"If ye continue in
My Word, then are ye My disciples indeed; and ye shall know the truth,
and the truth shall make you free."
John 8,31.32.
IT has been one of the favorite
pastimes of unbelievers and scoffers to predict the number of years
that will elapse before the Church will have completely repudiated and
discarded the Bible. Starting with the French infidels in the
eighteenth century and continuing down to this very day, these
self-styled apostles of enlightenment have relieved themselves of
prophecies which, while differing as to the length of life they concede
to the Bible, have this prediction in common, that the Scriptures are
inevitably doomed to quick and ignominious extinction. How strange, in
view of these confident assertions, that at a time when atheism has
organized its opposition along far-flung and highly systematized lines,
when the cancer of infidelity has so thoroughly eaten its way into the
vitals of American Christendom that some of our American churches
openly print and promote attacks upon the truth of the Bible, we find,
in the midst of the cut-throat assaults on the Bible, that the Book of
books is now annually said in 14,000,000 copies in the United States
alone and in 36,000,000 copies throughout the world, the highest peak
of Bible distribution that history has ever known.
THE GLORIOUS CONTENT OF THE
SCRIPTURES.
So tonight
let me
tell you more about this deathless volume and show you what it is and
what it can do for every one of you. And because I want the Bible to
speak for itself, I have based my remarks on the very words of our Lord
Jesus, “If ye continue in My Word, then are ye My disciples indeed; and
ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”
This promise
centers about Christ’s Word, His divine utterances in the four gospels.
But His Word embraces also the rest of the New Testament, with the
dazzling light it sheds on Christ’s sinless Saviorhood, and the Old
Testament, with its three hundred foregleams of Christ, the ancient
Scriptures, of which Jesus says, "They
are they which testify of Me.”
That is Christ’s Word, the entire Scripture, composed by almost half a
hundred writers, completed in fifteen long centuries, written under the
most varied circumstances, — this vision on the seashore of a lonely
exile, this letter in the confines of a martyr’s prison, this history
on a caravan wearily jogging its way across the desert, this psalm
under the starlit heavens of Judah, this song in the captivity of
far-off Babylon, — a Book to which many men and many countries and many
centuries have contributed, but which, from the creation of Genesis to
the beatified visions of paradise in the Apocalypse, is pervaded with
a marvelous unity, the dominating message of sin and grace, the
assurance of a loving Father’s gracious redemption of His children.
Now, it is
fundamentally vital that we realize that this Bible is Christ’s Word,
God’s Word, a divine Book; that, unlike the 12,000 different volumes
published in the United States last year, here is a book that came into
existence not ~by the will of man,” but, as the apostle tells us, by
the immeasurable and unending love of God to give His weak and
inconsistent children a positive and unfailing guide through the
perplexities of the here into the hereafter.
Externally, of
course, the Bible has much the same appearance as any other volume of
its size and proportions. But because it is God-breathed; because, as
we are expressly assured, “all Scripture is given by inspiration”;
because the men who wrote the various books of the Bible “spake as they
were moved by the Holy Ghost,” we believe that the Bible, as 2,600
different passages of the Old Testament and 526 different references in
the New individually claim, presents to us the Word of God, written by
men who were chosen and supernaturally endowed by God for that purpose
and who, through the divine process of inspiration, were given the
exact, literal messages they have recorded for us.
Now stop to think
what this means, that within the covers of the Bible you have Christ’s
Word. Christ is the only one who ever came down from heaven to tell men
of God and of the hereafter. What "eye
hath not seen nor ear heard” is
revealed in Christ’s Word, and in that Word alone. And so, when Jesus
tells you who labor under the sorrows and anxieties of a disillusioning
world that He has gone to prepare the heavenly mansions for you; when
His Word assures you that ~the sufferings of this present time are not
worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed” in you,
then rest fully assured that, unlike misguided fanatics of our day who
claim personal revelation from God, unlike philosophers and scientists
who speculate in vague theories as to the hereafter, Jesus alone
reveals authoritatively the divine facts of the life to come, on which
every sin-harassed soul can safely rest its hope.
