Jeremiah 36

Jeremiah 36:1-32

CUTTING THE HEART OUT OF THE BIBLE Jeremiah 36:1-32(Prof. Kent’s visit to Minneapolis was the occasion of this sermon. The author addressed him a letter, requesting his presence in the city auditorium on the Sunday night of its delivery. Prof. Kent responded, expressing regret that a previous engagement precluded his attendance at the auditorium. Near the close of the sermon, he appeared with two friends, and finding the house packed, and not being recognized by the ushers, he stood and gave earnest attention to the last ten minutes of this address. A pleasant correspondence between Prof. Kent and the author ensued.—Ed.) IN the course of time, two men have made themselves famous by the employment of the penknife on Holy Scripture. The first of them is Jehoiakim, son of Josiah, King of Judah. The second was Prof. Charles Foster Kent, Woolsey Professor of Biblical Literature in Yale University. The first consumed what he cut from the Scriptures in a fire burning on the hearth of his winter house. The second employed the portions that he removed from the sacred writings to feed the consuming flame of modern criticism.Having read the thirty-sixth chapter of Jeremiah, one wonders whether Jehoiakim would ever have been heard of had he not been able to claim the paternity of Josiah, a good king; and, after having studied “The Shorter Bible”, one is equally curious as to whether Prof. Kent’s production would ever have been taken seriously had he not been able to attach to his name “Woolsey Professor of Biblical Literature in Yale University.”Some years since, the world was treated to a twentieth century translation of the New Testament. I purchased a copy, perused its pages and passed it to the waste basket. I doubt if there is an individual in the house tonight who can recall the author or authors of this endeavor; and yet, as compared with “The Shorter Bible”, it was really a serious attempt at the translation of the New Testament Scriptures into the modern tongue, and it had the incalculable virtue of being free from the indictment of deliberate mutilation.It is impossible to read the title of Prof. Kent’s attempt at Bible making, without being reminded of the Jehoiakim incident, and it is not easy to peruse the Professor’s abbreviation of The Book without instituting parallelisms between the work of the two men. I want to do this, however, by a broad discussion of the questions involved between conservatives and critics, between Bible believers and Bible destroyers.Turning then to the thirty-sixth chapter of Jeremiah, I am impressed with three great facts, therein set forth, 1st, The Only Method of Bible Making; 2nd, The Motive-Type of “Modernism”, 3rd, The Dire Menace to the Modernist.THE ONLY METHOD OF BIBLE MAKING“And it came to pass in the fourth year of Jehoiakim the son of Josiah king of Judah, that this Word came unto Jeremiah from the Lord, saying” (Jeremiah 36:1) Every part of the Book worthy to be called the Bible, must come from the Lord. If not, The Book would be a misnomer. If not, “The Shorter Bible” would be a correct title. The claim of Divine origin for the contents of the Book, calls for its every sentence.In “The Menace of Modernism”, I have called attention to an experience in opening the Old Testament Scriptures at many points and searching for some such sentence as this, “Now the Word of the Lord came unto the Prophet, saying”, to find, the same in every instance and that with comparative ease. A notable Bible scholar has called attention to the fact that the single Book of Leviticus, containing twenty-seven chapters, holds the expression, “The Lord spake unto Moses”, or its equivalent, fifty-six times, or an average of twice for each chapter, while the “thus saith the Lord” or some sentence expressing the same idea is used more than 2,000 times in the Old Testament alone!Dr. Gaussen, professor of Systematic Theology, Geneva, is authority for the statement that “with the single exception of Theodore of Mopseustia, eight centuries of Christian history passed before a single Doctor of Divinity disowned the plenary inspiration of the same.

In that time the heresy was regarded as so violent as to be advocated only by Gnostics, Manicheans and Mohametans.”In spite of certain heresies which he has expressed, Dr. Charles Edward Jefferson of the Broadway Tabernacle, New York, admits that “the doctrine of inspiration is, in our day, fundamental to every other doctrine.”In that respect there has been no change since Jeremiah recorded the Jehoiakim incident.

