01 - The Storm Center of the Ages
I- THE STORM CENTER OF THE AGES THE most bitterly hated book in all the world is the Bible. Men have written thousands of volumes, and spent millions of dollars, to disprove it. Fifteen hundred years ago, the emperor Julian brought to bear the vast wealth and powerful army of Rome to reestablish the Jewish temple and religion, in order to disprove the prophecies of the Bible. A few years ago, Sir William Ramsay journeyed over Asia Minor to demonstrate that the New Testament could not be true, and ended by writing books proving its truth. In their furious endeavor to annihilate the Bible, men have turned the key, lifted the headsman’s ax, pulled the rope, applied the fagot, betrayed son and daughter, father and mother, to horrible fates, soaked the soil of Europe and written the pages of history with the blood of the world’s noblest and best.
Why this strange obsession? Why this animosity, as fresh and acrimonious to-day as when the Word Himself hung upon the accursed tree, the victim of the murderous rage of a whole people He had come to benefit? Why this virulent passion of 1,900 years of cyclonic vindictiveness towards a religion whose basic principle is love to God and love to man? This is an enigma that has saddened the hearts of those who feel, and puzzled the intellects of those who think. The Bible is the most expensive possession of the human race. It has cost the blood of millions of martyrs. The earth’s greatest and wisest have gladly given their lives that it might live. The Son of God shed His precious lifeblood that "every nation, and kindred, and tongue, and people" might read it.
Around the Bible have raged, in varying fury, the storms of the ages. All the moral and intellectual forces of the centuries have mustered their strength in attack and defense of this one Book, and its product, Christianity. The attack, and therefore the defense, have altered in form only to increase in intensity as the centuries have passed. Never for a moment has the battle ceased. There have been lulls, invariably followed by a fiercer attack upon some other point. No other book could have withstood a thousandth part of the fiendish, seductive, deceptive, insidious, infuriate assault that has been directed for so many centuries against the Bible. How, then, it may be asked, can the Bible endure it? The Bible is more than a book, though it is the greatest of all books. It is more than a compendium of ethics, though it has revolutionized ethics. It is more than a system of morals, though it is the basis of morals. It is more than a philosophy of life, though it has transformed life. It is more than a religion, though it is the source of Christianity, the world’s only true religion. The Bible is all of this and infinitely more. It is the life of God expressed in words and exemplified in the life of His Son; and this life it is which flows into the soul of the believer, making him the heir of eternity.
Man is not saved by theology, new or old, nor by creeds, good or bad, but by Christ. What we need is not a new theology, but a new heart; not a change of legislation, but a change of character. The recent attempt to tinker the Ten Commandments and the Bible to suit man’s disposition, so as to save man the trouble of suiting his disposition to the Ten Commandments and the Bible, is not the way to save man, but to damn him; is but the age-old battle raging within the gospel fort.
While the Bible is the result of God’s seeking man, all human philosophies and isms are the fruit of man’s seeking God. While "destiny without God is a riddle, and history without God is a tragedy," salvation without Christ is suicide, and Christianity without the Bible is the doom of nations, the end of the world.
Infidelity takes many forms. When to be a Christian is to court death, there are few infidels within the pale of the church; but when Christianity lowers the standard to include the world, inevitably the skeptics come in. Paul, ages ago, said that wolves would enter the flock and not spare it. Christ foretold as much, more than once. It should not surprise us, then, to find this a fact. Sad as it will be, it is our duty to defend the Bible against the skepticism of its professed defenders when these professors adopt the infidelity of the past and exalt it in the church as new light. Many churches are yet stanch and true, and are trying to keep the insidious unbelief of some ministers out of their pulpits and church literature.
What neither the ignorance of the bigot nor the hatred of the armed oppressor, the narrowness of the pedant nor the scoffing malice of the infidel, could accomplish, the defection of some of the trusted religious leaders has done. While for centuries the combined might of the Bible’s enemies beat vauntingly, fiercely, but in vain, against the bulwarks of Christianity, ecclesiastical hands, pledged to the defense of the heavenly country, have torn the banner of Christ from the tower staff, and opened the gates of the fort to the enemies of the Bible, so that now the battle over the Bible rages, for the first time since the Master’s death, within the church and around the pulpit. As we look at present-day events, we are compelled to ask: "Are the convulsions of society the harbingers of a better era? Are the throes through which humanity is passing the birth pangs that are to give us a grander civilization, or are they the death agonies of the human race? Are the doubts of the doctors of divinity the germs of a higher belief, or the final and most audacious entrenchment of infidelity within the church? Is the skepticism of the church’s leaders a nobler spirituality, or has every doubt a sin sticking to its roots? Are the pulverized Bible and a fallible human Jesus the foundation of a diviner religion, a surer salvation, or the certain evidence of religious decay and dissolution?" The church, it has been said, has done everything with the Scriptures except obey them. They have been read aloud in homes, enshrined in magnificent edifices of worship, honored in gorgeous ceremonies, commented on, trimmed, and glossed, till now many ministers and their flocks regard them as a sort of Arabian tales, and Jesus as merely a purer Buddha or a wiser Socrates. The man who proclaims a belief in the infallibility of the Bible and in the deity of Christ is in many religious circles a religious curiosity, a survival of an antique superstition.
"They shall put you out of the synagogues," said Jesus; "yea, the hour cometh, that whosoever killeth you shall think that he offereth service unto God. And these things will they do, because they have not known the Father, nor Me." John 16:2-3. The history of hundreds of years, and the torturous death of many martyrs, are a horrible but practical commentary upon these words of Jesus. Theism alone, a mere belief in God, is so far from being sufficient, that Christ’s own death was consummated by men of fervent theistic faith. The Mohammedans are the most rigid and enthusiastic monotheists in the world, but their history also shows them to exercise in behalf of their religion, cruelty, immense and unsparing.
Herein lies much of the danger of the present-day destructive criticism that is indulged by all too many ministers, many of them ignorant of the threatening dangers of their teachings. The faith of the critical ministers is not based on nor derived from the Bible. They are drifting, without knowing it, towards theism, pure and simple, like Unitarianism. However numerous the eddies of the present current of destructive criticism, and no matter whether found in or out of the church, the whole stream has been in one direction - to demolish Christ as our Saviour, the Decalogue as the standard of moral law, and the Bible as the infallible will of God, leaving us evolution in place of a Saviour, human conceptions of right in place of the Decalogue, and philosophy in place of the Bible.
If the little Rome of Marius could hurl back the hordes of invading Cimbri and Teutons, says Charles Jefferson, who would have dreamed that the mighty Rome of Augustus would fall a prey to the weak descendants of the invaders? If the few believers of the apostolic days were victorious against the hatred of the Jew, the subtlety of the Greek, and the iron might of Rome, combined, who would have dreamed that scores of millions of Christians in the twentieth century would surrender their faith to the ridicule of the modern critics?
Still the battle goes on, with the Bible as the battle center in every charge. It has survived the hatred of the infidel, the blind, unreasoning zeal of the fanatic, and the contemptuous indifference of the self-seeker. Will it survive the combined attacks of avowed infidels without, and baptized, secret infidels within? Never before in all the long and tempestuous history of war against the Bible, have its open enemies and its professed friends combined to discredit it. How will it fare under this Ingersoll-Judas onslaught? In every church are many who are aroused to ask this question, and who seek to unite with the friends of the Bible in concerted defense against its enemies wherever found. It is the purpose of this little book to aid in this defense.
God’s word spoke light to the primitive earth; that Word is light still to the soul of faith.
There is but one effective preparation -- panoplied in "the whole armor of God."