Our Bible
“Thou truest friend man ever knew.
Thy cons ta f icy Ih’e tried;
When all were false I found thee true,
My cou?isellor and guide.
The mities of earth no treasures give
That could this volume buy;
In teaching me the way to live.
It taught me how to die.”
Morris,
“The Word of Godr Hebrews
4.: 12.
The Bible never casts a shadow. Its truth is light and life. Christian civilization owes its development to the Bible. It is translated into almost every language on earth, and by this linguistic intercourse of nations, commerce and arts and sciences have been promoted. Only the missionary who laid himself on God’s altar as a sacrifice was willing to spend his life in mastering difcult foreign languages that he might translate the Bible into them, and carry the Word of Life to the people. The missionary has thus brought the ends of the earth together, and made possible the great commercial advances of modern times. When an Indian chief asked Queen Victoria what was the secret of England’s greatness, she quietly handed him a Bible.
The old Book is unique. Like Goliath’s sword there is none like it. As in a composite flower there are many perfect flowers in one,
131 so in the Bible there are many books. It is really a collection of sixty-six volumes, a whole library between two covers. It was about 1500 years in growing. Its authors differed in language, nationality, and surroundings. There were among them shepherds, kings, priests, mechanics, fishermen, physicians, theologians, and law makers. Some were learned, others illiterate.
While the personality of the different authors is clearly seen, it has a style of its own. Standing on the top of the Rocky Mountains with a conch-shell to your ear, you can hear the roar of the ocean; so the Bible carries with it everywhere the surf sounds of the ocean of God’s thought and power and love.
It teaches from beginning to end the fact of one God. Where did the writers get this idea? Certainly not from the nations about them, Herodotus informs us that 500 B. C. there were in Egypt more gods than men. In India not less than 300,000,000 of false deities. The Persians worshiped almost everything associated with light or fire. The fields, groves, and cities of Greece were full of imaginary deities, and yet all these writers for 1500 years taught that there was only one God.
There runs through the whole Bible a unity of purpose. We see it first of all in the curse upon the serpent in Genesis, and like the rising sun it grows brighter and brighter till the perfect day of the New Testament. Its purpose is to reveal God in Christ Jesus. With this bright revelation of Jesus the Saviour there is a dark revelation of man the sinner. The infidel informs us that there are parts of the Bible which ought not to be read in public. Yes, friend, and there are parts of you that ought not to be read in public. The old Book has no prudery, it speaks out, and has something to say to the daughter which the mother can scarcely whisper. It has a word to the son which the father would not venture to utter. It is a book, not for the crowd, but for the individual.
More than four thousand times God signs his name to this book as his very word. Begin with Genesis and read through Revelation, and you will find that books, chapters, paragraphs, verses and words bear the signature of God. “Thus said the Lord,” rings through it. “Hear the Word of the Lord.” “The Holy Ghost spake by the mouth of David.” “The prophecy came not in old time by the will of men, but holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost.” “All Scripture is God breathed.”” Of course there are utterances in the Bible which are not inspired. I would not preach from the words of the devil, except to condemn them, but the fact that the devil said just those things is inspired. God is responsible for everything in the book.
It is as clear as light that the authors of these books claimed that they were inspired. If they were not, then we have to explain how the book which contains the highest morality ever given to earth could be written by a set of liars. These bad men at the same time wrote their own doom, for no vice is more severely condemned in the Bible than deception. To claim that good men wrote the Bible, and deny its inspiration, is like the claim that Christ was a good man while he pretended to be what he was not. Either assumption is a sword which pierces through the opponents of inspiration. The Book was certainly written in its human aspects by good men or bad men. If good men wrote it, claiming inspiration, it is true; if bad men wrote it, we have the spectacle of the best book in the world written by the worst men, who at the same time denounce themselves most pitilessly.
About 250 years before Christ the Old Testament was translated from the Hebrew into Greek by seventy men, and for that reason the translation is called the Septuagint. This translation enables us to trace the history of the book back through the ages, and silences the infidel who would claim that it is of recent origin.
There are, so far as we know, no original manuscripts, and for a good reason. Jesus was careful to wipe away every vestige of his footprints on earth. The traveler as he goes through Palestine cannot be certain that he is standing just where Jesus once stood. He knew our tendency to worship places and things, and if an original manuscript in the handwriting of Paul or Peter were discovered, many would be inclined to worship it. It would be placed in holy shrines, and superstitious people would bow before it. God, therefore, in his wise providence, destroyed the original copy, but has left us more than 2,000 manuscripts copied by different hands in different ages and different places, and yet so nearly identical that not a single great fact or doctrine is affected by their differences.
As I looked upon the manuscript in the British Museum and compared it with other books, known to have been written hundreds of )^ears later, its pure whiteness and distinct lettering, compared with their faded and blurred appearance, impressed me with the conviction that the very angels of God must have watched over it and protected it. Amid political and social earthquakes, that have swallowed up nations and institutions, this manuscript has been preserved in its original purity. And as I gazed through the glass upon another manuscript in the Vatican at Rome, I had the same feeling. God surely has exercised peculiar care over his written revelation.
As history, the Bible gives the record of events which can be found in no other book. It begins with creation and ends with the consummation of all things. Its first words, “In the beginning, God,” is an explanation of the material universe, and if you would know the beginning of the family, the Sabbath, of sin and crime, of the diversity of languages, of the rise and fall of ancient cities, you have but to read this wonderful library. And there are many things in the book which antedate the discoveries of modern science. Before the world ever heard of Copernicus and Newton, Isaiah wrote of “the circle of the heavens,” and Job said, “He stretcheth out the North over empty space, and hangeth the world upon nothing.” At least 3000 years before geology as a science was born, Moses gave the order of creation and development. The Book was not intended to teach science, but all of its scientific references I verily believe, if properly interpreted, are up to date, and will continue to be up to date if the world should last and grow in knowledge a thousand years longer.
