IS THE BIBLE WHAT IT USED TO BE?
By O. S. Ferren
While I was visiting a hospital, an aged man remarked to me that he had been trying to solve two propositions—how to become rich in this world, and how to go to heaven when he died. I remarked that these were two hard propositions for him to grapple with, and especially to try to hold both. In the first place, Jesus says, “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.” In the second place, dead men never go to heaven: it is the living who go to heaven, if they are poor in spirit and rich toward God. There are no cemeteries in heaven; the graveyards are all on this earth. The old man said, “What do you mean?” He said, “Man, what are you reading out of?” Then he asked, “What version have you?” I replied, “The common version translated out of the original tongues.” Then he said, with considerable emphasis: “The Bible is not what it was one hundred years ago; for I was taught from a mere child that people go to heaven when they die.” I replied: “The Bible is the word of the living God, and is just the same as it was when you were a boy, or even when it was written on parchment.” I then told him that his teachers, not the Bible, taught such things. He was sure his teachers were right; and said that not more than two thirds of the Bible is true. I handed him my Bible, and asked him to be so kind as to separate the true from the false. He left the room; but in a few minutes returned, and seating himself close to my side, said: “Will you please read some more to me?” I asked which I should read, the true or false. “Oh, any of it,” he replied. When I looked on those white locks, and realized that that poor old man had served his time in slavery, and could not read a word, and now he was in a greater bondage, even the bondage of sin and death, my heart went out in pity and deep sympathy for him. What a responsibility rests upon teachers of the word of life! Speaking of the power of God, Paul says: “Who also hath made us able ministers of the new testament, not of the letter, but of the Spirit: for the letter killeth, but the Spirit giveth life.” Is the Bible what it used to be?