Of the Revelation it was then written as faith now affirms, “This Word came * * from the Lord”.In the pages of the Book it takes on permanent form.“Take thee a roll of a book, and write therein all the Words I have spoken unto thee against Israel, and against Judah, and against all the nations, from the day I spake unto thee, from the days of Josiah, even unto this day” (Jeremiah 36:2).In false religions, oral traditions have taken and held supreme place, and when finally committed to writing they have acknowledged their oral origin. From the beginning the Bible was built after another manner. When, in the mount, God gave to Moses the decalog, He demonstrated at once the Divine wisdom and the Divine custom. Instead of speaking these words to Moses and leaving them to be transmitted by word of Moses’ mouth to the people, He wrote them on tables of stone with the tip of His own finger, putting the Law from the very first into permanent form. When therefore a “modernist” says, “God did not write the Bible. Every page of it was written by men.

The lights and shadows of his moods, the depression and rapture of his spirit play over its pages. Its contents came up out of the cavernous depths of the human heart,” he takes utter issue with the Scriptures themselves as to their origin, not to mention contrasting contents of the human heart.When this roll of the book was written, all the words therein were spoken by the Lord, and Jeremiah listened to them, and, as he received, dictated to Baruch, the son of Neriah, his scribe or secretary, who wrote them, as he confesses “with ink in the book” (Jeremiah 36:18).Jeremiah, into whose ears the Lord spake, was no more the author of the thoughts or sentences received, than was Baruch to whom he repeated them and by whose pen they took permanent form.

That is why Peter could speak of David’s writings as “this Scripture * * which the Holy Ghost by the mouth of David spake” (Acts 1:16). That is why Paul, writing his Epistle to the Hebrews and quoting the message of David in the 95th Psalm, says, Even as He, the Holy Ghost, has said and assigns in the 7th verse, that Scripture to the same Divine origin. The same Apostle, in Acts 28:25 quotes from Isaiah the Prophet and yet says of the quotation, “Well spake the Holy Ghost”.History consulted, it is a fact that the writing of the decalog, by the Divine finger, gave to it no more permanent form than characterizes every sentence of Holy Scripture. The devil’s destroying devices are a multitude and yet it is doubtful if in twenty centuries he has even successfully discredited, much less destroyed, a single statement.Pres. Kyle of Xenia Theological Seminary had occasion for his statement, “Macaulay’s New Zealander may one day take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul’s.

Events at least as wonderful have taken place in our world within the last five thousand years, but if ever this strange fancy shall have become a stranger fact, out of the vast solitude this prophecy from the Heavens shall thunder in his ears, “The grass withereth, the flower fadeth”; surely the people is grass, “but the Word of our God shall stand forever” (Isaiah 40:7-8).The messages of the Book are popularized by the mouth of man. Jeremiah became God’s mouthpiece to the people, and Baruch became a secretary to the Most High.

The first pronounced “all these words” with his mouth and the second wrote them with “ink in the book”. When told that man wrote practically all of the Bible, and one concludes that it is purely human and not Divine, he ignores at once the creation of Scripture and indulges himself in an utter lack of logic. As a great writer has said, “Pascal might have dictated one of his Provincial Letters to some Clermont artisan, and another to the Abbess of Port Royal. Could the former have been on that account less Pascalian than all the rest? Undoubtedly not! The great Newton, when he wished to hand over to the world his marvelous discoveries, might have employed some Cambridge youth to write out the fortieth, and some college servant the forty-first proposition of his immortal work “THE ”, while he might have dictated the remaining pages to Barrow and Hailey.

Should we any the less possess the discoveries of his genius, and the mathematical reasonings which lead us to refer to one and the same law all the movements of the universe? Would the whole work be any the less his?

No; undoubtedly!”Man has been God’s medium of making His message known because His elected Prophets were made capable of translating Divine thoughts and words into human speech. Hence the Psalmist’s claim, “Thy Word was in my tongue”. That is the way of Bible making. All other books are made after another manner. They are man-thought and man-wrought, and belong in the category of “books”. The Bible is after another manner and will forever remain “THE BOOK”, and the whole program of its creation is suggested in the thirty-sixth chapter of Jeremiah.But herein we have alsoTHE MOTIVE-TYPE OF and, at that point, Prof. Kent and all his confreres come into the closest possible fellowship with Jehoiakim, the original destructive critic. Jehoiakim set the example that has now issued in a whole “school of modernism”.He deliberately attempted the destruction of unwelcome truths. It was the witness against Israel and against Judah that he resented. That speech didn’t suit him; hence the penknife. In what respect, will you tell me, did his procedure differ from that of the Yale professor? What difference does it make whether you employ the point of a knife to cut out a portion of the Bible, or the point of a pen to accomplish the same? Pres.

