God's Word Speaks Clearly

The Bible and the Spade

From the March/April 1983 Bible Study Monthly

The earth is continually yielding fresh treasures to the excavator and the investigator and with every such discovery the Bible stands illumined in brighter hue.

The days are long since past when the rash allegation that the Bible had no independent testimony to support its claim to be true history must needs be endured in dignified silence. Today there is a host of witnesses; solid evidences of the handiwork of men living in Bible times, testifying to the accuracy of that which had already been recorded in Holy Writ. And if the preservation of these clay tablets and rocks and stones through the centuries and the millenniums, and their subsequent discovery long after the very nations in whose languages they were inscribed had passed away, is a matter of astonishment and wonder, what must be said of the Bible itself? That record has been preserved, not on enduring stone hidden away in the depths of the ground, safe from interfering and malicious hands, until its secrets could be revealed to the sober inquiry of this latter age, but in the world of men and among men.

The precious manuscripts have at all times since their writing circulated in the world, been read and re-read, copied and re-copied, while the great established powers among men have sought by every means at their disposal to root them out and exterminate them. No other book ever written has had such a checkered and hazardous career as has the Bible. No other book has been the object of such determined and relentless efforts to suppress and exterminate it. And no other book has survived so long and so triumphantly. Neither the burning fires of persecution nor the chilling winds of indifference have prevailed to wither and destroy its message and its influence in the world. Even today, when the religious apathy of the Western nations has become a byword and a proverb, the Bible remains a "best seller." Not for nothing is it described by the apostle Peter as the "word of God, which liveth and abideth for ever" (1Peter 1:23). In all this world of change and decay, of tumult and unrest, of indifference and hostility, the Bible stands, serene, dignified, confident, an inflexible witness to God and to his concern and care for mankind.

That is its central truth. The historical features of the Bible are not there as an end in themselves; they are a means to an end. Its history is not myth. Men and women did live and work and write as the Bible says they did. Their hopes and fears, loves and hates, strengths and weaknesses, were all as the Bible relates of them. Even its greatest heroes have their faults and failings, their mistakes and their sins, recorded as faithfully as their triumphs of faith and the things wherein they pleased God.

But all of this is but to point to one great truth—that man, created perfect and sinless at the first, fell from that high estate into sin, and so death passed upon all men; that God is working ceaselessly to recover man from the effects of that sin and to achieve his final goal of a sinless creation in which "all that hath breath shall praise the Lord"; that to achieve that end—by the only way in which that end can be achieved—the Lord Jesus Christ came from above and moved among men, teaching the true principles by which men must live, suffering himself to be put to death rather than betray those principles; that eventually all men may be brought face to face with the alternative of accepting Christ and his ways and so inheriting eternal life, or rejecting them and suffering eternal death.

That is the message and the power of the Bible. It will by no means renounce or whittle down its claim to be the authoritative expression of God’s Will and exposition of God’s Plan in respect to man, his origin, his present state, and his destiny. It takes us back to earliest times and shows us man as he was—pure, upright, sinless, perfectly adapted to his environment, and capable of everlasting life while remaining in harmony with Divine Law. It passes on into history and leads us up to the present, showing us the dark and terrible results of human selfishness, depravity and sin, in a world that has largely rejected God and is increasingly so doing. It takes us forward into the future and shows us a world at peace, sin banished, war a thing of the past, love and good fellowship replacing hate and rancor and jealousy. It shows us the will of God done on earth as it is done in heaven, and God dwelling as it were with men and all creation at peace.

Then it comes back into the present, the time of this world, and shows us the means by which that glorious consummation is to be brought about, in the person and work of Christ, and tells us in unmistakable terms that only by full acceptance of Christ and consecration of life to him can men and women be recovered from their state of imperfection and weakness and sin, and be translated into the glorious liberty of the children of God.

The Bible has a lot to say about the philosophy of the atonement. It does not demand that all its readers understand that philosophy in detail. What it does demand, and demands because compliance with the demand is the only possible way of escape from sin and death, is "Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved."

"God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth inhim should not perish, but have everlasting life!"—John 3:16

That verse is the crowning glory of the Bible and the expression of its deepest truth. All else leads up to it. The object of the Bible in this world is to lead men to Christ and to instruct them in his ways after they have accepted him. Its history, its poetry, its visions, its ethics, all converge irresistibly upon one transcendent figure, the one who is rightful King of the earth and King of all men, the one who, in the power and glory of his second advent, will reign as Prince of Peace over a transformed and transfigured world of men, teaching them to pursue the arts of peace and eschew the evils of war, until in enlightenment and true reverence they come before him in voluntary yielding of all life’s powers in a dedication of heart and mind that will endure to all eternity.

In their own humble way, the tablets and the inscriptions on the rocks are agents in the execution of the Divine Plan. They have played, and still play, their part in establishing faith in God. It is said of him that he hath "left not himself without witness" (Acts 14:17) and this at least is one respect in which the statement is true. Jesus spoke of the very stones crying out to testify to his Messiahship (Luke 19:40); the voice of the monuments has made itself heard to declare, indirectly, that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.