The Book of Books 12/11/49
Scripture: Psalm 119: 97-106.
Text: Psalm 119: 105; “Thy word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path.”
Man does not live by mechanical power, though we of this part of the world put great and appalling trust in it. Man does not live by enriched bread or homogenized milk alone, though we ought not to forget for an instant that hosts of mortals are in danger of not living at all unless they can somehow get some bread and some milk. Man does not live alone by a good laugh, though a wholesome laugh is good for any man. “Man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.” [Deuteronomy 8: 3; Luke 4: 4] A chief repository of God’s words - more accurately His Word - is in the Bible.
In man’s darkness, the Bible is a lamp unto his feet and a light unto his path. In his confusion, it points a way. In his despair it promises hope. In his guilt it assures him of God’s forgiveness to all who repent. In his doubt, the Bible engenders faith.
Abraham Lincoln said of the Bible: “Take all of the book upon reason that you can, and the balance by faith, and you will live and die a better man.” William Gladstone remarked: “I have know 95 great men of the world in my time, and of them 87 were followers of the Bible.” Theodore Roosevelt pored over it. Handel brooded upon it until he brought the “Hallelujah Chorus” out of the book of Revelation. Painters have done their noblest work under its inspiration. Writers like Shakespeare are unintelligible without biblical acquaintance. Shakespeare’s works have hundreds of direct quotations from the Holy Scriptures.
John Greenlief Whittier summarized the influence of the Bible in the past in these lines:
We search the world for truth, we cull
The good, the pure, the beautiful
From carven stone and written scroll.
From all old flower-fields of the soul,
And, weary seekers of the best,
We come back laden from our quest
To find that all the sages said
Is in the book our Mothers read.
H. G. Wells observed that “The Bible has been the book that held together the fabric of western civilization. It has been the handbook of life to countless millions of men and women. The civilization we possess could not have been sustained without it.”
It is encouraging and gratifying to know that the Bible can now be read in 1,108 tongues; that it is a world’s best seller. Yet it is disconcerting to be reminded that there is appalling spiritual illiteracy among those of us to whom the Bible has been most accessible. When the Bible is kept as an ornament rather than as an instrument, our consequent lack is appalling. Possibly the majority of college students do not bother to read the Bible along with their many other books. A minister used to enjoy telling his favorite story of biblical illiteracy to youth groups. It was about a young lady who though the epistles were sisters of the apostles. But one day a young fellow in a discussion group piped up, after hearing that story: “Well, whose sisters were they, really?” So the minister started looking for another illustration.
The sale of Bibles reached an all-time high during the war. So did the Red Cross First Aid manual. Were both considered first aid equipment? The Bible goes immeasurably farther than first aid! A San Francisco columnist feels the urge to comment on the University of Denver report that out of 9000 students polled, 6000 claim they never read the Bible. The columnist remarks that “This could be the most significant news story ever published in America, because American was built by Bible-loving people. Indeed we can go much farther that that, and say that the western civilization was built by Bible reading people. Without the Bible as the foundation for a religion, whatever would have happened in the West in the past thousand years would have been inconceivably different from what did happen. The foundation of the Western present, as of the Western past and any Western future at all, is the moral order which has its most effective expression in the Bible.”
William Adams Brown observed that every great reformation in the Christian Church has begun with a revival of Bible study. The Bible inspired the mystics of the Middle Ages to cultivate better personal inner life. It gave Luther his great impetus to the spiritual house-cleaning of the church we call the reformation. It occasioned that outpouring of the Holy Spirit which resulted in the foreign missionary movement. No other single influence has contributed so much to the Christian life as daily reading of the Bible. To understand what we are as Americans, and to become more than we now are as Christians, the Bible is for us today required reading.
The viewpoint in reading the Bible is important. The cumulative number of times one may have read the Bible has no significance except that one at least does read it. The selection of proof texts for the support of one’s arguments is as often really harmful as beneficial. By proof texts, one might easily attempt to justify polygamy or celibacy.
