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  SHALL WE UNDERSTAND THE BIBLE
  by Thomas Williams
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Thomas Williams' study of different conceptions of God in the Bible, emphasizing
that one's understanding of God's character shapes the quality of religious
belief and practice.

  Chapters: 6

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  TABLE OF CONTENTS
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    1. 01 - Chapter 01
    2. 02 - Chapter 02
    3. 03 - Chapter 03
    4. 04 - Chapter 04
    5. 05 - Chapter 05
    6. 06 - Chapter 06

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  CHAPTER 1: 01 - CHAPTER 01
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’WHAT THE HISTORICAL INTERPRETATION OF THE BIBLE IS, AND THE NEED FOR IT.’

IT is, perhaps, only just to myself to say that the work I intend to do in these
six lectures will be of a quite elementary kind. I do not expect to say anything
which is not already familiar to all who have made a moderate acquaintance with
the subject, my purpose being to introduce to some intelligent use and knowledge
of the Bible those who have not yet begun, or scarcely begun, to look at it in
the light of modern research. One essential condition of a successful study is
that we should allow no theory to precede the facts; if you have any theory at
all concerning the Bible in general, either traditional or new, I ask you to lay
that theory aside and come merely to ask and honestly to find out what is in the
Bible what are the contents of these books. A student once complained to his
Professor that the Professor’s way of teaching the Bible destroyed his reverence
for it. The Professor reminded him that the only portion of the Bible they had
yet studied together was the Law of Holiness (Lev 17 - 26), and he asked the
student whether he had ever read that portion before. The student admitted he
had not! He had great reverence for it until he began to find out what it was!
Such reverence is unreal, and stands in the way of a candid investigation it is
reverence for a mere theory. Noble character cannot be built without reverence,
but true reverence is reverence for truth. If we found, e.g., that David did not
write the Psalms, or Solomon the Proverbs, or Isaiah the whole book that bears
his name, true reverence would call upon us to abandon the traditional theory
and abide by the facts. This, then, is the one preliminary demand that I make
upon you as a class, viz., that you should come with open, candid minds to ask,
What is true? What are the facts? And I may as well say at once that if anyone
comes here simply for the sake of defending some theory, without a proper care
to base the theory on facts, I have no time to waste upon him. I am not here in
the interest of any theory or any school of criticism, new or old, as such and
for its own sake; I am here only to inquire as to the truth concerning the
Bible.

Now, let us suppose that we are standing within the precincts of some ancient
abbey. The abbey is at once an historical monument and a place of worship. A
devout spirit can worship God in it without knowing anything about its history,
and it is true that when the old abbey helps a man to realize the presence of
God in his life, that is a more important thing than any knowledge of the
history of the abbey could be. Nevertheless, we should all maintain that the
historical knowledge has an importance of its own, and for many laudable
purposes it is absolutely necessary.

We go a step farther, and say that this historical knowledge as to how the old
buildings were erected, when, and by whom, ought not to lessen their value as a
place of worship, that it ought even to increase it, by giving us a larger
fellowship with men who built for God. You might, in these remarks, substitute
the Bible for the abbey. The poor African woman, who said of the old Book, ’
This is the oil that makes my lamp to burn,’ spoke truth from the depth of her
soul. She knew nothing of the Higher Criticism or any other criticism. What she
knew was that the Bible had helped her to find God; helped her to realize that
He was with her every day, and that sustained her life.

It is like the poor uneducated man who can worship in the old abbey. It is
possible for a man to be spiritually fed by old words of the Bible, whose
original meaning he does not know. He may say, * Salvation is of the Lord,’ or,
’ I know that my Redeemer liveth,’ and get help from it, though he does not mean
at all what those meant who wrote the words. But in the case of the Bible as in
that of the abbey, the fact that this good can be got without the kind of
knowledge we are now seeking is no argument for not seeking the knowledge. Nor,
if we preserve a right spirit, should inquiry and investigation, and analysis
and critical judgment, destroy or impair the worshipful spirit. John Ruskin
analyzed Nature minutely, and remained a fervent worshipper all his life. The
greatest lovers of our ancient buildings are often the most caref al
investigators of all the facts concerning them. It is equally true that some of
the greatest lovers of the Bible, some of those who value it most, spare no
research into its natural history, and they discriminate most carefully between
its different parts.

