About twenty years ago I went to a big conference at London University. The theme was “Evolution and Religion”, and the opening address was given by a world-famous theologian.
His subject was “Evolution and Theology”. He spent his time tearing the first three chapters of the Bible to pieces. According to him there never was any such place as the Garden of Eden, nor any such people as Adam and Eve. What “the experts” said was sacred; and therefore what Genesis said was false. And so, he concluded triumphantly, we must now regard Genesis as a collection of myths and legends.
Among the eminent people present was one of Britain’s best-known scientists, the late J. B. S. Haldane. There was also a young science student that nobody had ever heard of.
As soon as the meeting was thrown open to discussion, the young student stood up and quoted the following Bible passages:
“Since by man came death, by man came also the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive.”1
“As by one man sin entered into the world and death by sin, and so death passed upon all men - . . death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over them that had not sinned after the likeness of Adam’s transgression... For if by one man’s offence death reigned by one; much more they which receive abundance of grace and of the gift of righteousness shall reign in life by one, Jesus Christ”.2
“I should like to ask the speaker,” he said, “how he thinks we ought to regard the New Testament’s teaching about salvation? Those two passages (and others) show that Paul regarded Adam as a real man who brought sin and death into the world, and Jesus Christ as another real man who brought back righteousness and a way of eternal life.
“If Paul was mistaken about the very foundation of his teaching, how can we rely upon anything he wrote about salvation? If one of Paul’s two key men-Adam-was a myth, how can we be sure that the other key man-Jesus-wasn’t a myth also?”
The world-famous theologian looked most uncomfortable. He got up, muttered something about this being too big an issue to deal with in the time at his disposal, and sat down again.
He looked even more uncomfortable when the atheist J. B. S. Haldane began to rub salt in his wounds.
“I should like to underline the commonsense remarks made by this young man,” said Professor Haldane. “It is high time that orthodox theologians like our speaker today took a critical look at themselves. They are struggling to defend an absurd, impossible position.
“They are trying to adopt a compromise in circumstances where no compromise is possible. The Bible claims, from beginning to end, to be the inspired, infallible, Word of God. Either this claim is true, or it is false. There is no half-way position.
“If it is false (as I believe) then there is no foundation for Christianity at all. If it is true (as this young man believes) then Christians are obliged to accept all the Bible. There just isn’t any logical alternative.”
There was a hush for a few moments as the audience pondered the great scientist’s words.
Haldane was right, of course. There are some situations where compromise is a good thing, and some situations where compromise just doesn’t make sense.
Suppose that you say to the filling station attendant who has just filled your tank, “Six gallons at thirty-six and a half, that’s two pounds nineteen, isn’t it?” and he replies, “Afraid not, Sir, two twenty-nine, please.”
Do you say, “All right, let’s compromise; call it two twenty-five”?
Of course you don’t. Compromise is absurd in a situation like that. You know that there is only one right answer-your answer-and you stick out for it.
In the same way, as Haldane’s penetrating intellect saw so clearly, there is only one right answer for the Christian.
Jesus Christ taught His followers to call Him “Master”.3 The word He used did not mean “boss”; it meant “schoolmaster”. He called His followers “disciples”-a word that meant “students”. He made it quite clear what the relationship between Him and us should be:
“The disciple (student) is not above his Master (teacher) ... And why call ye me Lord, Lord, and do not the things which I say?”4
The lesson is quite clear. Our place is to sit at the feet of Jesus and learn, as Mary did.5 If we have the nerve to set ourselves up as judges over Jesus and try to decide where He went wrong, then we are courting disaster.
Yet this is just what so many modern theologians do, when they say that the Bible is a mixture of truth and error. For Jesus taught just the opposite.
When Jesus lived on earth about four-fifths of our Bible was already written. We now call this “the Old Testament”, but in those days the Jews called it “the Scripture”, or “that which is written”, or “the Law”, or “the Law and the prophets”, or “Moses and the prophets”.