Kyle never said a truer thing than when he remarked, “There are circumstances in which incompleteness is falsehood. A statement may be absolutely true in its every detail as far as it goes, and yet it may be, by reason of defectiveness, as false as the father of lies can make it. Witness the great deceiver’s use of Scripture.” Satan quoted correctly but he commenced and left off his quotations to suit himself.There is not a one of the fundamentals of the Christian faith but receives slack treatment in “The Shorter Bible”. If this was a result of pure abbreviation it would not be so bad, but it is impossible to analyze this endeavor without deciding that it is the sure result of deliberation.Take the Virgin Birth! The “Shorter Bible” majors on John’s conception and birth, and minors on the Master’s. It goes into detail as to what was told Elizabeth, but, with a blundering shrewdness, it passes over every reference to the great fact that “before they (Mary and Joseph) came together, she was found with child of the Holy Ghost” (Matthew 1:18), fulfilling the prophecy, “Behold, a virgin shall be with child, and shall bring forth a Son, and shall call His Name Emmanuel, which being interpreted is, God with us”, and by a contortion, rather than a translation, he makes Joseph the father of Jesus, disregarding alike Joseph’s protest of lack of paternity, and the language of Scripture which describes Joseph, and Mary the mother of Jesus”.The matchless miracles wrought by the mighty hand of God in the person of His Son are deliberately called “mental and moral healing”, and where miracles are of such a nature as not to yield to this treatment, he deftly omits them.His translation of Joh 3:16, while not a clear denial of the doctrine of regeneration, is an evident instance in which the New Theologian attempts to make old words convey new meanings.Concerning the resurrection!

By a very deft but indefensible translation, he pleads the evolution theory and practically destroys the prospect of that blessed reunion of soul and body, and the consequent fellowship of all saints.Concerning the Return of the Lord! The greater splendid passages upon that major subject of Scripture teaching, he simply omits.The atonement receives at his hands scant favor; and if the word atonement is to be longer effectively employed it must be interpreted as the consequence of the death of a merely righteous man.Redemption, according to the “Shorter Bible” is not a result of shed blood, but the simple consequence of good behavior.

For instance, he takes the noble passage in II Peter where men are told they “have escaped the pollutions of the world through the knowledge of the Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ” and are enjoined to watch against fresh entanglements of the same, and he twists this until it reads, “While you practice these virtues, you will never fall, and thus you will surely be given the right to enter the eternal Kingdom of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ,” a doctrine that utterly ignores the multiplied passages to the contrary; as for example, “By the deeds of the Law there shall no flesh be justified in His sight”; “There is none righteous, no, not one”; “By grace are ye saved through faith; * * not of works, lest any man should boast”.But by far the most serious fault to be found in the Professor’s “Shorter Bible” is the flat denial of inspiration.Such great passages as 1 Peter 1:10-12; 2 Peter 1:21; Revelation 22:19; 1 Corinthians 2:13 are strangely forgotten. Is it merely a juxtaposition of verses that make our Scripture say:“For the prophecy came not in old time by the will of man: but holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost. But there were false prophets also among the people, even as there shall be false teachers among you, who primly shall bring in damnable heresies, even denying the Lord that bought them, and bring upon themselves swift destruction. And many shall follow their pernicious ways; by reason of whom the way of truth shall be evil spoken of”? (2 Peter 1:21; 2 Peter 2:1-2). Jehoiakim thoroughly disdained the Divine authority of the Word. He believed what he heard was spoken by Jeremiah and what was read was written by Baruch, and his conduct with the penknife is accounted for by that fact. The principle has a present application. Wellhausen, who, more than any modernist, was the father of destructive criticism, in answer to Robertson Nichols’ inquiry whether the Bible could retain its authority over the minds and hearts of men in the light of modern research, answered, “I do not see how it can.”The most anomalous instance of reasoning ever indulged by the modernist since he quit the monkey stage and taught himself to speak, is that illogical conclusion that “while the Bible was not given of God, it is none the less Divine and ought to constitute the chief study of man!”Can you imagine such authorities as Driver of Oxford and Kirkpatrick of Cambridge, England, writing a book on “The Higher Criticism” that reduces the Scriptures to a level with Ade’s “Stories of the Streets and Town” and then turning about to remark that “all this renders the Bible no less the Word of God,” and can you think of a man of such popularity as R. F. Horton holds in Old and New World Colleges and universities, writing in one book, “Verbum Dei” these two sentences, “The unthinking dogma of Orthodoxy that the Bible as such is the Word of God, etc.” (p. 117) and then later remarking, “The Bible itself is in so unique and peculiar a sense the Word of God”? etc, etc.