Moreover, it must be remembered that there is a traditional way of interpreting
the Bible; there is a common prevailing view, and the teacher especially must
interpret somehow, and the question is, how? Now, my contention is that the only
proper method is the historical method. What is that? Come back again to the old
abbey. I will select parts of a description of Furness Abbey, given by Mr.
Brooke Herford, for illustration. The abbey was founded by the Cistercian monks.
They were a hard, plain, puritanic sect. They allowed no ornaments, no traceried
windows, no images of saints, no sculpture of the human figure, no painted
windows, no high, massive towers; everything must be stern, simple, and
unadorned. How comes it, then, that you find all these forbidden things in
Furness Abbey? By carefully studying the ruins you are able to read the story.
You can trace there the old plan, simple and unadorned as the monks themselves,
and then you can see how it has been departed from; how later hands altered this
and superimposed that. You can see the patched masonry, where traceried windows
of a later style have replaced the earlier Norman windows; you can see how the
little chancel has been enlarged; there is a lofty, massive tower, which you
know the original builders would not have put up, and you discover that it dates
only just before the Reformation. ’ All through the building you come upon
traces of the gradual change.’ To find out all the history of that old building,
experts have to examine every doorway, every arch and window, and all sorts of
marks which the ordinary visitor would not notice. And what is that work 1 It
might be called the Higher Criticism or the Historical Interpretation of Furness
Abbey. That is the kind of work that is being done to-day on all old literature.
The Higher Criticism did not begin with the Bible. It is sometimes spoken of by
ignorant people as a sort of device of the enemy for attacking the Bible,
whereas it is the universal method of studying all ancient literature. In a very
true sense it may be said that the founder of the scientific method was a
Yorkshireman of the seventeenth century. Richard Bentley was born at Oulton,
near Wakefield, in 1662. While he was King’s librarian at Cambridge, he disputed
the authorship of certain old Greek letters (148 in number), known as ’ The
Epistles of Phalaris.’ Phalaris was a tyrant of Sicily, born 570 B.C. Bentley
closed the controversy he had raised by a convincing array of knowledge and
argument, which was the foundation of what was practically a new scientific
method of treating old books. Men saw they must not take for granted that things
were exactly what they appeared, and that old books bearing the name of one
author might really be the work of many authors, and of different times. A
hundred years later the same process was applied to the ’ Iliad,’ which, instead
of being one poem by one man, is found to be the composite work of many hands.

Later still, the ancient history of Rome had to be reconstructed, and the truth
found as best it could in the mass of fable and legend. It was simply impossible
that the Bible should be left alone. All ancient history was undergoing fresh
examination by a scientific method, with the result everywhere that many
traditional notions were upset and large reconstructions necessitated. Why
should the history of the Jews be exempt? Any objection to submitting these
writings to the same test to which all other writings are submitted is due to a
theory concerning them, but we have no right to any theory until we know the
facts. Anyway, whether we object or do not object, the Bible has been, and is
being, examined by the method admitted to be valid in regard to every other
literature.

Criticism is judgment. Some sort of judgment you must have. The question is, Is
it to be competent or incompetent? Is it to be that of a slothful mind or a
diligent mind? Is it to be the very best you can reach by taking every care and
trouble, or the one that will cost you least?

Historical criticism is judgment in the light of history. It insists upon going
behind tradition, to inquire into the authorship, the age, the meaning, and the
spirit of the ancient writing. Setting aside all preconceived theories, it asks,
* What are the actual contents of this writing?’ And then it asks whether the
writing is one piece or a collection of pieces; if a collection, how related.
Then it seeks to determine the age of the respective pieces and their inner
meaning in the light of the time to which they belong. To reach its results, it
uses all sources of available information monuments, the study of language,
quotations in works whose date is known, references in the document itself to
known institutions or customs or persons, great differences of leading ideas in
the writing, all of which could not belong to the same man and the same time,
and many other criteria. The negative results are often quite certain, while the
positive results are uncertain. You may be able to prove conclusively that Paul
did not write the Epistle to the Hebrews, and be quite uncertain as to who did;
you may prove that Moses could not have written the Pentateuch, but who did
write it is quite another matter. The positive results of criticism vary from
weak probability up to such a convergence of probabilities as amount to
practical certainty. Just as in every other science, Biblical Criticism has had
often to revise its conclusions, but the point to remember is this: that if
historical criticism comes to wrong conclusions, it is only by more historical
criticism these can be corrected. Geologists of long ago made mistakes. But the
only remedy was more geology. Those who denounced the geologists in the name of
religion were worse than useless. It is so with criticism. When criticism is
wrong, what you want is more criticism, not ignorant denunciation. Among
scholars of all schools this is now practically recognised. One of the best
modern critics, Professor B. Wisner Bacon, in a new book (’ An Introduction to
the New Testament,’ p. 24) says: ’ We should do injustice to the line of
conservative scholars if we failed to recognise the splendid scholarship and
industry of German critics, such as B. Weiss, aud Theo. Zahn, whom one hesitates
to class as apologetic, so genuine is the purpose, especially of the former, to
be free from traditional bias.’ He says that Weiss rejects the sceptical way of
refusing to scrutinize the documents, and that Zahn, that ’ prince of
conservative scholars,’ ’ knows no method but the universal methods of pure
scientific criticism.’ * With all these differences of judgment, there is,
nevertheless, to-day but one method of literary and historical criticism. The
perfect balance of evidence in detailed results remains for him who shall be
able to join to the amplest scholarship an impartiality of judgment, absolute,
not only in intention, but in fact.’