The reading of the Bible is not for effecting spiritual magic or storing up an arsenal of argument, but for the developing of spiritual muscles. If men find that bowling strengthens the muscles of their arms and backs so that they can better lift a load when necessity arises, they just as surely find that reading the Bible strengthens the spirit for the loads a living soul must carry. The Bible is not just a book of quotations, but is “the literary expression of the religious development of the Hebrew people, culminating in the life and teachings of Jesus.” And it recounts the result on people’s lives of the early impact of Jesus’ influence. It is not a scientific journal, not a medical manual, not a history text, not an astrologer’s chart. It is a conglomerate collection of books “written on 2 different continents, in 3 languages, by a hundred writers, scattered over a thousand years.” It contains biography, food laws, private correspondence, religious hymns, some history, collections of wise sayings, sermons, criminal codes of government, drama, essays, and some predictions. Though now bound together, it should never be read as one might read a single book, but as one would read in a library of books - 66 or more of them.
The Bible is a literary expression that has come to us in many diverse forms. Yet there is one unifying theme running through all of it. It is a report of God’s progressive revelation of Himself and His ways to mankind. God creates, God reigns, God lives. This unifying theme runs throughout the books of the Bible. Its records begin with nomadic half-barbaric people and progress to the libraries of Greece and Rome. They begin with worship before a flat stone for an altar by some oasis or on some hill and progress to the elaborate chants in the great temple at Jerusalem. They begin with the notion that God is a tribal war-god, vengeful, jealous, capricious, and progress to the idea of God as Father of all men, essentially loving in nature.
When you read about God in the Bible, be sure you understand whether you are reading the idea of a primitive early writer, or of a spiritually mature later writer - whether you are reading about God through Jacob’s eyes or the eyes of Jesus or one of the apostles. As I said before, one can find in the Bible warrant under God for anything from polygamy to celibacy, from human sacrifice to vicarious suffering, from witchcraft to ethical monotheism.
Did Jesus give equal weight and undifferentiated value to all scripture? Of course not. He did say that he would not change the dotting of an “I” or the crossing of a “t” in the essential commandments. But he flouted the lesser mass of little laws and regulations. He would say to his hearers, “Ye have heard that it was said by them of old times --- but I say unto you..” Martin Luther once said that he wished the book of Esther had never been written. And I have heard an eminent Old Testament scholar remark that for spiritual value, he would gladly trade that same book for one of the books of the apocrypha. John Wesley asserted his belief that some of the psalms ought never to appear on a Christian’s lips. If you want to know what he meant, open your Bible after dinner today and look at the 109th Psalm. Then brood again over the 23rd Psalm. And see if you can see anything favorable of comparison.
But remember that the Bible is not, despite its vast variety, a book of confusion. It is a library of the development of man’s understanding of God. If God seems to babble to primitive babes, it is the babes who have not yet understood Him. If God speaks to kings, it is mature rulers who are beginning to get their eyes open. God Himself is the same God, yesterday, today, and forever. And it has always been God who spoke and speaks, to imperfect human beings with the great moral imperatives of right.
We do not need to stop there. For we are vividly reminded again at this advent season that God has not always limited Himself to spiritual babes in His efforts to reveal Himself to mankind. In one point of time, through one who was born as a babe to be sure, but who lived and died as the Master Teacher of men, was God seen as if through an open window.
Because the Bible culminates in the life and teachings of Jesus, it becomes required reading for all who would call themselves Christian. The final authority for Christians, at least for Christians of the Protestant testimony, is not an institution, however venerable; not even a book however revered; but a person. It is the mind, the spirit, the person of Christ. This constitutes the final authority of Christian people. By this glorious Person all else is measured - be it the teachings of Moses, the sermons of Paul, the encyclicals of the Pope, the pronouncements of the World Council of Churches, the ethics of an individual, or the politics of a nation. The best aid for discerning the mind and spirit and person of Jesus is found in the gospels of our New Testament. Probably no one of us could escape being profoundly influenced for immeasurable good, if we would spend but 20 minutes a day in the presence of Jesus as pictured in the gospels. There is so much spiritual power there that one cannot be exposed to it and remain casually indifferent.
The importance of the individual biography which each one of us is writing is measurably determined by the amount of time each of us spends with the Great Biography of Jesus, set as it is in the midst of the important religious literature which we call the Bible.
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Delivered in Wisconsin Rapids, December 11, 1949.