Jesus used the same terms, and this is what He said about it:
“The Scripture cannot be broken.”6
“It is easier for heaven and earth to pass away, than for one tittle of the Law to fail.”7 (A tittle is a small stroke on a Hebrew letter, rather like the crossing of our letter t.)
“Had ye believed Moses, ye would have believed me, for he wrote of me. But if ye believe not his writings, how shall ye believe my words?”8
“They have Moses and the prophets; let them hear them . . . If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded, though one rose from the dead.”9
Jesus was a preacher who lived up to His own message. He not only said that the Old Testament was true and authoritative; He showed by the way He used it that He really believed it to be so.
Look at the way Jesus conquered temptation. Three times the tempter came to Jesus in the wilderness, and three times Jesus defeated him. Each time He used the same method. “It is written ...”, He said, quoting an Old Testament passage that disposed of the temptation.10
The tempter did not stop to argue. He did not say to Jesus, “Yes, but that verse wasn’t really written by Moses. It was only attributed to him by the scribe who wrote it, hundreds of years after Moses was dead.” It was well known that Jesus accepted the first five books of the Bible as the Word of God given by Moses.11 To Jesus, if something was “written”, that settled the matter.
Similarly, Jesus frequently silenced the Pharisees and Sadducees by appealing to Scripture. “Ye do err, not knowing the Scriptures”,12 was His complaint.
Six times in Matthew’s gospel alone He asked a question with the devastating opening: “Have ye not read ...?” or, “Did ye never read ...?”13 Each time the introductory words were followed by a quotation, one from Genesis, one from Exodus, one from 1 Samuel, one from Numbers, and two from the Psalms. Each time He appears to have rendered His opponents speechless.
Many times He settled disputes once and for all by quoting Scripture. When Jesus said to His religious opponents, “It is written .
or, “What is written . . .”, as He did on at least six occasions,14 that always finished the argument.
Jesus could, of course, have relied on His own authority to settle disputes. He claimed that His own words were the words of God.15 Often He did speak on His own authority, with a “Verily, I say unto you”.16
But when a really big issue arose-resisting the tempter, or halting the attacks of the Pharisees and Sadducees-Jesus generally appealed to Scripture. To Him this was the ultimate authority. This was absolute Truth. There could be no gainsaying Scripture.
Jesus did not drift through life like most of us, taking each emergency as it comes. From the beginning He knew exactly where He was going:
to the Cross. During the last part of His mortal life He made this clear to His disciples:
“From that time forth began Jesus to show unto His disciples how that He must go unto Jerusalem, and suffer many things of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and be raised again the third day.”17
This road to the Cross was not easy to walk. It took all His iron determination to follow it to the end. An hour or two before His arrest He had one last chance to run away, and the temptation to escape was enormous.
Luke tells us how He prayed for strength to go through with it. He was in “an agony”, and “His sweat was as it were great drops of blood, falling down to the ground.”18 Come what may, He knew that He must go forward. He expressed His determination to do so in the words: “Father. . . not My will, but Thine, be done.”19
With this resolve to conquer His own human feelings and to do God’s will, He went to a terrible death.
But how did He know that it was God’s will for Him to die by slow torture? He would have had to be very, very sure that it was necessary before He could go willingly to the horrors ahead of Him.
Yet He was sure that it was God’s will. He had known all along what He must do. Time and again He had told His disciples how He knew. Here are four examples, one from each gospel:
“And He took unto Him the twelve and said unto them, ‘Behold, we go up to Jerusalem, and all things that are written by the prophets concerning the Son of Man shall be accomplished. For
114 GOD’S TRUTH
He shall be delivered unto the Gentiles, and shall be mocked, and spitefully entreated, and spitted on. And they shall scourge Him and put Him to death; and the third day He shall rise again.”20
“The Son of Man goeth as it is written of Him; but woe unto that man by whom the Son of Man is betrayed!”21
“He answered and told them...how it is written of the Son of Man that He must suffer many things and be set at nought.”22
“Search the Scriptures - . . they are they which testify of Me.”23 Had there been no crucified Saviour there would have been no Christianity. And the Saviour would never have been crucified unless He had believed-implicitly-that the Old Testament revealed exactly what sufferings He must endure. What sort of disciples (the word means “pupils”, remember) of His should we be, if we thought that He was sadly mistaken in His view of the Old Testament?
