WG-02-3. TRANSFORMATION OF LIFE
3. TRANSFORMATION OF LIFE
BECAUSE the Bible makes such extraordinary demands and statements, it should be most rigorously scrutinized be fore it be accepted as the Word of God. We may and must assume that the Word of God will have characteristics whereby it may be distinguished from the word of man; and a priori it will be obvious to us that those characteristics will be such that the unlearned can distinguish it from all human productions; or, to use the Bible phrase, such that “the wayfaring man, though a fool, shall not err therein.”
We shall not here attempt to set forth those characteristics, but will mention only what is perhaps the chief—namely, the power of this Word to transform the life of those who truly accept and believe it.
What lies before the reader in the following pages is an examination of the account which this Book gives us of the conditions of humanity, as they now are and as they have been during all historic times. This account is so radically opposed to the teachings of the philosophy of Materialism, and so repugnant to the natural self-esteem of man, that it would be extremely difficult to account for its presence in any philosophic system which was the product of human thought.
We are here confronted by one of the distinguishing characteristics of the Bible. It is the one Book which declares man to be a fallen creature, and his world to be a lost world. It is the one Book which unsparingly condemns man, which finds “none righteous, no, not one,” but all, without any exception, “guilty before God.” And yet, instead of being rejected because of these declarations, so offensive to the natural man, the Bible is the one Book that is translated into every language and dialect, and is read and cherished by some among every nation, tribe, and people. Surely it has required superhuman power to accomplish this! The Bible itself—its history, its influence, the wonders it has wrought in the lives of men, its power in the world to-day—is an amazing and stupendous fact, for which infidel philosophy has never ventured to offer an explanation, and which it can only ignore. This is but the beginning of the tests which reason, by means of knowledge, may apply to the claims of Scripture. It should, however, suffice, since the only explanation which accounts for the Bible is that it is the Word of God.
We ask, then, is it possible that the Biblical explanation of man and the world can stand the test of a scrutiny which the Darwinian explanation of the "Descent of Man” could not survive? We confidently assert that the Biblical explanation accounts in a thoroughly satisfactory manner for the present and past conditions of humanity in the mass, and of the nature of the individual human being; and further, we assert that there is now before us, with the facts which recent discoveries have brought into our possession, no explanation which can by any possibility account for the world as it is and has been, excepting that given in Genesis—the Book of Humanity. And if we find this to be indeed the case, if this ancient explanation survives and prevails to-day over that which so recently dominated the minds of men and was supposed to be based upon all the Accumulated knowledge of the ages, must not the reason be that the ancient account came from One who knows all things and needs not that any man should instruct Him?