THE NATURE OF THE BIBLE'S AUTHORITY

THE FINAL AUTHORITY OF THE BIBLE

            My purpose is not that of proving the finality of the authority of the Bible, so much as that of attempt­ing to consider the nature of that authority. I do propose, however, to devote a few moments in conclusion to one line of evidence in proof of its authority.

            We start then by assuming the truth of the words of the writer of the Letter to the Hebrews, that God spoke, and has spoken; that He spoke to man in one era, or age, through prophets in divers portions and in divers manners; and that after those days, He spoke at last in His Son. As we have seen in previous articles, the Bible is the record of things said through prophets in times past, and it is the record of the Son, and the speech of God that came to men through Him.

            Seeing that we are considering the nature of the authority rather than defending the fact of it, it is necessary that we should remind ourselves of the true nature of the Bible, which we have already considered in previous articles. The Bible is Christo-centric. In the Old Testament we have a revelation of human need and the promise of supply. In the New we have a revelation of divine supply. In the hope of that promise, men lived by faith. But the Old is not final. Its ritual was not final. It was an ordained ritual, a divine form of religion, given to man. Presently, however, God abolished that which He had given, because "it made nothing perfect." (Heb. 7:19) And God is ultimately interested in perfection. “Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.” (Matt 5:48) It fulfilled its temporary purpose, but it was not final. The New Testament brings about the final product God is interested in. “Now unto him that is able to keep you from falling, and to present you faultless before the presence of his glory with exceeding joy.” (Jude 24). Do a search using the word "perfect" in the NT.

            Again, it is true that the ethic of the Old Testa­ment is not final. It is not complete. It deals with external rather than internal conditions. That is not to say that there is anything false in the Old Testament. The truth can be partial, without being final. There is absolutely no contradiction between the Old and the New Testaments. I am told today, that the God of the Old Testament is not the God of the New. Those who say that know neither the God of the Old nor the God of the New. They are exactly the same. There was accommoda­tion to the varying conditions of human life, but God is the same. He does not change.

            In the New Testament we have a revelation of supply, and a meeting of need; and to under­stand this is to realize immediately that the final authority of the Bible is found in Him. We do not look for finality of authority in the Old Testament. Finality is found in the New. It is all concerned with the Christ. We have seen His Person in the first four books; His power in the Acts; His precepts in twenty-one little Letters; His program in the Book of the Revelation. As F. W. H. Myers sang in that wonderful poem, "St. Paul," the whole Bible is saying, Christ! I am Christ's! And let the name suffice you, Ay, for me too He greatly hath sufficed . . . Christ is the end, for Christ was the beginning, Christ the beginning, for the end is Christ.

            So that the finality of authority must be discovered by dealing with the One who is central to the whole literature.

            I shall submit, therefore, that the Bible is final in its authority on four matters. We shall go over this ground again from a different stand­point in our next article, but we are beginning now with the fact of authority. The finality of Biblical authority is found in Christ. He is the final Authority concerning God, and man, righteous­ness, and redemption.

            I do not go to the Bible for philosophy, though the Bible is philosophic. I do not go to the Bible for a scientific treatise. I declare, with all the dog­matism of which I am capable, that there is no discrepancy between the ascertained facts of science and what the Bible says. There is a good deal of discrepancy between the hypotheses of scientific thinkers, and what the Bible says. There is a great deal of difference between a fact and a hypothesis. There is no difference whatever between what the Bible really says, and the truth in itself. There is a difference sometimes between what the Bible says, and what people say it says.

            But let those things be dismissed. We remember that Christ is central, and the whole Bible centers in Him. He is finally authoritative in human life on these four things—God, man, righteousness, and redemption. He through whom God spoke His final message to humanity, has uttered the last, the ultimate word in every case.

            What then has Christ revealed to us about God? What is that which is finally authoritative in the Revelation? Sometimes it is best to be careful when quoting. We might profitably speculate maybe, but I prefer quotation, and one of the most familiar, taken from the Introduction of the Gospel according to John. Having given the word of final philosophy in the opening verse, passing to verse 14, he says, "And the Word became flesh." That is the whole statement of the Incarnation. We next come to what I want to quote "(glory as of the only-begotten from the Father), full of grace and truth." That is the ultimate in the Revelation concerning God, that came to man through Jesus Christ, that He is "full of grace and truth."