Christ is
everlasting and unchangeable, “the same yesterday and today and
forever”; and that means that His Word likewise is not subject to the
fluctuations of human learning and experience. There is not a
recognized institution of higher learning in our country today that
employs the same textbooks in natural sciences, for example, which
were used at the beginning of this century, — so changeable and
vacillating are the best products of the human brain. But here in the
Bible, because it comes down from Him ~in whom there is no variableness
neither shadow of turning,” we have a changeless Christ for a changing
world, a Book of sacred promises which is never out of date and which,
according to the Savior’s own pledge, shall survive the relentless flow
of devastating time.
Christ is holy. His
challenge, “Which of you convinceth Me of sin?” has remained unaccepted
though nineteen centuries of human hostility to Him. So, likewise, His
Book is the echo of His holiness and of His infinite beauty and
excellence. Even the unparalleled language seems to be conscious of
its high privilege in being chosen as the vehicle of this divine
beauty. It was Lord Macaulay, who knew the Bible well from his
childhood and whose writings are replete with references to it, that
said, “The English Bible — the Book which, if everything else in our
language should perish, would alone suffice to show the whole extent of
its beauty and power.”
But this literary
grace is only a vanishing shadow of the great spiritual beauty
portrayed by the gracious promises of love. Christ is Love, Love in its
highest, deepest, broadest reaches, and never have human eyes read a
volume that abounds with the singular tenderness of the love which the
Bible extends to every sorrowing soul. Behold its consideration for the
sick and the suffering; its provisions for the outcasts and the
destitute; its hatred of persecution; its rejection of injustice and
oppression and its corresponding emphasis on mercy, peace, and love;
its tenderness even for dumb animals, which forbade the removal of the
mother bird from her nest. But remember that this is merely a weak echo
of the most beautiful theme that human ears have ever heard, the holy
beauty of the divine grace and forgiveness in Jesus Christ, who,
“having loved His own that were in the world, loved them unto the end,”
that heart-breaking, earth-shaking end at Calvary, with a love that
knows no bounds and that demands no payment, but that would make the
sin-stained souls of all men pure and white in the sight of God.
Christ is the
universal figure of history. His transforming love addresses itself to
“all who labor and are heavy laden.” And so His Word, the only truly
universal Book, has hurdled the barriers that divide men into different
and opposing races, castes, and colors and crashed through the walls of
the artificial caste systems that selfish men have erected. Because the
Bible is the Book for all lands, from the tropical climes of darkest
Africa to the frozen wastes of the frigid North; because it is the Book
for all people, the cultured and the illiterate, the wealthy and the
impoverished, the mighty and the humble; because it is the Book for
every need in every human heart; because, in short, it is God’s Book
for humanity in its entirety, it has been translated into approximately
nine hundred languages and dialects and has brought men to God all over
the world. The nearest approach to that universality is Martin Luther’s
“A Mighty Fortress Is Our God,” which has been translated into 171
languages. And that hymn is largely a poetic reproduction of the 46th
Psalm.
Christ gave the
world a complete redemption. When He cried, “lt is finished,” and when
He rose again to seal the power of His shed blood, God’s plan of
salvation was perfected. His Word, too, is complete. The closing verses
of the Bible place a curse upon those who take away from, or add to,
the revelation of God. And in a day when men either take out of the
Bible parts that do not appeal to their natural pride and ambitions or
tell us that we need something to supplement the Bible, a mystical key
to its interpretation or the traditions of the Church Fathers or the
so-called assured results of science, we rest assured that this Book
would not be God’s Book if it required the additions of human theories
and human opinions to make it complete.
Christ is eternal.
He, humanity’s everlasting contemporary, comforts us with the assurance
that He is with us “alway, even unto the end of the world.” And His
Word is imperishable. In moments of doubt we may sometimes think that
the missiles of hatred may mar the Word; but then, through the Spirit
of God, we are reassured that these loud-mouthed and overconfident
enemies of the Bible are simply raising a tissue-paper barricade to
restrain the on-rushing flood of God’s Word. Their names and their
delusions are “wrtt in sand.” A wave laps lazily over them, and all is
destroyed. Let us not worry about the Bible. Here is Christ’s sacred
pledge, “Heaven and earth shall pass away, but My Word shall not pass
away.”
THE SACRED PROMISE OF THE
SCRIPTURES.