That, I think, must suffice as to the first part of my subject what historical
interpretation means. And now as to the necessity for it. An observant reading
of the English Bible will raise questions at once.

If you were reading an English book purporting to be two centuries old, and came
across the word ’ telegraph ’ or * telephone,’ you would know that that, at any
rate, could not have been written so long ago. In the same way, if a psalm,
which is called a Psalm of David, speaks of the temple at Jerusalem, you know
there was no temple in David’s time, the first temple being built by Solomon.
When you read in Genesis 36:31, a reference to a monarchy in Israel, you know
the reference could not have been made by Moses any more than a writer of fifty
years ago could have referred to boycotting. If you found the author speaking of
the ’ Eternities ’ and the ’ Immensities,’ you would feel sure he was acquainted
with Carlyle. If he spoke of ’the power that makes for righteousness,’ you would
not place him before Arnold. One writer tells us of a painter who depicted the
penitent thief on the way to the Cross receiving the last consolations from a
monk! But it was too early for monks. - The picture, however, though not
historical as regards the thief, is historical as regards the painter. It tells
you what he thought. That is what happens again and again in the historical
books of the Bible. A man writes the story of days long, long past, but he
writes under the influence of the ideas of his own time, and you have constantly
to be on your guard to distinguish between the event and the writer’s comment.
You will find this constantly if you read Samuel and Kings and compare them with
Chronicles. Chronicles was written in the Greek Age, say 300 B.C. approximate
i.e., some centuries after the older histories. And you will often find things
of the later time read back into the earlier, like the monk in the painting.

Hezekiah holds a passover with elaborate ritual, according to the Chronicler (2
Chronicles 29:1-36), whereas the author of Kings gives the story of Hezekiah
without any passover, and introduces the passover of the book of the Covenant as
a new thing in the reign of Josiah, and says no such passover as therein
prescribed was held from the days of the Judges to the eighteenth year of
Josiah. Then, again, why does the Chronicler speak of so many things as done by
the sons of Aaron the sons of Aaron are the priests in Chronicles whereas in
Kings the sons of Aaron are not mentioned? ’ Historical interpretation,’ says
the writer of Kings, ’ does not mention the sons of Aaron as the priests,
because the priesthood had not been confined to Aaron’s family at that time. By
the Chronicler’s time they alone were the priests, and he puts them into the old
story as the painter put the monk.’ But here the reader asks himself, ’ Are not
Aaron’s sons made priests in the Pentateuch, which was before Kings?’ That,
however, is the question: Was it before Kings? Criticism will tell you
differently by-and-by. Meantime, this kind of thing shows the necessity for
criticism. The Bible cannot explain itself. Suppose you ask how Israel came to
have a King. You refer to the Books of Samuel, but there you find two stories.
According to one it was God who wanted the people to have a King to save them
from the Philistines. Samuel anointed Saul by God’s command. According to the
other account, it was the people who clamoured for a King, and God granted them
their desire in anger, and regarded their action as rebellion against Him. Here
is a contradiction which compels us to the work of historical criticism.

If you ask who sold Joseph, you will find two answers given. According to one,
his brethren sold him (Genesis 37:1-36, two accounts), but according to another,
the Midianite merchants stole him out of the pit and sold him in Egypt. Joseph
in prison tells the chief butler (Genesis 40:15), ’I, too, was stolen out of the
land of the Hebrews ’; but later on he tells his brethren, ’ I am Joseph whom ye
sold into Egypt.’ It would be dishonest to pretend that there is no
contradiction, and the existence of the contradiction calls for historical
interpretation. The reader who passes from Isa. 39 to 40. finds that he has
changed climates; the style of writing is vastly different; the whole atmosphere
of thought is different; the historical situation is different; Jerusalem,
instead of being threatened by a possible invasion, is at the end of a long
punishment, having received double for her sins. The question arises, Did the
same man write these chapters? The answer can only be found by historical
interpretation. In Jeremiah 33:14-26 you have a passage which looks upon
religious ritual in a different light from that in which Jeremiah usually
regards it. This at once creates suspicion, and you wonder how he could so
contradict his general position. Then you find that in the Septuagint version
the Greek Bible which was translated from the old Hebrew that passage does not
appear at all; you think it probable, then, that the passage was not in the
original Jeremiah, that it must be the work of some later editor or scribe, that
it is probably like the tvacevy of the window in Furness Abbey the work of a
later hand than that of the original builder. You must settle the question as
best you can by historical inquiry. If you read in one of the Gospels that Judas
committed suicide, and in the Acts that he died by accident, and that that was
well known in Jerusalem, you have a contradiction which needs some explanation.
These are only stray illustrations of the need for a critical method. For
further illustration, and also for some statement of how criticism has found
things, I will now ask your attention to the first six books of the Bible,
called the Hexateuch. The ordinary reader who reads carefully will soon meet
with strange phenomena here. In Exodus 6:1-30 the name ’ Jahweh ’ (= Jehovah,
often translated ’ Lord ’ in the English Bible) is revealed to Moses for the
first time, and God tells him He was not known to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob by
that name. But according to Genesis He was. In Genesis 15:1, e.g., it is Jahweh
who speaks to Abraham.

