PROPPING UP THE BIBLE

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Feb 24, 1887

PROPPING UP THE BIBLE.

THERE are many people who think that the Lord needs their help to brace up the truth of the Scriptures; so that all the while they are trying to give additional force to what God has said, by the opinions of men. They seem to imagine that if Napoleon, or Charlemagne, or Frederick the Great, or some one equally noted in science or literature, shall be pleased to express an admiration for Christianity and the Bible, that telling it will make their preaching so much the more effective. If some statesman, after a life of public service, and perhaps a vain pursuit of the highest honors, acknowledges the divinity and authority of the Son of God, it is heralded from a hundred rostrums, as might be the words of a newly discovered original manuscript of the New Testament.

Such a view indicates a mistaken idea of what the church is called upon to preach, and an imperfect conception of the majesty and power of the truth as it is in Jesus. Who is helped in his appreciation of the truth that the sun shines with a power and brilliancy beyond all other heavenly bodies, by quoting what Huxley or Tyndall may say about it? What is the value of the testimony of Ruskin or Humboldt as to the grandeur of Niagara, to one who has gazed upon the majestic cataract, and listened to its unceasing thunder? Who will prop up the Pyramids with tooth-picks?

And yet men who think they are called to preach the gospel, spend much of their time in explaining, and apologizing, and proving it by the testimony of worldly men!

God has given us a revelation of himself in a book that cannot be overturned; his truth is so great and enduring that no testimony of uninspired men is needed to establish it. The structure of Christianity is as the New Jerusalem to the enraptured vision of the apostle John; so immense, so incomparably magnificent in design, so illimitable in its wealth of adornment and indescribable beauty, that when it is portrayed to the world in the words of the Spirit, it stands the wonder and joy of the ages! Let the sun shine on; let the tremendous torrent of Niagara roll forever over the mighty precipice; let the only remaining of the world’s seven wonders stand in their prodigious massiveness; and let God’s book and Christ’s divinity speak for themselves; none of them need the praise or testimony of men to establish them. And thou, O man of God, preach the word, not what men say about it; shun not to declare the whole counsel of God, unsupported by human testimony; remembering that heaven and earth shall pass away, but the words of Christ shall not pass away. And all who hear, and believe, and obey, shall be saved, because God hath said it, and not because some worm of the dust has indorsed it!—New England Evangelist.