As poetry, the Bible has no rival. It is a supernatural book from beginning to end, and there can be no real poetry without a belief in the supernatural. George Eliot wrote good enough novels, but reading her poetry is like eating dry bones. If you would feel the fire and mount upon the wings of poetry, you must read Longfellow, Whittier, Milton, Shakespeare, and other great poets who believed the Bible and echoed its noble sentiments. If you would hear music from master-minds you must listen to Beethoven, Handel, Mozart, Mendelsohn, who drank their inspiration from Biblical fountains.
The most fascinating part of the Bible, however, is its prophecies. Hundreds of years before events took place they were foretold, and hundreds of years before men were born their names were given and their biographies carefully written. The place of Christ’s birth, over which he could have no control, his character and reception by the people, the manner of his death, the dividing of his garments, piercing of his body, the kind of companions he would have in death, all these and more are given with minute distinctness. How can we account for it? By simply accepting the fact that the God who moved men to write the book could see ahead and tell what was coming to pass, and that he moved them to write what, as mere men, they could not possibly have known.
Jesus, whose biography was thus pre-writteii by the prophets, is himself a prophet, and tells his disciples that certain things shall come to pass, while they could see no indications of their approach. He declared that Jerusalem should be destroyed, and you read in Josephus the fearful fulfilment of that prophecy. The prophet Isaiah wrote the doom of Babylon while she was still in her glory. He declared that it should never be inhabited, that no Arabian would ever pitch his tent there, that only the wild beasts of the forest should dwell in it, and this prophecy has been literally fulfilled. No traveler has ever yet been able by bribery to induce his Bedouin guide to spend a night among the ruins of Babylon. The prophet Nahum declared that Nineveh, then in her glory, should be destroyed by fire and water. The historic fact is that, after the swollen river had washed away a part of the wall, the besiegers rushed through the breach and set the city on fire. Tyre, the Liverpool of ancient times, the queen of the seas, had her doom written for her while there were no signs of decay. God said, through Ezekiel, “I will also scrape her dust from her, and make her like the top of a rock;” and again, “thou shalt be a place to spread nets upon.” Such is the prophecy. Here is the history written by Volney, the infidel: “The whole village of Tyre contains only fifty or sixty poor famiHes, who live obscurely upon the produce of their little ground and a trifling fishery.” A traveler informs us that, while he was standing on the site of old Tyre, at the approach of evening he saw the fishermen pull their nets out of the water and spread them upon the bare rock to dry. He took out his Bible and read with deep emotion the prophecy of Ezekiel, whose fulfilment he had just seen. And Ezekiel prophesied of Egypt: “It shall be the basest of kingdoms.” No one to-day denies the truth of that prophecy, and it was written when Egypt was at the climax of her glory — the England of her time.
Every Jew among us is a living fulfilment of prophecy. More than one prophet declared that they should be scattered among the nations; despised and persecuted, yet remain distinct. As we look into each other’s faces we cannot tell whether our forefathers were English, German, Scotch, Irish, French, or Scandinavian, but I am quite sure that we can tell whether they were Jews. The Jew remains a Jew. In China he tried to become a Chinaman by adopting Chinese customs and wearing the pig-tail, but a Jew with a pig-tail is a Jew still. Millionaires, like Baron Hirsch, may advocate their mingling with the Gentiles, but all their persuasion only makes the average Jew more determined to remain distinct.
In Hartford, Connecticut, I attended a Saturday service in the Jewish synagogue. There were business men by the score who had left their banks, stores, and factories at the busiest hour of the day to worship on the Sabbath of their forefathers. As I sat there and listened to the mumbling of the Rabbi, reciting the Hebrew Scriptures, I did not know what he said, but I did know that his presence and that of his congregation were the fulfilment of prophecy written more than three thousand years ago. Frederick the Great asked a learned man to give him in one sentence a good reason for his faith in Christianity, and his reply was, “The Jews, your majesty.”
But we need always to remember that the Bible is a very practical book and no one can add to its moral code. When the infidel speaks against it, ask him for some improvement upon the ethics of the Bible, and you will find him speechless, if he be an honest man. He may prate about the bad character of some whose biographies are given in the Bible, but he knows that the morals of the book condemn everything that is bad. A man and his wife were sitting in their quiet parlor, she busy with her magazine and he with curious interest reading a Bible which he had picked up. “Wife,” said he, “if this book is right, we are wrong.” She dropped her magazine and gazed at him curiously, and then resumed her reading. After a few minutes he said, a little more earnestly, “Wife, if this book is right, we are lost,” and she stopped to talk with him over that fact and then resumed her reading. After reading more carefully the precious volume for a half hour longer he looked up and said, with a tear in his voice, “Wife, if this book is right we may be saved.” Read the Bible, friend, and it will tell you where you are wrong, why you are lost, and the blessed fact that you may be saved. It reveals in Jesus Christ the fulness of God’s love and sympathy and mercy. It is the book that will comfort you when you are in sorrow, that will strengthen you in weakness, will guide you in perplexity, will cheer you in sadness, and when you come to die will shine upon the future and reveal to you the golden gates of the paradise of God. Throw the whole weight of your weakness and sin upon its promises and they are strong enough to hold you.