There are two stories of creation, each with its own order, and each with its
own ideas of God. There are two different accounts of the Flood, two
explanations of the origin of certain names e.g., ’ Bethel/ ’ Israel,’ and ’
Beersheba.’ Two different reasons are given for the institution of the Sabbath.
In Exodus it is to be kept because God had rested on the seventh day, and so
hallowed it; in Deuteronomy the command is to keep it as a memorial of the
deliverance from Egypt, and it was instituted for that purpose. The reader must
ask, How did these double accounts come in? In Exodus 37:1-29 you read that
Bezaleel made the ark after Moses had received the new tables of the law, which
tables Moses put into the ark. But in Deuteronomy 10:1-22 Moses is commanded to
make the ark before he goes up to receive the tables, and he makes it himself
and then puts the tables in. If we ask where the ark was kept, we should find
equally conflicting accounts.

Another phenomenon that must attract notice in the Hexateuch is the different
strata of legislation. On the supposition that all was the legislation of Moses,
see what result you get regarding slavery, for example. In Exodus 21:1-10, the
slave who has served six years and who by law is free in the seventh, may, if he
so desire, go voluntarily into lifelong slavery, and make a contract that will
bind him for the rest of his life. Next year, however, you find, according to
Leviticus 25:39-42, that an Israelite must not sell himself to another
Israelite. Israelites can serve as hired servants to the year of Jubilee, and
then be free, but an Israelite is not to hold another Israelite as a bondman; he
can make bondmen i.e., slaves of the heathen, but not of his own people. That
would be very poor morality for us, but it was an exalted standard for
Israelites so long ago. But according to Deuteronomy 15:12 i.e., thirty-eight
years later Moses goes back again to the old view that an Israelite may be a
slave for six years, and may voluntarily make himself a slave for ever. The law
of Leviticus by this theory was designed for life in Canaan; and yet in
Deuteronomy, on the eve of entering Canaan, Moses himself ignores it It is quite
impossible that Moses could have been the author of all these laws. Again,
according to Exodus 20:24, the people are at liberty to worship in many places;
but the law of Deuteronomy 12:1-32 forbids it, and confines worship to one
sanctuary only. Historical criticism maintains that these laws relate to
different periods of the nation’s life. Again, there is an unmistakable
difference between Leviticus and Deuteronomy, so great that, if one were Mosaic,
the other could not be. To mention only one point in illustration viz., in
Deuteronomy, all Levites are priests; in Leviticus only one family of Levites
are priests, the sons of Aaron. Connected with this is an elaborate ritual and a
priestly atmosphere in Leviticus that separates the book by a wide chasm from
Deuteronomy, and it is evident upon a comparison that some theory quite other
than that of unity of authorship must be found. In this way the reader comes
upon signs of composite authorship, as Bentley did with the epistles of
Phalaris. When the work is undertaken to disentangle these interwoven writings,
it goes without saying that we have to depend a great deal upon experts, as we
should have to do in any department of ancient history, whether it be the
examination of books, or abbeys, or rocks; for many things we must rely upon the
scholars. But what if the scholars do not agree? It would be a miracle if they
did at all points. A man is hard up for an objection when he objects to Biblical
criticism on the ground that the critics are not agreed. In what department of
investigation do experts always agree? Doctors, e.g., have many differences in
diagnosis and prescription, but we are not foolish enough to say that therefore
we will have nothing to do with them. Will you tell the student of English law
that his wisest plan is to leave the subject alone until the authorities are
agreed on all matters of chronology and interpretation? Then why countenance so
puerile an attitude regarding Jewish law? This objection is really too childish
for serious treatment; I only mention it because many use it to prejudice the
historical interpretation of the Bible who would never think of arguing in the
same way in any other department, When you go into these matters with any
thoroughness, especially in the Hexateuch, it is the measure of agreement that
surprises you, not the disagreement. That so many scholars working independently
should be able to agree so much as to what documents are compiled in the
Hexateuch, and be able to come so near to each other in the work of separating
these documents, is really amazing, and, to my mind, convincing. On a host of
minute particulars there is disagreement and uncertainty, but on the main
features there is no substantial disagreement, and ’as little uncertainty as you
can expect in the study of anything so ancient.

Let me try to give some rough idea of how the Hexateuch is made up, omitting
unavoidably all details of the analysis.