Yet there are, unhappily, many would-be “pupils” of His who do think Him mistaken. They have even invented a complicated theological explanation for His “mistakes”, and have given it a Greek name24 which makes it sound much more clever than it really is. But even this so-called explanation only covers the period of Christ’s mortal life; those who teach it admit that the Son of God could make no mistakes after He rose from the dead to glorious immortality.
And consequently it is a waste of words for them to argue that Jesus could hold wrong notions while He was still a mortal man. Because Jesus held exactly the same views after His resurrection as before it.
The resurrected Jesus, who could say, “All power is given unto Me, in heaven and in earth”,25 could also say:
“O fools, and slow of heart to believe in all that the prophets have spoken! Ought not Christ to have suffered these things, and to enter into His glory? And beginning at Moses and all the prophets He expounded unto them in all the Scriptures the things concerning Himself - ..All things must be fulfilled which were written in the Law of Moses, and in the prophets, and in the Psalms, concerning Me.”26
“Fools,” the resurrected Jesus called them, because they did not believe all that was written in the Old Testament. Fools! You can’t help feeling sorry for those poor disciples. It must have been a very humiliating experience, being called fools by the Son of God.
Claims of the Old Testament
It is easy to see why Jesus regarded the Old Testament in the way He did. He took it at its face value. Time after time the Old Testament claims to be an authoritative message from God to men.
Jesus accepted that claim. Commonsense says that one can either accept the claim, or reject it altogether. There is no sensible middle course.
According to one writer,27 the Old Testament makes this claim in 3,808 places-an average of about four per page. Even if this is an overestimate the number must run into thousands.
The prophets are particularly rich in such claims. For example, Haggai says, “Came the word of the Lord by Haggai” in his first verse, and again in his third verse, while in the second verse he says, “Thus speaketh the Lord”. Haggai uses expressions like this more than twenty times, in a book that occupies only two pages in the average Bible.
Even the legal code given to the nation of Israel (the Law of Moses) is spattered with phrases like “Moses wrote all the words of the Lord”, and “The Lord spake unto Moses”.28 Similar phrases are less common in the historical books, but they still occur many times. For example:
“The Lord spake unto Joshua”,29 “Thus said the Lord”,30 “The Lord revealed Himself to Samuel in Shiloh by the word of the Lord”.31
The writers of the Old Testament books not only tell us that God spoke to them, or through them. Sometimes they go into more detail, and give us a glimpse of what it was like to be the mouthpiece of God.
