“To the Law and to the Testimony.”
By F. A. Buzzell
In looking over an old number of the Independent containing a Sunday-school lesson founded on Matt. 26: 59–68, I found it filled with so many pertinent and truthful statements in reference to Bible believers and their conduct when confronted with evidences of their errors in doctrines, that I deemed them worthy of a place in the REVIEW, but only quote a part, as follows: “When Jesus, put on his oath before the high priest, affirmed that he was Israel’s promised Messiah, the high priest adjudged him guilty of blasphemy; and when others of the council were appealed to in the question, ‘What think ye?’ their answer was, unhesitatingly: ‘He is guilty of death.’ Yet he was the Messiah. His words were the truth. He was blameless. “The very law by which he was nominally tried would have given him acquittal had it been appealed to fairly. . . . It was for his punishment, not for his trial, they had assembled. . . . In all this, their law was not at fault. Their wrong interpretation of the law was the trouble. . . . He asked only that the Scriptures should be searched and his fulfillment of prophecy tested. . . . Nothing of this kind was, however, attempted, and he for whom Israel had looked longingly as a deliverer, was rejected by the highest spiritual court of Israel without an examination of his claims to confidence and in defiance of the very law by which the members of the court supposed themselves guided; and this merely because he had not come in the way which they supposed was declared for his coming. “There is much of this kind of judgment in religious matters. Men are often counted blasphemers, infidels, or heretics, because they read the Bible differently from the chief priests and elders of their church. They do not call the Bible in question; but they see in it what some about them fail to see. “They deny some commonly accepted dogma, as inconsistent with the word of God. . . . All they venture is an appeal to the sacred text itself. That is too often denied them. They are condemned as violators of the very law they honor and defend. . . . If a minister denounces other evils or defends other doctrines, according to his reading of the Holy Scriptures, it by no means follows that those who profess to be guided wholly by the Bible will either accept his utterance as correct or attempt its disproof by the sacred text. If they dislike his doctrine, they are quite likely to denounce him as unsound, without testing his teachings by the only safe standard. “Since, then, the high priest and his counsel rejected our Lord, when they might have been convinced of his Messiahship had they139consented to examine anew the Scriptures to which he appealed, it behoves every one who would avoid the error and the guilt of the Jews, and who would know the mind of Jesus, to come to the Bible with a simple desire to learn its teachings. . . . “In this spirit of openness to the truth and this fidelity to the inspired record, every doctrine should be considered and every rule of conduct tried. ‘To the law and to the testimony,’ with each and all of these counsels, ‘if they speak not according to this word, it is because there is no light in them.’ “But have a care lest, from examination, you reject as unscriptural that which the law and the prophets show to be worthy and precious.”