04.04. Luke's Case and Other Important

4. LUKE’S CASE, AND OTHER IMPORTANT RELATIVE MATTERS In this chapter I call your attention to a case where the word “inspiration,” you may say, does not occur, but I take that particular case because it is raised as an objection. A distinguished lawyer once heard me preach on inspiration, and he came to me with this case:

“I want to know how this squares with what I heard you preach,” he said. Luke 1:1-4 says, ‘Forasmuch as many have taken in hand to draw up a narrative concerning those matters which have been fulfilled among us, even as they delivered them unto us, who from the beginning were eye-witnesses and ministers of the word, it seemed good to me also, having traced the course of all things accurately from the first, to write unto thee in order, most excellent Theophilus, that thou mightest know the certainty concerning the things wherein thou wast instructed.’

Now,” he went on, “evidently. from the face of that Luke gathered his information just like any other historian-no evident inspiration about it: that he traced out everything from the first.”

“Didn’t those other writers that Luke tells about try to do the same thing? I answered.

“Then why was it necessary for Luke to write an account? Those other writers didn’t make things certain: Luke makes them certain. He says, ‘I am going to write you an account that you may know the things- are certain.’ If he were writing to give a mere history to the world, it would not make things certain. What has become of all the memoirs or histories of Christ? Luke says that a number wrote them. Why have these accounts survived-Matthew, Mark, Luke, John and Paul?”

“Well,” replied my interrogator, “I think you are putting too much emphasis on that.”

I handed him a Greek concordance (I knew he was a Greek scholar) and a Greek Testament.

“What is the Greek word for ‘from the first?”’ I asked him.

“’ Anothen, ’” he answered.

“Now,” I said, “look through the Greek concordance and tell me what that word means.”

“Well,” he replied, “in many cases in the Bible it means ‘from above.’ ‘A man must be born,’ says Christ ‘ anothen’ - born from above.”

“Very good,” I added. “Now let me read the Greek to you and translate it in this passage of Luke: ‘Having been instructed in all things accurately - anothen - from above.’ Why not translate anothen that way here, since you do translate it that way in other cases in the New Testament? A good many scholars deny that anothen should be translated ‘from above,”’ I went on. “I have studied what they say, and it seems to me they make out a poor case of it.” My friend replied that he did not know that that word was there. Now note the object was that Luke was to write to produce absolute certainty. He had heard a good many things on this problem. Luke says, “Having been instructed in all things from above, I will write you so you may know the certainty of the things that are believed among us.” This staggered my lawyer.

“Anyway, whether you accept that position or not,” I said, “you see the need; that when one goes to write a history of Christ he must write about Christ’s boyhood; that, Luke knew nothing about. He learned this from God. who told Mosses many things and who told Paul about the Lord’s Supper. Paul says,

‘Jesus told me Himself.’ There is no record of Mary telling Luke, as some believe. How did Luke find out just exactly what Elisabeth, the mother of John the Baptist, said when ‘Mary visited her? How did he find out just exactly what

‘Mary said when she sang the Magnificat? ‘Now,’ says Luke, ‘if you would know the certainty of these things you must know them from above.’”

“I will give you an uninspired account of Christ’s boyhood,” I continued. “the work that was palmed off on the world by the Roman Catholics, and I will ask you if it gives you strength. Now, will you please read that and see what a silly and indecent thing it is? Notice the way it deals with delicate subjects. Notice the bald immodesty in this uninspired account. Notice the silliness, and then go down on your knees and ask God to help you never to doubt that the Scriptures are inspired. John said that he didn’t write everything that Jesus said and did; that he just wrote enough to superinduce faith, that you might believe.

Now. I was taught that the best way to reach a safe conclusion is to get a large induction of facts and then let a man try them. Therefore, I have selected several kinds of inspiration where the end was different, and no matter what the end was, the end was certainly accomplished.”

Then I asked this lawyer to turn to the account in the book of Numbers which tells of Balaam, who didn’t want to say what he said, but he had to speak what the Lord put in his mouth. He didn’t want to bless Israel, but God made him say what he didn’t want to say.

“I will take a more remarkable case than that,” I continued. “Turn to that passage in the New Testament where it is said that the prophets received a communication from the Holy Spirit that they themselves did not understand and that they earnestly inquired the meaning of it, but they wrote it down just like God gave it to them, and they studied their own prophecies just like you study them. That was not human comprehension. Oftentimes the prophets did not know the meaning of what they wrote down. Do you suppose that Isaiah comprehended everything that he wrote about the salvation of the Gentiles?