One’s heart bleeds for the present-day student-body. The average college and university carefully guards its young men and women against logical thinkers and speakers, surrounds its campus with a few preachers who are Wellhausen parrots, puts into its Y.

M. C. A. secretaryships and college pastorates a few more modernist magpies, and they organize themselves into a bodyguard against the admission of any orthodox man who might bring a message from God and righteously affect the students, if once he were privileged a hearing.In Finney’s day the colleges, in consequence of the fact that they welcomed a man with a message, heard ministers steeped in a knowledge of the Scriptures, who met and more than matched the scholarly deists, turned the tide of skepticism and rescued the Church of God from its relapse and saved the colleges themselves. It is not forgotten that Finney was the very man who in Rochester, N. Y., (then as now a center for free thinking,) removed the Bible from the sacred desk and declared “I will never replace it until I have proven by fair arguments in the eyes of all the world that this is the Word of God,” and the great man made good.It is little wonder that skeptics have drawn a cordon around our schools, and not one conservative, who is certain to deliver a logical message, is longer admitted. The alert minds of students would too shortly distinguish.

The modernists can’t afford to have their vain philosophies brought into comparison with Gospel preaching, nor their evolution theory set in the light of the sacred Scriptures, nor their Unitarian tendencies treated as they justly deserve. A few years since, the President of Princeton made a futile attempt to keep the students from hearing Billy Sunday.

Who blames him? If I were the president of a “modern” University and wanted to mold my students into 20th century skeptics, I would do my best to guard them against virile and thoughtful men, and whenever a Prof. Kent came within call, I would turn over to him “the convocation.”But I cannot end this discourse without a final remark with its elaboration, namely,THE MENACE IN THIS MATTER IS TO THE do not read in Jeremiah 36 that any harm came to the Prophet of God or to the scribe who put into writing the inspired words, but I do read,“Then the Word of the Lord came to Jeremiah, after that the king had burned the roll, and the words which Baruch wrote at the mouth of Jeremiah, saying, “Take thee again another roll, and write in it all the former words that were in the first roll, which Jehoiakim the king of Judah hath burned. “And thou shalt say to Jehoiakim king of Judah, Thus saith the Lord; Thou hast burned this roll, saying, Why hast thou written therein, saying, The king of Babylon shall certainly come and destroy this land, and shall cause to cease from thence man and beast? “Therefore thus saith the Lord of Jehoiakim king of Judah; He shall have none to sit upon the throne of David: and his dead body shall be cast out in the day to the heat, and in the night to the frost. “And I will punish him and his seed and his servants for their iniquity; and I will bring upon them, and upon the inhabitants of Jerusalem, and upon the mm of Judah, all the evil that I have pronounced against them; but they hearkened not. “Then took Jeremiah another roll, and gave it to Baruch the scribe, the son of Neriah; who wrote therein from the mouth of Jeremiah all the words of the book which Jehoiakim king of Judah had burned in the fire: and there were added besides unto them many like words” (Jeremiah 36:27-32). This passage suggests firstThe man who opposes God’s Word puts himself in peril.“He shall have none to sit upon the throne of David: and his dead body shall be cast out in the day to the heat, and in the night to the frost”. It would be an interesting study to trace the opponents of God’s Book to life’s end and find out how often they have come to judgment. You will remember that the Ark of the covenant contained three types of the Word; Aaron’s rod that budded, a type of the power of the Word to bring life out of death; the pot of manna, type of God’s bread, the Book; and the tables of the Law, God’s will written by His own finger. The cover of this Ark was of gold and made the mercy seat, over which the effulgence of His face shone. Woe to the sacrilegious hand that attempted to touch any one of these types! Death was his portion.I doubt if the sacrilegious fare any better in modern times. Goethe was a great poet, but Goethe was an opponent of God’s Word and when the lights of time were going out, he not only cried to people to open the shutters and, with a shiver, complained of the increasing darkness, but confessed, “I have scarcely tasted twenty-four hours of happiness during my long and unhappy life.”Mirabeau, the French infidel, pled for an opiate to deaden conscience and drive away the haunting visions of coming doom.Go back, if you will, into history and ask after the closing hours of a Semler, Ernesti, Griesbach; of a Tyndale, Hobbs and Bolingbroke, or a Hume, Paine, a Voltaire!