            We will for a moment take the two words in the other order. What is truth? Truth is holiness, truth is light shining. That means that in God there is a holiness that consents to no compromise with evil, it is absolute. Yes, we have the right to use the word absolute when we talk about God, and in no other way, in spite of a good deal of nonsense today. There are no absolutes in your life, my friend. Do not deceive yourself. But holiness is absolute in God, and that alone is almost a terrifying fact. Light, holiness, consenting to no compromise. Remember, all these things were seen in Christ.

            But there is the other word, coming first in that passage in John, "Grace." What is grace? If truth is light, grace is love, and love in action. If holiness consents to no compromise with evil, compassion stops at no cost to redeem. Those are the great facts concerning God; and the revelation that came to man in Christ was that of the inter­relationship of these two facts in their activity. Not truth only. That does not tell all there is to know about God. Not grace apart from truth. That denies the holiness of God. But the merging of grace and truth in Him. At once, with profound reverence, I say that we see that in the Cross. The Cross forevermore stands for the fact that God will make no terms with sin. The Cross is the ultimate revelation of the fact that God will stop at no cost in order to rescue and ransom the sinning soul; grace, and truth.

            It may be asked, can we not know God apart from Christ? No, we cannot. We can know much about Him, marvelous things. Take this Bible away from me, which means that Christ is taken from me, I can still find God, I find Him in might, I find Him in wisdom, I find Him in beauty. I care not whether it is a pansy or a planet, I can see the might and the wisdom and the beauty of God. I cannot be in any meadow, daisy decked, or on any mountain height, with the sweep of the land­scape before me, or gazing out in the silence of the night, and looking upon the stars, without my being very sure of God, in His might, His wisdom, and His beauty. But what I cannot find is His holiness and compassion. Other men have found God in His might and wisdom and beauty in other forms of religion, but the last word about God is the word that came to men through Jesus Christ, and it is an authoritative word. God is grace, and God is truth, and truth and grace in relationship with each other; never one at the expense of the other, and the other ever sacrificed to the one. That is the authority of the Bible concerning God.

            Second, its authority is found concerning man. That is a great theme. What is man? The old Hebrew singer felt it long ago, when he had been lifting his eyes to the heavens above:

“When I consider Thy heavens, the work of Thy fingers, The moon and the stars, which Thou hast ordained; What is man, that Thou art mindful of him? And the son of man, that Thou visitest him?”

            All the majestic music of the universe is sweeping round us as we listen to the singer. Well, what is man, in the presence of that vast universe? The Psalmist had discovered a glory and a wonder in man he did not find in sun or moon or stars, or the universe. He saw that man was a being that God visited. A wonderful gleam of light that, in the old economy. The question still abides, what is man? We can go back to Genesis to have it answered. There it is recorded that man was the outcome of the counsels of Deity, when He said, "Let Us make man in Our image, after Our likeness."

            I stand in imaginative wonder. I want to see this being that God is making after His own image and His own likeness; and looking, I never see him. Before I have been able to understand the being so created, there is a catastrophe, a break­down, and red riotous ruin runs down the cycles, and I have not seen man. I do not know what God meant when He said, "Let Us make man," through the Old Testament. There are wonderful men who stand out, beacon-lights of glorious revelation of men who lived by faith in God, but not a man who did not tarnish his shield sooner or later, with perhaps one exception, Joseph. Still, there is frailty in him. We are left, discussing, what is man? Men are trying to find out today by going back and back until they arrive somewhere in a tailless being, and they declare he came out of that! I may be Victorian, and old-fashioned, but I am as old-fashioned as Genesis, because there I have a solution. What is man? I never know until, to use Paul's word, I see God's "Second Man." The "Second Man" was the "Last Adam."

            Then, picking up the Gospels, I say, Let me see Him, and in Him I see that ideal humanity is like God. In the fact of the Incarnation there was no break in upon a possible thing. It was quite possible that God should dwell in man, and take the form of man because He had made man in His own image and likeness. While I watch the perfect humanity of Jesus of Nazareth, I am seeing Someone who is like God. There is no point in the narrative at which I pause, where I cannot see God. Is He taking babies in His arms? That is God. Is He weeping by the side of a grave because the hearts of two women are broken that He is going to heal? That is God. Is He thundering vengeance upon those who are misinterpreting God, until the "woes” of Jesus flash like the lightning across the centuries? That is God. He is like Him, naturally like Him, because of His perfect humanity.