It has been found that there are four principal documents in the Hexateuch. Some
of these continue into the historical books, but for the present I leave that
unnoticed. These principal documents are called J., E., D., and P. i.e.,
Yahwist, Elohist, Deuteronomist, and Priest’s Code. Yahwist = writer who calls
God Jahweh i.e., Jehovah, often ’ Lord ’ in our version. Elohist = writer who
calls God Eiohim, translated ’ God ’ in the English Bible. Probably these
represent, not merely different writers, but different schools of thought.
Scholars have been able to separate these documents. Though they are so
interwoven that you often have two documents represented in the same verse, it
is possible to pick out and put together each document, and you find that each
makes a story by itself, and without the double accounts and the contradictions
to which I referred e.g., one story of creation belongs to P., the other belongs
to J. Each document is seen to have its own distinguishing characteristics, its
own leading ideas, its own institutions, and its own style. It is a great
mistake to suppose that all is decided upon mere evidence of language; the
language is only one part of the evidence. The evidence is of a cumulative
nature; its strength and convincingness in regard to main conclusions depend
upon a convergence of many lines of proof. In a single lecture it is impossible
to give these proofs, and impossible to describe in detail the characteristics
of the documents or their limits. As to limits, I can but say that P. is
interwoven with J. and E. in Genesis and Exodus and Numbers; that it includes
the whole of Leviticus, though there it incorporates older legislation called
the law of Holiness, chapters 17-26; it has only a few verses in Deuteronomy,
but a considerable section in Joshua. D. is practically Deuteronomy. J. and E.
are found in all except Leviticus and Deuteronomy. This is in the rough. As to
characteristics, I can only give one or two illustrations. Think, e.g., of the
question of sacrifice. According to J. and E., sacrifice existed from the
beginning; it was the natural way in which man approached God. The patriarchs in
these stories build altars and offer sacrifice, and Moses, in Exodus 24:5, even
sent young men to offer burnt offerings and sacrifice peace offerings to the
Lord. But P. looks at these things very differently. Sacrifice, in his view, is
a special Divine institution; it does not properly begin until Aaron and his
sons are consecrated to do it. In J., e.g., when Noah comes out of the ark, he
builds an altar and sacrifices, but in P. he does no such thing; God makes a
covenant and Noah is a party to it, but there is no altar and no sacrifice. The
priestly school of P., in writing ancient history, would not represent a layman
as offering sacrifice. The same difference marks these documents in the case of
the other patriarchs. In D. any Levite is a priest, but P. (Numbers 18:7) so
confines the priesthood to Aaron and his sons that any stranger coming nigh to
it shall be put to death. When D. writes the story of Moses appointing Joshua as
his successor, the whole transaction takes place between the two men in the
sight of God and the people; but when P. comes to tell the same story, Moses has
to place Joshua before Eleazer the priest, and he must play an important part in
the transaction. To the priestly school the thing would not have been valid
without a priest. Again, in D. the priests have no property, and certain
charitable allowances are therefore to be made for them; they are classed with
the poor who have to be looked after. But in P. their revenue is greatly
increased in several ways, and they are also to possess forty-eight cities, with
allotments of pasture land besides. These are only very few instances; I have no
time for more. Yet, by the traditional theory that all this was Mosaic
legislation, all these contradictory points of view were taken by one
legislator; all the very different conceptions of God, of worship, and of
sacrifice were the conceptions of one and the same man; and all these
conflicting regulations were issued in one lifetime for practice in Canaan.
Whatever is or is not right in the conclusions of the higher criticism, one
thing is absolutely beyond doubt that the old theory breaks to pieces. The old
view cannot be held by any man who works candidly and honestly at the subject.
Now, when the limits of these separate documents have been settled, the question
arises as to their respective dates. To come to any conclusion on this point it
was necessary to do two things viz., to compare the documents very carefully
with each other, and then to compare them with history as best known. This was a
big task, and as our knowledge of ancient history is constantly open to revision
through discoveries and other investigations, conclusions of this kind must be
held liable to revision too. There has been, however, and still is, practical
unanimity that J. and E. are dated from the ninth to the eighth century B.C.; of
these J. is the older. There has been much controversy concerning the respective
dates of D. and P. I cannot even epitomize it here. The prevailing modern view
is that the true order of the documents is as follows: J., E., D., P. J., E.
existed, it is held, before 750; they were combined by 650. Deuteronomy is
placed about 621. When it was composed is a doubtful question, but it comes
definitely into the national history, and it is adopted by the people, in 621.
We have a date for Josiah’s reformation. That reformation was based on a
law-book found in the Temple, and the things done by the reformers are the
things prescribed in Deuteronomy, not the things prescribed in Exodus or
Leviticus; the inference is that that law-book was Deuteronomy, though,
probably, not the whole book as we have it now. Hence the date 621. During the
exile in Babylon, Deuteronomy was combined with J., E. There, too, the old
histories Judges, Kings, and, perhaps, Samuel were revised and edited. And the
editor of that day did not scruple to put his own comments into the text. These
editors worked under the influence of Deuteronomy. That is why you find a man
often condemned for conduct which evidently never struck him as wrong; the law
which made it wrong did not exist in his time, but it did in the time of the
editor.

