THE HOLY SCRIPTURES.


  It is vital that we realize that the Bible is Christ’s Word, God’s Word, a divine Book; that, unlike the 12,000 different volumes published in the United States last year, is a book that came into existence not “by the will of man,” but, as the apostle tells us, by the immeasurable and unending love of God to give His weak and inconsistent children a positive and unfailing guide through the perplexities of the here into the hereafter.

Externally, of course, the Bible has much the same appearance as any other volume of its size and proportions. But because it is God-breathed; because, as we are expressly assured, “all Scripture is given by inspiration”; because the men who wrote the various books of the Bible “spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost,” we believe that the Bible, as 2,600 different passages of the Old Testament and 526 different references in the New individually claim, presents to us the Word of God, written by men who were chosen and supernaturally endowed by God for that purpose and who, through the divine process of inspiration, were given the exact, literal messages they have recorded for us.

And when you now ask, “What can this deathless Book do for me?” the words “If ye continue in My Word,” tell you that if you accept the Bible as the guiding principle of your life, cling to the message of its Cross as to the veritable Rock of Ages, and in prosperity and adversity, in sickness and health, in employment and unemployment, in life and death, find in it Christ as the great Friend and Savior that He is, “Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” (John 8:31-32)

Now stop to think what this means, that within the covers of the Bible you have Christ’s Word. Christ is the only one who ever came down from heaven to tell men of God and of the hereafter. What “eye hath not seen nor ear heard” is revealed in Christ’s Word, and in that Word alone. Christ gave the world a complete redemption. When He cried, “lt is finished,” and when He rose again to seal the power of His shed blood, God’s plan of salvation was perfected. His Word, too, is complete. And so, when Jesus tells you who labor under the sorrows and anxieties of a disillusioning world that He has gone to prepare the heavenly mansions for you; when His Word assures you that “the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed” in you, then rest fully assured that, unlike misguided fanatics of our day who claim personal revelation from God, unlike philosophers and scientists who speculate in vague theories as to the hereafter, Jesus alone reveals authoritatively the divine facts of the life to come, on which every sin-harassed soul can safely rest its hope.

Have you accepted Jesus as your own Savior and His Word as the promise of your salvation? may God give you His grace, first to realize that you have heard the question of paramount importance in human life and then to answer this question with a ringing conviction that in Christ’s truth and freedom the search for your happiness has found its goal. Amen.

Dr. Walter A. Maier