God Still Speaks

Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California · Jul 15, 1913

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 40, No. 27.

THE Bible itself is not merely a record of what God said or was believed to say long ago; it is an organ through which God speaks perpetually to souls still. Even the modern mind can hear Him speak in it as He speaks nowhere else in the world, and can enter into fellowship with Him through it as through no other voice audible on earth. It is not a doctrine, but a fact, that this is so, and the preacher who has had experience of the fact will know how to make it tell in his preaching. He may or may not be able to define a doctrine of inspiration which will suit the modern mind; but that through the Scriptures he has dealings with the living God in the way of salvation, and that the Bible is the supreme, final, and sufficient means of grace, he has no doubt at all. Criticism was entitled to some latitude in discrediting false inferences that had been attached to such words as “inspiration” and “infallibility;” but it is time for Christian experience to assert again, even for the modern mind, the truth which these words were intended to express, and to vindicate the authority of the Bible in the church. That to which the Spirit of God bears witness, by and with the Word, in our hearts, can and will hold its ground as the truth from which there is no appeal. If there are those who can not see it, or who can not yet see it, all we can do is to bear our testimony to it, to pray, and to hope. There is no mind, modern or ancient, which can prescribe beforehand the scale or the contents of truth. On the contrary, it is the coming of the living God through His word that adds a new content, it might almost be said a new dimension, to the mind.—The British Weekly.