It was found, however, that the Jews in Jerusalem were very negligent of
worship, and that Deuteronomy was not sufficient to meet the case. It was to
meet this that men of priestly interest in Babylon drew up P., the Priest’s
Code, composed somewhere between 538-444. In 444, under Ezra, the people
solemnly adopted either the Priest’s Code or the whole combined Pentateuch. By a
study of the history of Israel, when you have learned to discount the editors’
notes, you find that Deuteronomy was not known before the seventh century e.g.,
you have Amos and Hosea prophesying in the eighth century, and they give you no
hint of knowing Deuteronomy. They do not demand from the people what Deuteronomy
demands, nor do they blame them for violating its requirements. Deuteronomy
demands worship at one central sanctuary. These prophets do not, nor do they
hold that there is anything wrong in having many sanctuaries, though the resort
to sanctuaries is denounced because the claims of morality are neglected. So in
the historical books, men have many sanctuaries and images without the least
consciousness that they were breaking a law. If Deuteronomy existed, even the
leaders did not seem to know anything about it. By the same kind of argument,
and many others, the conclusion is reached that P. was not in existence before
the captivity in Babylon. When you read the historical books, remember that
Kings is coloured by a Deuteronomic editor; and Judges, though less so; and
Samuel scarcely at all; that before Chronicles was written, P. had come into
existence, and that is why there is a priestly colour on events which are
without it in Kings.

All this, and much more, is necessary to our understanding the history of the
Hebrew development. It is difficult work, but intensely interesting when you get
into it, and it redeems the Bible from being a mere Divine apparatus to be
adored but not read. It becomes a living book, full of human interest and of
lasting worth; in many senses the most important story in the world, the story
of the thought and life of that wonderful nation to which Jesus belonged, and
the story, too, that leads up to and includes Him. To understand the Old
Testament is the true preparation for a historical interpretation of
Christianity. One conviction is borne in irresistibly upon the mind when the
story of this people is properly traced viz., that ’ God marshalled them, gave
them their goal.’ Their way was certainly not in themselves alone.


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  CHAPTER 2: 02 - CHAPTER 02
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’DIFFERENT CONCEPTIONS OF GOD IN THE BIBLE;

WE should all say that the main value of the Bible is that it inspires us with a
sense of God’s presence with us. That sense of God constitutes the essence of
religion. All who are aware of Him have some sort of religion. But if we want to
know further what sort of religion it is, we must ask what sort of idea, what
sort of conception of God, is associated with the sense of His presence. While
the sense of God constitutes the essence of religion, the conception of God
conditions its quality. It is important, therefore, not only to feel strongly
and deeply that God is with you you may have that and be a Sultan ordering the
massacre of Armenians, or a Saul of Tarsus persecuting Christians as a service
to God. You must also have the loftiest possible conception of God, of the
character of God. Let us lay it down as an axiom of our Christian life that no
lower idea of God will do than the highest we have known. The moment you lower
your idea of God you lower the whole standard of life. God must be to us the
impersonation of our ideal sanctities. Allow nothing which you feel to be in the
least wrong to mix itself with your conception of God. This I take to be an
essential qualification of a Sunday-school teacher that he will on no account
allow himself or his scholars to think of God except as infinitely righteous and
loving. I think we shall all agree in saying that we recognise this conception
of God as the Christian revelation. You will find it, therefore, in the Bible.
It constitutes the eternal value of the Bible. It is the clearness, the fulness,
the richness, the certainty of that idea of God in the Bible which lifts this
literature into its place of supremacy in the literature of the world. But it is
necessary to remember that, though this conception of God is to be found in the
Bible, many other conceptions of God are there too. We shall find conceptions
very inconsistent with the Christian idea of God. We shall find God thought of
in a way we cannot think of Him; and doing things which, if we have the
Christian idea, we cannot believe He did; and saying things we cannot believe He
said. It is necessary to distinguish between the different conceptions of God,
and to fix their relative values. To regard the Bible as the Word of God in the
sense that you can open it anywhere, and be sure to find His word for your own
life, leads to endless error and confusion. That is the weakness of any pledge
to read some portion of the Bible every day. The idea is, that in any portion
you get God’s word, which is not true. In many parts you will find ascribed to
God actions and words which utterly contradict Jesus Christ. To believe them
would be to disbelieve Him, and to twist your own moral sense too. The whole
Bible can never be the rule of faith and practice. To practise Leviticus you
would have to turn your chapels into slaughter-houses, and put the New Testament
in the fire. How could you practise Deuteronomy, which confines worship to one
place? When people use these phrases they simply do not think what they mean. It
is no doubt a generous habit to speak of a whole literature in the terms of its
highest content. There is a profound truth at the back of this. When you
discover a man’s ideal it is profoundly true to say, ’ That’s the man ’ it is
the essence of the man, it is what he is aiming at, and, at his depths, what he
is aiming at he is. Still it would be dangerous therefore to take that man as
infallible, and to believe all that he does is right and all he says is true. It
is just as necessary, for a true estimate, to see where he fails of his ideal as
to see what the ideal is. Now, to take the Christian idea of God and say, ’
That’s the Bible,’ is true only in that way. It is the consummation of the
Bible; it is what the whole thing led up to; and it is therefore the deepest
truth and meaning of the whole development. But we must not therefore think that
all in the teaching that preceded it is infallible that is simply to confuse our
own moral sense, and to obscure the ideal itself. What I want, therefore, to
impress upon teachers is that, in teaching thoughts of God from the Bible, they
should always hold the highest conception of God which they have formed by the
help of Jesus, and all the good, as the key to the right or wrong of any other
conception presented to them. Sacrifice at once any notion you may have of an
infallible book, or of the inspiration of any old law-giver, or seer, or
prophet, or writer, rather than lower your conception of God. Our theology is of
the utmost importance. Do not allow yourselves, if you are revolting from old
beliefs, to say that beliefs are of no importance, that conduct is everything.
What a man really believes about God (not necessarily what he formally believes)
is the foundation of his life. Approach the Bible, then, I ask you, to teach
about God with the idea firmly fixed in your mind that God is the impersonation
of the very highest and best you have yet conceived, and infinitely transcends
that. Wherever, then, in the Bible you come upon a conception of God lower than
this, do not hesitate to point out that it is lower, and to ascribe it to the
special condition of the individual who wrote it, or to the stage of culture and
development at which the people were who conceived it; and if they ascribed it
to a revelation from God Himself, do not hesitate to say that they were
mistaken. Your scholars will lose nothing by thinking that the Bible is
imperfect, or the old prophet imperfect, but their souls are damaged if they
think God imperfect. If e.g., you read in Numbers 25:16-18, ’ The Lord spake
unto Moses, saying, Vex the Midianites and smite them, for they vex you with
their wiles,’ never allow the children to think that God said so.

