The Whole Bible or None.
By Pharallus Church
CHRIST is the soul of the Old Testament as well as the New. The account of Samson, Jonah, Elijah, and all the most objectionable things of the kind are merged into Christianity. Heb. 12: 32; Matt. 11: 14; 12: 39; et. al. The creation in the first chapter of Genesis analogically reflects, both in language and doctrine, Christ as the beginning and creator of his redeemed church, whatever conclusions geology may come on the subject of its applicability to the framework of nature. Rev. 3: 14; 10: 6; 2 Cor. 5: 17; Gal. 6: 15; Col. 3: 10, 11. A new creation is the favorite idea of redemption in the New Testament. And what is Eden but the Paradise of souls in whom God rules through their higher faculties? And what is the fall of man but the dominance of his lower nature bringing on the corruption and misery ending in the flood? And so onward the whole record is made by the apostles a shadowy representation of Christianity. That I do not mistake in making the whole Bible contain Christ, we have the most conclusive evidence. Peter speaks of the prophets as "searching what, or what manner of time the spirit of Christ which was in them did signify, when it testified beforehand the sufferings of Christ and the glory that should follow." 1 Pet. 1: 11. Here it is affirmed that Christ spoke through the prophets; that he through them foreshadowed his sufferings and ensuing glory, and that they did not fully comprehend the meaning of their own predictions. And their ignorance seems to have been pardonable, till after the resurrection of Christ, which was the key to unlock the whole Old Testament, leading him to rebuke the remaining unbelief of his disciples, saying: "O fools, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken. Ought not Christ to have suffered these things and to enter into his glory?" Luke 24: 25. Christ affords further evidence that the Hebrew Scriptures are not to be judged of as we judge of Grecian and Roman literature. The latter never rises above what is human, but the former derives all its glory from the divine. The latter are scintillations of genius, the former, of the insufferable glory of the great white throne. The one is on the plane of natural sense and reason, but the other that of moral government, divine law, and immortality. The one is from the intonation between gifted minds and nature, the other the inspiration of God. As Christ's whole career while on earth was made up of what he said and did to men, and they to him, so the Old Testament is a record of what were of like relations between God and men. Hence, "beginning at Moses, and all the prophets, he expounded unto them, in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself." Luke 24: 26, 27. This all includes just what we have in the Old Testament. The things concerning Christ were its supreme subject matter. How, then, can we set aside a part?
Besides, the Messianic ancestry, beginning with Eve's promised seed, and reaching to Mary's incarnated Son, are the two ends of a chain, of which Adam, Noah, Abraham, Judah, and David, with his royal line were intermediate links. Along this radiant and ancestral line cluster a host of luminaries whose blended light is dimly visible in the Messianic milky way spanning the ages. All we know of them is their names. They are like the unknown masses in the lines of a great army making the war and its leaders illustrious, but without individualized fame. The genealogical tables are a glorious showing of Christianity as a mountain stream gushing up from the lowest depths of society, and not confined to nor beginning in its higher orders. When it came in the person of its author, it was from a peasant's home, and its first triumphs were in the cottages of the poor and the marts of slaves. But when it ended in the conquest of the Cæsars its decadence began. It could stand the martyrdoms of Nero, but not the golden endowments of Constantine. Conversions by persuasion and not by power are as different as Heaven is from hell. The genealogical tables of Chronicles and other books is a foreshadowing of this affinity of Christianity with the masses, and is the most significant part of the Old Testament. . . . No doubt some of the Old Testament books are more directly in the Messianic line than others. Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther, Job, and the books ascribed to Solomon are historical sketches, patriarchal reasonings, or prudential maxims, that contain less of Christ than the psalms of David, and the prophecies of Isaiah or Daniel. But though aside from the Messianic track they are so far illuminated by it as to be unlike any other form of ancient literature. Can the theology of Homer be compared with that of Job, the Anabasis of Xenophon with Ezra, Nehemiah, and Esther, or the maxims of Copernicus with those of Solomon? Or, admitting their unrivaled superiority as literary productions, are they not wanting in the theology which opens Heaven to man, and in the terminology which makes it available? Is not Hebrew literature a visible embodiment in forms adapted to the earlier generations, of the Christianity which at length appeared in unveiled glory as the world's great civilizer, and the ground of heavenly hope to untold millions?
I will add, in conclusion, that the fewer we have of these critical pastors and professors, the better it will be for Christ's church. The apostles had no such acumen in treating the Bible. Luther, Calvin, Edwards, Wesley, Bunyan, Baxter, Whitefield, and all our most reliable modern preachers and evangelists, who have made the Bible so great a power for man's regeneration, wielded all parts of the word with a master hand. If a fact or figure was there recorded, they accepted it as a weapon, without questioning where or how it was forged. If Jesus and his apostles used it without question, that was enough for them, and the most effective sermons I have ever heard have been those of Bible facts rather than finished logic and oratory.
I can but ask, is the vast wealth of this country to be laid at the feet of dilettant preachers and professors, to reward their intellectual acumen in detecting spurious Scripture and captivating the people by their logic or their eloquence? Are men to become famous according as they break down the carved work of God's inspired sanctuary with their lately invented axes and hammers? Must we not look at the building with all its material in place to see its architectural effect rather than as broken into a confused375mass, to examine, brick by brick, stone by stone, and timber by timber? Let us have God's revelation in its entirety, and not in its broken fragments, and then we shall see its architectural design in a glorious Christianity. "If the foundations were destroyed what can the righteous do?"
"Thus saith the Lord. Stand ye in the way, and see, and ask for the old paths—where is the good way, and walk therein." Pharallus Church, D. D., in Christian at Work.