Not one of them passed with pleasure into the great beyond, but met the last enemy, death, with dread, and you may include those greater modernists, Kuenen and Wellhausen —even those so-called Christian critics like Kirkpatrick and Driver; yea, even our own matchless modernist and American, William R. Harper, and no such note of triumph ever broke from their lips as Paul voices when he was passing out, or as Moody uttered when, for him, God called and the Heavens opened.I note in the last place that this message from God was not obliterated but increased. “There were added besides unto them many like words” (Jeremiah 36:32).The message of Inspiration survives all opposition.

It will forever remain so. For full twenty centuries infidelity has raged. It has employed the fagot; it has used the sword; it now arrays itself in the cap and gown of scholarship and approaches its task in the name of science. But the same Scriptures that survived the fagot and the sword, smile in their conscious strength and know that once more Satan’s scheme will meet defeat and every one of the sixty-six Books will emerge from the cloud of dust raised about them and every one of the forty writers will come as clear from this “German barrage of theological smoke” as the three Hebrew Children came from the king’s furnace.In conclusion let me give you the experience of a man who went into this infidelity and came out of it. J. F.

Behrends was the honor graduate of his class! He became easily one of the most famed of American pulpit skeptics.

His learning and eloquence combined to prove to the unthinking his new theological conclusions, and for a time he was paraded as a representative of whom the critics were most proud. But as a thoughtful man, he worked his way through it all and walked out of the intellectual fog bank into God’s bright day again. Here is his record of it, taken from his volume, “The Old Testament under Fire”.“I have been in the crushing coils of this critical anaconda, and know what the fight for life means. Less than twenty years ago, the revolutionary criticism made its appearance in our higher institutions of learning. It was unknown in my seminary days. It is all the rage now.

Theology has been thrust into the background, and the critic is in the saddle. He will not stay there long, for already the steed is becoming unmanageable.

And when the new criticism first appeared, I ignored it. I did not believe the enemy ever would come within rifle range, and so I was not disturbed. But that which at first was only a rustle in the top leaves of the trees, swept downward and forward and with increasing velocity. I kept my feet, and waited. At last, eight years ago, I could stand it no longer and I determined that the issue must be fairly and squarely met. I girded myself for the task. I took down my neglected Hebrew Bible, and plodded through its every line; once, and again, and yet again—the Pentateuch a good many times. Meanwhile, the agony grew apace.

Many a day was spent in restless pacing in my study; many a night was without any sleep, except the sleep of exhaustion. It seemed to me as if the Old Testament were slipping away from me. I dreaded to open it, and I dared not shut it. The darkness seemed growing denser. On I pressed, and stumbled, sometimes nearly losing my footing. The eddy became a maelstrom, whose hissing and whirling waters threatened to suck me into their cavernous depths. None knew my agony, for I bore it alone. And Sunday after Sunday I went into my pulpit, to preach the Gospel, while my heart was ready to break.

I had lost my childhood faith, and there was none to take its place. The language of the first half of the twenty-second Psalm is none too strong to describe the agony of those years.But there came a time when I cried with the Psalmist, “Thou hast heard me”. God drew me out of the engulfing waters, out of the pit and the miry clay, set my feet upon the rock, established my goings, and put a new song into my mouth. Be it eddy or whirlpool, I am out of both; and my feet are planted where the waters hiss and swirl, without so much as dashing their spray upon my footing. I have unlearned much. There are many things about which I have come to be indifferent, which I once regarded as essential.

I have no words to waste upon questions of infallibility and inerrancy. Chronologies and genealogical tables have ceased to trouble me.

Alleged discrepancies are no more to me than a few drops of rain on a radiant June day. The sun shines, and is regnant, for all that. The dispute, whether inspiration is verbal or neotic, mechanical or dynamic, partial or plenary, has lost its interest for me. Two things I know; that the Bible is God’s Book, and that it is true. I smile when I hear men disputing about the phrases, “The Bible is the Word of God” and “The Word of God is in the Bible.” I believe both as I believe body and soul constitute a man. The message of God is the eternal soul; the history is the body in which that soul lives, and moves, and through which that soul acts. The message is infallible and eternal. The history is true.

That is my confession.”