Point out to them the difference between that morality and the ( morality of
Jesus: * Pray for those who persecute you;’ ’ Father, forgive them, for they
know not what they do.’ If you read in Exodus 3:22 directions ascribed to God as
to how the Israelites are to steal the property of the Egyptians by pretending
to borrow it, take care you do not allow the children ever to think that God
gave such directions.

If you read in 1 Kings 22:20-23 that God put a lying spirit into the mouths of
prophets in order to entice a man into wrong-doing, take care you do not
tolerate that conception of God. There is no difficulty in setting aside these
views of God if we remember that the Bible is the history of growing thought and
life covering many centuries of time. I now want to illustrate the use of the
Bible which I am recommending to you.

Last week I spoke of a document in the Hexateuch, which also continues into the
historical books, known as J. This represents the Jahwist school during a
considerable period of time. It is regarded now as the oldest of the documents.
It incorporates, however, bits of literature older than itself, some snatches of
old song, e.g. Behind it lie the tales and the folk-lore, and old national
traditions which always precede the writing age in any nation. J., as we have
it, is interwoven with some other documents, and was itself, no doubt, revised
and edited both before and after its combination. This means for experts a great
deal of minute work, which we cannot be expected to master. But the main
features of this old document have been set before us unmistakably. The only
feature I want to notice now is its conception of God. The theology of the
Jahwist is very childish and elementary, though it is not all on the same level.
He thinks of God very much as in human form, holding intercourse with men almost
as one of themselves. His document begins with Genesis 2:4 b, and its first
portion continues, without break, to the end of chapter 4. This portion contains
the story of Eden. Here Jahweh moulds dust into human form and breathes into it;
plants a garden and puts the man in it. Jahweh comes to the man in his sleep and
takes part of his body to make a woman, and so skilfully, apparently, that the
man never wakes under the operation. Jahweh walks in the garden like a man in
the cool of the day. He even makes coats for Adam and Eve. Farther on the
Jahwist has a flood story, in which Jahweh repents that he had made man, and
decides to drown him, saving only one family. When all is over, and Noah
sacrifices on his new altar, Jahweh smells a sweet savour, just as a hungry man
smells welcome food. When men build the Tower of Babel, Jahweh comes down to see
it he cannot see it from where he is. In Gen. xviii. the Jahwist tells a story
of three men coming to Abraham’s tent. Abraham gives them water to wash their
feet, and bread to eat, and Sarah makes cakes for them, and ’ they did eat ’;
altogether they seemed to have had a nice time. As the story goes on, he leaves
you to infer that one of these was Jahweh himself. It is J. who describes the
story of Jacob wrestling with some mysterious person who, by inference, is
Jahweh, He tells a very strange story in Exodus 4:24, that when Moses was
returning into Egypt, at Jahweh’s own request, Jahweh met him at a
lodging-place, and sought to kill him. In Exodus 14:15 it is said Jahweh took
the wheels off the chariots of the Egyptians. If we wanted to believe that such
statements were true at all we should resort to the device of saying they were
figurative. But J. meant them literally. The Jahwist would have no difficulty in
thinking of God in this way. The story of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah
belongs to this same document, in which you remember Jahweh says, 4 1 will go
down now and see whether they have done altogether according to the cry of it,
which is come unto me; and if not, I will know ’ (Genesis 18:21). That God was
omniscient and omnipresent had never occurred to the Jahwist. Jahweh, like a
man, had to go and see if he wanted to know. There is, however, some
compensation in the fact that he can move about without difficulty he can come
down and go up. One might say, perhaps, that in J., though Jahweh cannot be
everywhere, he can go to almost any place. All this is just like a child’s
thought. The child, at Christmas, can believe that, though Santa Glaus cannot be
everywhere, he can move about with wonderful facility, and though he is a man he