Thus:
David: “The spirit of the Lord spake by me, and His word was in my tongue.”32
Isaiah: “He laid it (a burning coal from a heavenly altar) upon my mouth, and said, ‘Lo, this hath touched thy lips, and thine iniquity is taken away and thy sin purged.’ Also I heard the voice of the Lord, saying, ‘Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?’ Then said I, ‘Here am I, send me.’ And He said, ‘Go, and tell this people ...’”33
Jeremiah: “Then said I, ‘Ah, Lord God! Behold, I cannot speak, for I am a child.’ But the Lord said unto me, ‘Say not, “I am a child”, for thou shalt go to all that I shall send thee, and whatsoever I command thee thou shalt speak.’ . . Then the Lord put forth His hand and touched my mouth, and the Lord said unto me, ‘Behold, I have put My words in thy mouth’... (much later) Then I said, ‘I will not make mention of Him, nor speak any more in His name.’ But His word was in mine heart as a burning fire shut up in my bones, and I was weary with forbearing, and I could not contain.”34
As you might expect, the apostles of Jesus took exactly the same line about the Old Testament as their Master. They supported it right up to the hilt. Here are five examples:
“Lord, Thou art God... who by the mouth of Thy servant David hast said . .”35
“The Holy Spirit was right in saying to your fathers through Isaiah the prophet. . 36
“In many and various ways God spoke of old to our fathers by the prophets.”37
“So worship I the God of my fathers, believing all things which are written in the Law and in the prophets.”38
“I continue unto this day, witnessing both to small and great, saying none other things than those which the prophets and Moses did say should come.”39
Notice what is implied in those first three quotations. (1) What David (who wrote many of the Psalms) said, God said. (2) What is written in the Book of Isaiah is what God’s Holy Spirit said. (3) The words of the prophets were really spoken by God.
No wonder that in the last two quotations Paul said he believed all that was in the Old Testament, and preached nothing else!
Of course, there are two possibilities about these claims made in the Bible. They may be true, or they may be false. Later on we shall have to try and decide which. For the present, however, let us leave it as an open question. It will be sufficient in this chapter to concentrate on trying to understand just what those claims are. According to the writers of the New Testament, God spoke through them, too. John says that Jesus promised to use His apostles in that way:
“Howbeit, when he, the Spirit of truth, is come, he will guide you into all truth…”40
“The Comforter, which is the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in My name, he shall teach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance) whatsoever I have said unto you.”41
So Matthew, Mark, Luke and John would not have to rely on a hazy recollection of what Jesus had said. When they wrote their four gospels the Holy Spirit would cause them to recall the exact teaching of the Master. Or so, at least, John’s gospel said.
Peter and Paul also claimed repeatedly that they were being moved to preach and write God’s words. Here are two examples from each:
Peter: “Those [the apostles] who preached the good news to you
through the Holy Spirit sent from heaven.”42
“Be mindful of the words which were spoken before by the holy
prophets [the Old Testament], and the commandment of the Lord P
and Saviour through your apostles [the New Testament].”43
Paul: “When ye received the Word of God which ye heard of us, ye received it not as the word of men, but, as it is in truth, the Word of God.”44
“But I certify you, brethren, that the gospel which was preached of me is not after man. For I neither received it of man, neither was I taught it, but it came to me through revelation of Jesus Christ.”45
Evidently the apostles believed that they were being used by God just like His prophets of old. First, God’s prophets were moved by God’s Spirit to speak His words. Then the Spirit caused them to write down God’s words, and thus create the Old Testament. Similarly the apostles were first caused by God’s Spirit to preach His words. Later, the Spirit made them write God’s words, and so produce the New Testament. Or so the apostles claimed.
Most people would agree that if there is a God, He must be able to do things on earth invisibly. As Cowper’s well-known hymn puts it:
“God moves in a mysterious way
His wonders to perform.”
The Bible has a name for the invisible work of God on earth. It calls it the doings of “the Spirit of God”, or “the Holy Spirit”, or for short, just “the Spirit”.
This is a good name for it, because it is the translation of Hebrew and Greek words meaning “wind”. In this age of weather forecasts we understand what the wind is. But in the ancient world wind was something strange, mysterious, powerful. It made men think of the invisible power of God working on earth.
It is fitting, therefore, that most of God’s great miracles were said to be performed by His Spirit. So was the giving of His Word-which was, of course, a kind of miracle. When men spoke-or wrote-the Word of God, it was the Spirit that moved them. Again and again in the Old Testament it says that the Spirit of the Lord came upon so-and-so, and he prophesied.