They prophesied about the coming of Christ, and they were very anxious about the time when Christ should come and wanted to get a time definitely fixed.”

Now, the next most important question is, what is not inspired? Well, first of all, a version is not inspired. A version is a translation. We have the American Standard Version or translation, the King James Version and the Septuagint Version in Greek. We have the Old Testament in Latin, called the Vulgate, and hundreds of other versions. Into practically every tongue that has been spoken on earth this Book has been translated.

Versions, or translations, are not inspired; if they were, all of them would be just alike; but the original manuscript was inspired.

What else is not inspired? Why, the division into chapters and verses. The Pentateuch comes in just one book. There are different divisions in it, but it was just one book. That is why “and,” “and” goes on through it, connecting the books as we now have them. We know just exactly when it was divided into chapters, and who did it. That is not inspired.

I will even go beyond that, and say that the copies of the manuscripts were not inspired, and will go further than that, and say that we have no original manuscript. We take the three oldest manuscripts the Vatican, the Sinaitic and the Alexandrian. These are the three nearest to the original copy. There are hundreds and hundreds of manuscripts.

Well, suppose a man bad written on parchment, and after a while some other man comes along, and be wants some paper and he hasn’t any, and he writes on the vellum that is, one thing on top of another; now you have to put a microscope on it to see the first writing.

It would be interesting here to give the story of the manuscripts; also a story of the text and canon, but I must confine my discussion to the subject of inspiration.

I come, now, to ask a question. Some have gone the Sunset Route from San Antonio to El Paso, and will remember the Pecos Viaduct, where they crossed on that steel bridge and it made them dizzy to look down into that canyon, far, far, below. A young man was the architect of that bridge quite a young fellow. If he had made a mistake as to the kind of steel, or in one-eighth of an inch of a certain piece of material, or the wires had been at fault; if he had not exercised infinite precaution in the knowledge of material and the greatest knowledge in putting things together, then the great trainload of people would have been precipitated into that river.

What, then, do you think is necessary to make the bridge that will span the chasm between earth and heaven? Is there any mere human wisdom that could do it? We don’t want a probable standard nor one of such uncertainty, but we want something that is absolutely infallible and irrevocable, and the Bible is called holy because it is that infallible, theopneustos, product of the Holy Spirit. The Bible is the Word of God.

All the Bible is the Word of God. A great many people say, “I think the Word of God is in the Bible, but I don’t believe that all of the Bible is the Word of God; it contains the Word of God, but it is not the Word of God.” My objection to this is that it would require inspiration to tell the spots in it that were inspired. It would call for an inspiration more difficult than the kind that I talk about, in order to turn the pages of the Bible and find out which part is the Word of God.”

“Oh,” says one man, “I can pick them out.” But can you satisfy Mr. B.? He can pick them out, too, but he doesn’t agree with you. So, whatever you do when you preach, don’t preach a spotted inspiration, or you will have to find an inspired man to find the spots. In other words, with reference to the Scriptures, inspiration is plenary, which means full and complete, hence my question is, “Do you believe in the plenary inspiration of the Bible? “If the inspiration is complete, it must be plenary. My next question is this: “Do you believe in plenary verbal inspiration?”

I do, for the simple reason that the words are mere signs of ideas, and I don’t know how to get at the idea except through the words. If the words don’t tell me, how shall I know? Sometimes the word is a very small one, maybe only one letter or a mere element. The word with one letter-the smallest letter-shows the inspiration of the Old Testament. The man that put that there was inspired.

Take the words of Jesus. He says, “Not one jot or tittle of that law shall ever fail.” The “jot” is the smallest letter in the Hebrew alphabet and the “tittle” is a small turn or projection of a Hebrew letter. He says the heavens may fall, but not one jot or tittle of that law shall fail. Then He says that the Scriptures cannot be broken.

What is it that cannot be broken? Whatever is written cannot be broken if it is theopneustos. But the word is not inspired if it is not theopneustos, which means God-breathed, or God-inspired.

Let us take that case that Paul spoke of in the letter to the Galatians, where it is the number of the word, whether singular or plural, that determines the argument. Paul speaks confidently and says:

“Now to Abraham were the promises spoken, and to his seed. He saith not, And to seeds, as of many; but as of one, and to thy seed, which is Christ.” - Galatians 3:16.

If the words are not inspired, what business had Paul making an argument on one of the words as singular and the other plural?

