Christ, Christianity and the Bible Part 17

Put Christ into the Bible, and the harp strings will be smitten as with a master's hand.

Put Christ into the Bible, and the voice of song is heard as when a lark from the midst of dew-wet gra.s.ses sings, as it soars aloft to greet the coming dawn.

Put Christ into the Bible, and all the doors of the palace are swung open and you may pa.s.s from room to room, down all the ivory galleries of the King, beholding portrait and landscape, vista of beauty and heaped-up treasures of truth, of infinite love and royal grace.

Put Christ into the Bible, and you will have a scarlet thread--the crimson of the blood--that will lead you through all the winding ways of redemption and glory.

Put Christ into Genesis, into the verses of the first chapter, and it will chime like silver bells in harmony with the wondrous notes in the first chapter of the Gospel of John, and tell you that he who created the heavens and the earth is he who in the beginning was the eternal Word, the voice of the infinite silence, and who, creating for himself a human nature, and clad in mortal flesh, walked on earth among the sons of men as Jesus of Nazareth.

Put Christ into the twenty-second, the twenty-third and the twenty -fourth chapters of Genesis, and you will have placed before you in perfect type the birth of Christ, the sacrifice, the resurrection on the morning of the third day, the setting aside of the Jewish nation as the first wife, the coming of the Holy Spirit in the name of the Father and the Son to find a Bride for the Son, the calling out of the church, the endowment of the church with the gifts sent from the Father in the name of the Son, the pilgrimage of the church under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, the Second Coming of Christ, the Rapture and meeting of Christ and the church in the "field" of the air, and the marriage of the Son.

Put Christ into the dryest and dullest page of the book of Kings and Chronicles, and it will bloom with light and glory; and if you watch in faith, you will see the King's chariot go by, and catch a vision of the King himself in his beauty.

Put Christ into the Tabernacle, and it will cast its treasures like a king's largess at your feet.

You will see the brazen altar to be the cross, the brazen laver, the bath of regeneration, even the Word of G.o.d. In the Holy Place the table of shew bread will speak of him who once said, "I am the bread of life." The golden candlestick will remind you that he said: "I am the light of the world." The golden altar and the priest with his swinging censer of burning incense standing thereat will proclaim him as the great high priest. The beautiful veil of fine linen embroidered with figures of the cherubim in blue, purple and scarlet color is (according to a direct Scripture) the symbol of his flesh, his mortal humanity while on earth. Every board and bar, every cord and pin, the coverings, the curtains, the blue, the purple and the scarlet color, the golden vessels as well as the furniture, each and all, proclaim him, ill.u.s.trate and illuminate him in his person, his work, his present office and coming glories.

All these are a.n.a.logies, types, pictures, are so related to Christ that he alone explains them; the explanation is filled with such perfection of harmony in every detail, the relation between them and our Lord Jesus Christ as the Ant.i.type is so strikingly self-evident, that any discussion of it would be useless.

When you find a key and lock which fit each other, you conclude they were intended for each other.

In the light of facts already cited, what other conclusion can be drawn than that Christ and the Bible were intended for each other?

And when you see this Bible coming together part by part, foretelling the Christ and explained alone by him, what sane conclusion is possible other than the book which is opened and explained by him who is not only the Christ but the Personal Word of G.o.d, _must be_, and _is_, THE WRITTEN WORD OF G.o.d!

Let your mind dwell for a moment on the style of the book.

It is so simple that a child may understand it; so profound, that the mightiest intellect cannot go beyond its depths. It is so essentially rich that it turns every language into which it is translated into a cla.s.sic. At one moment it is plain narration; at another, it is all drama and tragedy, in which cataclysmic climax crashes against climax.

It records the birth of a babe, the flight of an angel, the death of a king, the overthrow of an empire or the fall of a sparrow. It notes the hyssop that groweth out of the wall and speaks of the cedars of Lebanon. It shows us so pastoral a thing as a man sitting at his tent door in the cool of the day, and then paints for us a city in heaven with jasper walls, with golden streets, and where each several gate that leadeth into the city is one vast and shining pearl.