When the Old Testament was practically complete, a thousand years or so after Moses had begun it, another prophet, Nehemiah, summed up the situation:
“Thou [God] gavest also Thy good Spirit to instruct them [Israel] . . Many years didst Thou forbear them, and testified against them by Thy Spirit in Thy prophets... But we have done wickedly, neither have our kings, our princes, our priests or our fathers kept Thy Law.”46
As the apostle Peter put it, several hundred years later still:
“No prophecy of Scripture is a matter of one’s own interpretation, because no prophecy ever came by the impulse of man) but men moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God.”47
In the same way, according to the verses quoted earlier in this chapter, the New Testament also was written by men who were moved by the Holy Spirit. As Jesus told them before they began, “But you shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you shall be My witnesses.”48
The Bible uses a special word to describe this work of the Holy Spirit. The word is inspiration. Paul used it in this way: “All Scripture is given by inspiration of God.”49
Inspiration. It is not a bad description, because it makes you think of “in-spiriting”, of putting God’s Spirit into a man chosen to convey God’s words to the world. And yet it is not a particularly good word, because it does not really convey Paul’s meaning.
The whole phrase, “given by inspiration of God”, is actually a translation of one long Greek word. That word means “Godspirited” or “Godbreathed”. (Remember that, in Greek, the word for “spirit” also means both “wind” and “breath”.)
So although it is less elegant it is more accurate to translate Paul’s words like this: “All scripture is breathed out by God.”
In other words, the Bible is expired by God rather than inspired. In a figurative sense it came out of God’s mouth, just as our breath comes out of our mouths.
About a thousand years earlier a Jewish hymnwriter had made a similar point. He wrote in the book of Psalms:
“By the word of the Lord
Were the heavens made
And all the host of them
By the breath of His mouth.”50
He was referring to the first chapter of Genesis, where God created the heavens and the earth. The words, “And God said, ‘Let there be ...’“ keep recurring in that chapter like a refrain. The words of God were spoken; the deeds of God were done.
All this adds up to a vital conclusion. If the Bible’s repeated claim is justified-if there really is a sense in which the Bible is “breathed out of God’s mouth”-it must mean that the very words of the Bible come from God, not just the ideas.
At first this sounds a staggering claim. And yet the more you think about it, the more it makes sense. In an unimportant piece of writing-say, a magazine article, or a novel-it doesn’t matter much what words are used, so long as the general sense is what the author intended.
But in an important document, like an Act of Parliament, or a man’s will, the words are terribly important. A wealthy old man once wrote a very short and simple will: “I leave all my money to my nephew Percy.”
Poor Percy. He only got a few pounds. It was quite clear what Uncle meant. But Uncle had not said what he meant. “Money,” said the lawyers, means pound notes and coins of the realm. Uncle’s fortune was in the form of bank deposits, stocks and shares-and that’s not “money”. The real wealth went to Uncle’s next of kin, while all Percy received was the contents of Uncle’s trouser pockets.
We might expect that if the Bible really is what it claims to be-the most important document in the world-the words it uses are tremendously important. And this is exactly what it claims. No Bible writer ever says, “God gave me a message in vague terms, and left me to write it down in my own words.”
On the contrary, many of them emphasise the precise nature of the message God gave them. For example:
David: “Ml this the Lord made me understand in writing by His hand upon me.”51
Jeremiah: “Thus saith the Lord . . . speak unto all the cities of ....... all the words that I command thee to speak unto them; keep not back a word . . . Take thee a roll of a book and write therein all the words that I have spoken unto thee.”52
Jesus: “The words that I speak unto you, they are spirit and they are life.”53
Paul: “And we impart this in words... taught by the Spirit.”54
John: “If any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the book of life.”55
Needless to say, these statements do not apply to the words of the Bible in English. The dear old lady who said, “If the Authorised Version was good enough for St Paul, it’s good enough for me!” has been dead a long time. The men who wrote the original books of the Bible were said to be inspired by God, not the men who afterwards copied those books and translated them into other languages. (Just how accurate were those copyists and translators? We shall look at that question in Chapter 17.)
