safe port. It is at this point that the great battle is to be fought out. Here should be the great line of cleavage and separation in the professing church today. The old distinctions between Presbyterians and Methodists, between Baptists and Congregationalists, between Lutherans and Episcopalians, have largely lost their significance for most of us. They have lost all of their significance for me. To be more exact, they never had any great significance for me. I am a Presbyterian because I believe a man ought to belong to and be responsible to some definite body of believers. I do not believe in guerrilla warfare. But I would not go across the road to make any other man a Presbyterian, but I would go a long ways and work hard to convince any man that this dear old Book, to which I owe everything I am and everything I may have ever accomplished in the world, is the absolutely dependable Word of God. I have far more fellowship with and joy in a Baptist who believes this Book to be the Inerrant Word of God, than I have with a Presbyterian who denies it or seeks to quibble about it and befog the issue, as some Presbyterians, I regret to say, do.

My subject then this morning is: Who says, “The Bible is the Inerrant Word of God’? By the Bible I do not mean any particular English Version of the Scriptures, the Authorized Version, the English Re-

[14] vision, or the American Standard Revision or any other Version, but the Scriptures as originally given. And we can now tell with substantial accuracy how the Scriptures as originally given, read. Furthermore, any of these versions mentioned are a substantially accurate rendition of the Hebrew and Aramaic of the original Old Testament manuscripts, and of the Greek of the original New Testament manuscripts, and to that extent they are “the Holy Scriptures,” the Bible.

Let me repeat my subject: Who says, “The Bible is the Inerrant Word of God’? I have three texts: Matt. 5:18, “For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled.’ Jno. 10:35, “The Scripture cannot be broken.” Mark 7:13, “Making the word of God of none effect through your tradition.”

We shall consider first Who says, the Bible is the Inerrant Word of God? and after that we shall consider, Who says, the Bible is not the Inerrant Word of God? Then you can judge for yourselves which group of witnesses you ought to believe. First, then, let us consider Who Says, ‘““The Bible Is the Inerrant Word of God”?

1. In the first place, our Lord Jesus Christ says so. The attitude of Jesus Christ toward the Bible, toward both the Old Testament and the New Testament and His opinion in regard to the Bible as to whether its author was man or God is unmistakable.

(1) In one of our texts, Mark 7:13, our Lord calls the Pentateuch “the Word of God” in so many words.

His exact words are, “Making the word of God of none effect through your tradition, which ye have delivered.’”’ In the verses immediately preceding He has drawn a contrast between the teachings of the Pharisees and the Scribes on the one hand, and the teachings that Moses gave in the Pentateuch, not merely in the Ten Commandments but in other parts of the Pentateuch as well, on the other hand. And then He sums it all up by saying that they were “making the word of God of none effect through their tradition.” In this way He calls the Pentateuch in so many words “the Word of God.”

When I was holding meetings in England a high dignitary in the Church of England, a scholarly man, took exception to my calling the Bible “the Word of God,” and in private correspondence said “the Bible nowhere claims to be “the Word of God.” In reply I called his attention to this passage among others and showed him how our Lord Jesus Christ Himself called the Pentateuch “the Word of God.”

(2) In another of my texts, Matt. 5:18, our Lord Jesus says: “For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled.” Now every Hebrew scholar knows that a “jot” was the Hebrew character Yedh (*), the smallest character in the Hebrew alphabet, less than one half the size of any other character in the Hebrew alphabet, and that a “tittle” was simply the little horn that the Hebrews put on some of their letters, smaller than the cross we put ona #. So our Lord Jesus here sets the stamp of His endorsement upon the absolute Inerrancy of the Law as originally given through Moses down to its smallest letter and smallest part of a letter. That is verbal inspiration with a vengeance.

Now of course these two passages refer primarily only to the Pentateuch. But if you can accept the Pentateuch you will not have much trouble with the rest of the Bible. This is the very part of the Bible where the hottest fight has always been waged between those who believe the Bible to be the Inerrant Word of God and those who think that much of it is only fable, or “folklore.” Here is where you find the two accounts of Creation, about which so many superficial and illinformed readers and teachers of the Bible gabble so much to their own satisfaction and so much to the disgust of all real students of the Bible. Here is where you have the story of the Fall, for which our ‘““Modernists” and “New Theology Men,” and ‘Eddyites” and “Theosophists” and “Spiritualists” and all that sort of folk have so much contempt, in which contempt they reveal their ignorance both of archaeological research and that type of present-day psychology that considers man as he really is and not as the dreamers would like him to be. Here is where we find the story of the Flood, of Sodom and Gomorrah and of Lot’s wife (all of which were specifically endorsed as true history by our Lord). Here is where you find the story of the Manna, the miraculous opening of a path through the Red Sea, and the Smitten Rock that poured forth water, etc., etc., all things at which the. destructive critics and their sympathizers most cavil. Is it not

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