It is full of outlines--outlines as large and bare as mountain peaks, and then it is crowded with details as minute as the sands of the sea. There are times when clouds and darkness float across its pages and we hear from within like unto the voice of him who inhabiteth eternity; in another moment the lines blaze with light, the revelation they give is high noon--and all the shadows are under the feet.

It is terrible in its a.n.a.lysis and cold and emotionless in the hard impact of its synthesis. It describes moments of pa.s.sion in pa.s.sionless words, and states infinite conclusions without the hint of an emphasis. It shows us a man in h.e.l.l (hades) and, although it describes sufferings more awful than mortal flesh can know, causing the soul to shudder at the simple reading of it, it takes on no quickened pulse, no feverish rush of added speech.

In a few colorless lines it recounts the creation of the heavens and the earth. In language utterly barren of excitement it describes the most exciting and soul-moving event that can occupy the imagination --that moment when the heavens shall be on fire, the elements melted with fervent heat, the earth and the works therein burned up, and a new heaven and a new earth brought into view.

It is a book of prose and yet a book of sublimest poetry.

The book of Job is a poem by the side of which the hexameters of Horace, the drama of Shakespeare, the imagination of Milton, are not to be compared.

In all literature the book of Job alone introduces a spirit into the scene and reports its speech without utterly breaking down into the disaster of the commonplace.

Listen to the account which Eliphaz the Temanite gives. He says:

"In thoughts from the visions of the night, when deep sleep falleth on men, Fear came upon me, and trembling which made all my bones to shake."

Then a spirit pa.s.sed before my face; the hair of my flesh stood up; It stood still, but I could not discern the form thereof; an image was before mine eyes; there was silence, and I heard a voice, saying, "Shall mortal man be more just than G.o.d? Shall man be more pure than his Maker?"

Here is the threshold of the unseen. Before he sees or hears anything, the Temanite has the sense of fear--the fear of something more than human. The unknown weighs upon him and presses him down, all the life and energy in him are at low ebb--he feels as though the tides of life were running out. A spirit pa.s.ses before his face.

It is like a breath of scarcely moving air out of the night. The hair of his flesh (mark the psychological and physiological fact), the hair of his flesh stood up. It was as if a current of electricity had pa.s.sed through him. Then the spirit stands still. It is as though this breath of air out of the night were no longer moving. He cannot discern any form. There is nothing fixed or stable enough for him to perceive. An image is before his eyes. He makes no vulgar attempt to describe it--it is indescribable. There is a great silence; then, as the margin has it, he heard a still small voice-- not a loud and jarring voice--but a voice low, soft, still; and yet!

the utterance of that voice! what immensity of self-conscious power what authority and dignity--the dignity of infinite integrity: "Shall mortal man be more just than G.o.d? Shall man be more pure than his Maker?"

How the night is full of a sudden law of proportion. Mortal man and eternal G.o.d. You feel the distance widening and widening between them there in the stillness of the night. The justice of man! man!

the unjust--the law breaker; man, who is of yesterday and is gone to-morrow--mortal man, more just than he of whom it is said, "Justice and judgment are the habitation of his throne." Fallen man, man full of iniquity, shall he be more pure than he who made him; he who breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and made him a living soul; he whose name is holiness and righteousness and very truth? As the question lingers man shrivels and sinks into the dust, and the whole night is filled with stillness--with the stillness and immensity of the all-pervading and holy G.o.d.

Read the thirty-eighth and thirty-ninth chapters.

They record the highest reaches of human language, so great that our own version cannot dim their splendor. Nothing ever written surpa.s.ses them, not only in the felicity of expression, but in the sense of deity pervading them. Each succeeding verse sustains the other and, at the last, you feel that G.o.d, very G.o.d, indeed, has spoken.

The Almighty answers the complaining Job.

He answers him, not out of the midst of a deep, unbroken calm, but out of the whirlwind; and yet, from the centre of that mighty vortex of unlimited force and energy and power, the voice comes forth with the calmness of one who knows himself superior to the whirlwind and the storm.

"Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge?"