Take this fact: Commence at the first verse in Genesis, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” The second verse drops from the universe matter to this earth. Just in one sentence it drops to one particular part of the universe; then it goes right on dropping from the general to the particular until it gets to Christ. It drops every one of the nations down to one nation-Israel-and from the ten tribes that were dispersed to one tribe-that of Judah-and from all the families of Judah to that family that had David as its ancestor, then on to Christ. That is characteristic of the Old Testament. It goes the other way when we get to Christ, from the particular to the general. Where do you find that in any other book? Suppose a man finds some bones while having an excavation made for the foundation of a house, and another party finds other bones, and so on until one hundred have been found, and you put these bones together, and they make a perfect skeleton of joint and bone of a perfect animal; they make a correct skeleton of an animal, but the bones must all be there. What does this prove by the fitting of every bone and joint, of each part to the other? This perfect articulation of the parts proves that these bones were all the bones of one animal. Did that happen of itself? There must have been somebody back of all these bones who had the design in the making of that animal. That would necessarily mean the fitting or corresponding of all these parts. The Bible is just like that.

There never was a skeleton so well fitted as the books of the Bible.

There was once a little Irish boy who said to me, “Mister, I have something to show you,” and he showed me nine speckled puppies and said, “Mister, would you believe it? I can’t spare a one.” That is the way I am about the Bible. I could not spare one of these books of the Bible. If you take out one of the collection, the Bible isn’t complete. Each part fits into the other part and is a demonstration of the design and the structure of the whole sacred library.

Now, take Sir Walter Scott. I read twenty-seven of his books in twenty-five days. He is a wizard writer - a writer most marvellous - but his books do not fit into each other that way. Take James Fenimore Cooper’s novels. His sea tales don’t fit his “Leather-Stocking” tales, nor do his land stories fit his “Leather-Stocking” stories. What is the matter? It is just like a train. A lot of coaches put together must have a head, and so there is the great engine, and when that engine moves that coupling-pin holds these coaches together and the train acts as a unit. The Bible is as much a unit as that train.

Now I am going to give you the most hyperbolical illustration that you ever read. Spread out a map of America and take the great Mississippi River System. Taking our position at its head and looking toward its mouth, we see the rivers that come in on the left, viz.: the Chippewa, the Wisconsin, the Illinois and the Ohio, with all their branches; then on the right, the Minnesota, the Des Moines, the Missouri, the Arkansas and the Red, with all their branches. Now imagine all these tributaries coming into this great river, from the right and from the left, and that water going down until all these tributaries flow into the Gulf of Mexico. That exactly illustrates the Bible.

Take the case of Charles Haddon Spurgeon. He believed in that Book from cover to cover. He believed that every part of that Book was profitable, and he preached four thousand sermons covering every book in the Bible. You can take one set of those sermons and put them together, and you have a complete commentary on the Bible. He believed it all. He preached sometimes from Job, sometimes from Esther. From anywhere in that Word of God, he would take a text and preach from it, and what was the result?

Never since the days of Paul were so many people converted. What else followed? Homes for old widows, orphanages, colportage, missions went out from that one man’s preaching, and all over the wide world those sermons went. A boy had one of the sermons in his hand when they found him, dead. A man was found frozen in the Alps with one of his sermons in his hand. A poor convict had his hand resting upon some precious treasure, and he was shot, and a bullet pierced his hand, and the treasure was one of Spurgeon’s sermons. Who ever heard of any one carrying anything of the higher critics around, anything that they have said on inspiration? I tell you the difference: Their criticisms are like jelly-fish-they have no weight, they have no backbone-no legs to stand on-just jelly-fish.

Then imagine one of Spurgeon’s sermons drifting out on the sea and a man picking it up, and when he reads it his soul is convicted. A Hindu was going, on his hands and knees, to the Ganges, to be purified of his sins, and the poor fellow never got there. They found him dead, and his face was illumined, and in his hand was a passage translated from John’s Gospel.

What wind brought that leaf to him with that saving message which delivered his soul from bondage and, while gasping in death, caused him to find that Jesus Christ is the light of the world, the hope of the world, and the Saviour from sin?

Now, if we have not a standard, why say A is right and B wrong? If A is right and B wrong, there must be some law that prescribes the right and proscribes the wrong. If you don’t believe anything, don’t preach anything. God’s man would say, “Because I believe, I have spoken.”

Recently, with three hundred people turned away because they could not get into the house, I spoke on the salvation of men. All the Christians of the city had come together, and sinners crowded in. I outlined the sermon, and as I presented it in the words of God, if I ever saw rapt faces it was that crowd that night. The mayor of the city called on me on the following morning. “Thank God that you came here,” he said. “I never heard such a sermon. These people will never get away from it, but if you had come here with criticisms, the people would have scorned you.”