There is something almost uncanny about the sight of a big electronic computer working. The heart of the computer is so delicate that it has to be boxed away in an air-conditioned chamber, like a premature baby in an incubator. Wires connect the delicate central part to other machines, through which the operators feed in the problems for solution. Other wires connect the computer to an electric typewriter, which types out the answers.
It is a strange sight to see one of these typewriters typing away at breakneck speed, as if some invisible typist were using it. Those sheets of typed paper are being dictated by the electronic machine in its glass case, and once the machine is set to work on a problem no human being has any control over that typewriter.
Now this is not-repeat, NOT-the way to think of God inspiring the Bible. The writers of the Bible were not just human typewriters, setting down automatically the words that God dictated to them. They were individuals with a style of their own, each writing his inspired message in his own particular way.
At first, this statement may seem to contradict all that has gone before. If God did not dictate His words to the writers of the Bible, but gave them freedom to write in their own style, how could their writings possibly turn out to be the exact words of God?
This problem is not nearly so difficult as it seems. Try looking at it this way. A crack shot with a rifle can still hit the target when a strong wind is blowing. His skill enables him to estimate the force and direction of the wind, and then allow for it when he points his gun. If the wind is blowing strongly from the left, he aims to the left of the target. He knows that his bullet will follow a curved path, and end up on target. But if there is no wind he aims directly at the target, and expects his bullet to travel by a shorter path to it.
In other words, the wind has no effect on the final result. A brilliant marksman’s bullet will always end up where he wants it. What the wind does is to decide the path by which the bullet will get there.
It is rather like that, only much more complicated, with the workings of God. He knows exactly what end result He wants to achieve, and with infinite skill He is able to achieve it. He can allow for the effects of human free will-or of the literary style of individuals-as easily as a marksman can allow for the wind.
When He wanted a book written in the characteristic style of Jeremiah, He raised up exactly the right man to write it. He told Jeremiah that He began shaping him for his work as a prophet even before he was born.56 When the time came for Jeremiah’s great work to begin, he was exactly the right man for it. Even his nervousness and humility helped to fit him for the job.57
The resulting book was therefore truly Jeremiah’s book. No other man, perhaps, could have written it in quite the same way. But because God had made Jeremiah what he was, and then caused him to write what he did, Jeremiah’s book was filled with the very words of God. The same applies to all the other books of the Bible.
This subject of the Bible’s claim to be “Godbreathed” (inspired) is a very big one. It really needs a book to itself. In just one chapter I have only been able to outline it. If you wish to examine it in depth, you will need to read one of the standard works on the subject.
The finest book ever written on this topic is probably that by Gaussen.58 More recent books by Warfield,59 Young60 and Pache61 are also useful.
Like this chapter, none of these books proves that the Bible is inspired by God. It is always wrong to reason in a circle; we must beware of making that mistake here.
I have not tried to argue that because the Bible makes certain claims, those claims must be true. What I have tried to show is that the Bible’s claims are so emphatic, so clear cut, that they must be either true or false.
The Bible writers all say with one accord:
“What we have written are not our own words. God miraculously took control of us, and caused us to write His words. Consequently, everything we have written has the authority of the Almighty behind it. Everything we have written is true.”
It stands to reason that there are only two possibilities. Either the Bible’s astonishing claim is true-or the book is the biggest confidence trick in all history!
But as we saw at the beginning of this chapter, many leaders of religion refuse to accept that these are the only alternatives. They adopt a third point of view. They say that the Bible is sort-of-true and sort-of-false.
Of course, they don’t put it like that. They express their views in language that is almost impossible for the man in the street to understand. But that is what it comes down to. Unlike the prophets, unlike Jesus Christ, unlike the apostles, these Biblical scholars believe in a Bible that is neither true nor false, but something in between.
There are many of them and their views are widely known. So we cannot ignore them. The next chapter will take a look at their position and see where it leads us.