This is the abrupt and sudden question. It is the fitting question of him who knoweth the end from the beginning. In the very asking of it all the boasted knowledge, the attainment, the self-consciousness and vanity of man fade away, and man himself is as nothing--G.o.d alone remains upon the vision--all knowing--all wise--supreme.

This Bible is a book of history.

It will spend page after page in describing the doings of a rebellious king, and then compress the story of twenty-five hundred years into a few dozen lines, but will do this in such a way, by means of exact symbols, that the twenty-five centuries thus compressed will reveal a clearer outline and fuller vista than thousands of ordinary volumes could set forth in detail.

Mark the providence that has guarded the book.

Kings and potentates have sought to destroy it. It has been thrown into the flames. Volume after volume has been burned. But always, and at the critical moment, some copy has been preserved--here in the cottage of a devoted peasant at the risk of his life, hidden in the crevice of a rock from the inquisitor's search, or cast aside by a careless hand and forgotten amid a pile of swept up dust in a neglected corner of some impregnable castle; from whence it has come forth to be copied by slow and painful, yet loving, toil, pa.s.sed from house to house secretly as a priceless treasure, then printed on concealed presses and at last cast forth as living and fruitful seed.

Men have denounced it and demonstrated that it is false both in history and science; then, unexpectedly, the stroke of a pick or the turn of a shovel uncovers some startling witness of its exact truth and the excuseless folly of those who deny it.

The fourteenth chapter of Genesis has been set aside by the critics as historically worthless. The excavations in Babylon have brought to light a tablet with the name of Arioch, the fourth king mentioned in that chapter, stamped upon it.

The statement in Exodus that Pharaoh forced the Children of Israel while building his treasure cities to make bricks without straw, has been treated as a fable. The treasure chambers themselves have been found, the rooms divided by brick part.i.tions eight to ten feet thick--and great quant.i.ties of these bricks _made without straw_.

Luke says that Sergius Paulus was pro-consul of Cyprus. The critics denied it and proved thereby the fallibility of the New Testament.

The homely but truth-telling spade, and without consulting the critic, dug up some coins in the island of Cyprus itself, and on the coins were stamped both the image and the name of Sergius Paulus.

Luke declares that Lysannius was tetrarch of Abilene; and again the critics denied it and more than ever discounted Luke as an historian.

Renan, the plausible and a.n.a.lytical infidel, read the record carved on the stones of Baalbeck, and announced, openly, that Luke is correct.

From the ruins of Nineveh and Babylon, Tyre and Sidon; from the trenches of Tel el Armana; by the key words of the Rosetta stone and the black but speaking face of the Moabite stone; from newly discovered papyri and parchment, and the mystic page of cracked and crumpled palimpsest; from the rocks of earth, the depths of the sea and the heights of heaven--and from the latest discoveries of science, there arise amazing witnesses, which speak in tones that cannot be hushed, with facts that cannot be denied, and bear testimony beyond all possibility of dispute to the truth and accuracy of the book; so much so, indeed, that such an one as Sir John Hersch.e.l.l, the great astronomer, has said: "All human discoveries seem to be made only for the purpose of confirming more and more strongly the truths contained in the Sacred Scriptures."

Consider the vitality of the book.

In less than ten years a text-book is out of date, a cyclopedia worthless, and a library a cemetery of dead books and dead ideas; but this book keeps living right on--keeps abreast of the times, has a testimony for every day, and every day borrows its youth afresh as from the womb of the morning.

Science has laughed it out of court. Two hundred and fifty years ago Voltaire said: "Fifty years from now the world will hear no more of the Bible." Self-elected scholarship has p.r.o.nounced it out of date and dead. Again and again its funeral services are held. Kind and condescending eulogiums are uttered over its past history and its good intent. With considerate hands it is lowered into its grave.

The _resquiescat in pace_ is solemnly p.r.o.nounced and lo! before the critical mourners have returned to their homes it has risen from the dead, pa.s.sed with surprising speed the funeral coaches, and is found--as of yore--in the busy centres of life, thundering against evil, revealing the secrets of the heart, offering consolation to the sorrowing, hope to the dying, and flashing forth from its quivering, vital pages the wonders of coming glory.