And when you now
ask, “What can this deathless Book do for me?” the words that I read
before tell you, “If ye continue in My Word,” that is, if you accept
the Bible as the guiding principle of your life, cling to the message
of its Cross as to the veritable Rock of Ages, and in prosperity and
adversity, in sickness and health, in employment and unemployment, in
life and death, find in it Christ as the great Friend and Savior that
He is, “ye are My disciples indeed.” Remember, that pledge is
contingent upon a faithful, consistent, and unwavering continuance in
Christ’s Word. It is not a matter of reading the Bible today and
setting it aside tomorrow; not a worshiping on Sunday and a denying on
Monday; not an automatic, passive, indifferent acknowledgment of
Christ’s Word, but a living, vitalizing, constant devotion to the
Scriptures, through daily and unintermittent study of the Word. Only in
this way can you enjoy the glorious distinction of being enrolled
shoulder to shoulder with the host of Christian soldiers who, following
in the footsteps of the Twelve and in the pathways blazed by the
apostles, are marching on in endless procession and under the
leadership of the great Captain of their soul’s salvation. There can,
of course, be an outward show of Christianity without this Biblical
basis. In a day when the largest and most imposing churches are often
built up on anti-Scriptural foundations, when doctrinal demarcations
are steadily being obliterated; when church-membership is made so easy
that no statement of faith or pledge of conduct is seriously demanded,
it may be well to remind ourselves that our Savior is speaking of His
disciples “indeed” and that there can be no real and sincere
discipleship that is not loyally pledged to Christ’s Word.
The blessing of
such discipleship is this, “Ye shall know the truth.” Think of it: In
Christ’s faith you have “the truth.” Why, protracted centuries of
research have been unable to reveal the truth even in some of the
simplest affairs of our everyday life. Our whole existence is wrapped
up in lies, with lies in our courts, lies in our business world, lies
in our social relations, lies in our politics. But here, thank God, in
this pure and perfect Word, is an infallible and unerring truth, which
never can make a mistake because it came from Him who is ~the Way, the
Truth, and the Life.” Here error-bound humanity is offered the truth
absolute, the truth concerning human origin and human destiny, sin and
grace, life and death, the here and the hereafter; the truth concerning
the practical issues in life, your success and your adversity, your
happiness and your sorrow, your soul and your body; the truth
concerning your home, your business, your country; the truth concerning
such modern questions as war and peace, capital and labor, crime and
its cure; in short, the basic truth to answer every question in life,
particularly and predominantly the soul-searching inquiry, What must I
do to be saved?” Trust that Word, believe in that truth, accept its
promise of the forgiveness of your sins; for every merciful assurance
of the waiting arms of your heavenly Father, every pledge it offers you
for the solution of the besetting difficulties of life, has been
written in the blood of Christ and sealed with His glorious
resurrection.
That truth, our
text continues, “shall make you free.” Freedom and liberty have always
ranked among the highest and noblest aspirations of men. To free their
fellowmen from bondage, 300,000 soldiers laid down their lives in our
Civil ‘War. To preserve their liberties, as the soldiers on both sides
of that bloody conflict were told, eight and a half million combatants
went down to death in the World War. But the tragedies that have
followed in the wake of that stupendous conflict have emphasized to an
increasing number of thoughtful people the ghastly disappointments
which millions have met in their longing for political and national
liberty. Yet our text promises higher and nobler freedom; for all the
blood that flowed at Antietam or at Chateau Thierry, swollen by the
gory streams of all human battles for liberty and independence, cannot
remove from humankind the thraldom of that superhuman tyranny which
blights our lives and our happiness — the domination of sin. For that
emancipation we need the holy, precious blood of Him who “Himself in
His own body bare our sins on the tree” and His divine benediction,
given to all of us who love and trust Him, “Thy sins be forgiven thee,”
the heavenly declaration of our independence from sin, hell, and death.
Have you accepted
this declaration? As I repeat the question and ask, “Have you accepted
Jesus as your own Savior and His Word as the promise of your
salvation?” may God give you His grace, first to realize that you have
heard the question of paramount importance in human life and then to
answer this question with a ringing conviction that in Christ’s truth
and freedom the search for your happiness has found its goal. Amen.
(The preceding radio sermon first
aired in October 1930)