            Yet I watch Him through processes, see Him realizing Himself in fellowship with the God whom He is like. Experimentally, He lived all the way in fellowship with God, depended upon God, prayed to God, declared that He did nothing of Himself, but what His Father gave Him, that He did. What, then, does the Bible say about man? That essentially He is like God, and experimentally he can only realize the meaning of his humanity as He lives in fellowship with God. That is what the Bible says about man, and it says it in Christ.

            Turn away for a moment from the Bible, and what is man? What is the best thing man is saying about man? That man is a mixture of the angel and the beast, and human experience consists in circling between the angel and the beast. My only comment on that is this. As I look down the centuries; and out upon the world today, it seems to me the beast is in the ascendant at the end, and not the angel. But if I go back from all these theories and here behold the Man like God, He is realizing all the possibilities of His marvelous being in fellowship with God. That is what the Bible says about man.

            Again, Christ is the final word about righteous­ness. What does the Bible teach about righteous­ness? That it consists in right relationship with God. It declares that the ultimate standard of righteousness is found in God. Turn aside from that idea, and what is found? Man attempting to set up moral order and better conditions of life, and, in order to do it, making laws of convenience; and when man makes laws of convenience he has a thousand centers, and sooner or later the centers are in conflict, and there is chaos. It is always so. I do not want to be disrespectful to my own nation, of course; but there is no law upon the law books of America, that has resulted from acceptance of convenience, that does not break down. The cross-currents of conflict make a fool of the law. It is only when man is living himself in right relationship with God, and consequently in right relationship with his fellow-man, that we have the true standard of righteousness.

            We come then to the final word, about redemption. The Bible is authoritative on the subject of redemption, and here it is not a question of competition. Christ's is the only voice that proclaims the possibility of redemption. Other voices speak with more or less of understanding, about God. Other voices, thousands of them, are speaking about man. Other voices are speaking about righteousness. But there is no other voice speaks of redemption. Search the philosophies of man, search the religions of the world, and the old text we knew in childhood comes back to mind: "In none other is there salvation; for neither is there any other name under heaven, that is given among men, wherein we must be saved." (Acts 4:12) There we have finality, because there is no com­parison or competition, and the test in that applica­tion must be pragmatic and practical. Does this story tell of the possibility of redemption? Two thousand years have proved that it works.

He breaks the power of cancelled sin, He sets the prisoner free.

His blood can make the foulest clean, His blood availed for me.

            Finally, when we are asked for proofs of our assertions as to the finality of Biblical authority in these matters, there are many lines of evidence. I am only going to name one or two.

            First, the proof of the finality of authority is found in comparison of what this Book says in Christ, and all other attempts to deal with these self­same subjects. Second, the finality of its authority is proved by the fact of development and application in every successive age. The revelation made here abides as germ and norm; germ, the life-principle that can be applied to changing conditions: norm, the test of accuracy with truth through all the generations. Again, thirdly, there is proof in the effects produced in human life wherever the ways of this Book, which are the ways of Christ, have been ordered in its light.

            I conclude by naming one which to me is final and inclusive. What is the proof of the authority of the Book and the Christ on these matters? The consent of the human soul to its finality of authority. How often we have referred to it, that when Jesus had uttered His great ethical Manifesto, as Matthew records it, at the close he tells us that the people were astonished at His doctrine, because He taught as One having authority, and not as the scribes. But the scribes were the authoritative teachers. Jesus said they were, for they sat on Moses' seat, and, moreover, He said as they were true to their position, they were to do what they said. And yet the people said, "There is something different here. This is not the authority of an office. It was what He said was authoritative." Matthew's record will apply at any time during all the centuries since. I challenge anyone to take the Sermon on the Mount and tell me something in it that can be called in question as to truth and accur­acy. Oh, I know it can be said it is not practicable, but we will not deny the severity of it, and the beauty and glory of it. It is a most remarkable fact that during recent decades amounting now to a couple of generations, when men have been questioning His deity, and when a great section of the Christian Church may or may not believe in the Virgin Birth, no one has called in question at all, in the Church or out of it, the perfection of the ideal represented in the teaching of the Sermon on the Mount.

            I go further, and say that there is a consent everywhere to the finality of the idea of God that we have had through Christ. There is consent to the perfection of the ideal for man that He has presented to the world; and there is the consent to the beauty of the ideal of morality. We may stand aside and say these things are not practicable, but that does not interfere with the fact that the human mind and soul know the authority of all these things. And none who has lived with open eyes can question the power of the Gospel to rescue lost and ruined humanity and make it beautiful indeed. The authority of the Bible concerning God, man, righteousness, redemption, is all focused in the Christ Himself.