is rather mysterious. The Jahwist’s thought of God represents the childhood
stage of the national life. This document itself, however, shows some advance
upon this level of thought. When Jahweh comes to Moses in the burning bush, the
ground is holy, and Moses must not draw too near. Jahweh is not so familiar and
accessible as in the other instances I referred to. This represents later
thought of the Jahwist school, but it is the same school, and even in this very
story Jahweh has to ’ come down ’ to deliver the people from Egypt. Again, in
this document men worship Jahweh from the beginning. Knowledge of Jahweh is not
limited to the chosen people. ’ Nimrod was a mighty hunter before Jahweh;’ Laban
asks Jahweh’s blessing on Abraham’s servant; Balaam has to do with Jahweh;
Jahweh worship is looked upon as the primitive religion of man. Nevertheless,
Abraham is definitely called, and one line of his descendants are the chosen
people to whom Jahweh promises the land, and for whom he will drive out other
nations. It is in this chosen nation and all its history that the Jahwist is
intensely interested. Jahweh here becomes the God of this people, just as other
peoples had gods of their own. The moral character of Jahweh is by no means
high. Moses is represented on a higher elevation more than once, if judged by
our modern standard e.g., Jahweh threatens to kill the people for disobedience,
and Moses pleads for them, and he succeeds in persuading Jahweh when he reminds
him that his fame will suffer; the Egyptians will hear of his killing the people
he delivered, and will say he was not able to bring them into the land! To this
argument Jahweh gives way. Without further illustration, we can surely see that
here, throughout an entire document, is a conception of God which the growth of
mind has transcended. There is truth in it, as in every stage of culture, but it
is a stage, and a stage left behind. We turn now to the conception of God in the
Elohist. This document is called the Elohist because its name for God is Elohim,
not Jahweh, up to the time when Jahweh revealed himself as such to Moses. Here,
at once, is a great difference between the Elohist and the Jahwist. To the
latter even the ancestors of Abraham had worshipped Jahweh. But in the Elohist
document Joshua says to all the people of Israel (Joshua 24:2), ’Thus saith
Jahweh, the God of Israel, Your fathers dwelt of old time beyond the River, and
served other gods.’ The two documents fundamentally contradict each other on
this point. To the Jahwist, Jahweh worship was from the beginning; to the
Elohist it was a new revelation to Moses. Jahweh was the God who called Abraham,
but Abraham did not know him as such. The Elohist has got the idea of
progressive revelation. To him it was possible to know more of God, to discover
a new name, a new character, as time went on. It is exceedingly interesting to
find this so far back; it comes almost as a rebuke to many who have scarcely
grasped the idea of progressive revelation yet. And the Elohist’s way of
thinking of God is very different from the Jahwist’s. We are dealing here with
more mature mental conception. He is more reflective; he has left the child
stage. And so the familiarity with which the Jahwist spoke of God disappears,
God does not come among men almost like one of themselves; he is more distant
and awful. He comes mostly in vision and in dream. His voice is often heard when
no form is mentioned, and sometimes his angel speaks for him. With E.
intermediaries are beginning, and God is being distanced from man.

God does still speak with Moses face to face and mouth to mouth, but with no one
else so. The people when they have heard God at Sinai even beg that he will
speak to them no more, but let Moses mediate God dwells in the thick darkness.
This conception of God is no doubt less crude and simple than the Jahwist’s, and
represents later thought. It is in this document that God is so often said to ’
prove ’ men. The story of Abraham and Isaac on Moriah belongs to the Elohist,
and is perhaps the outstanding instance of this point. I should like briefly to
illustrate how this story might be taken in a Sunday-school class. As too often
taught it presents a very barbarous view of God. That God should even for a
moment of trial ask a man to kill his own child is a horrible thought. I wish no
Sunday-school walls would show a picture of Abraham, with his uplifted knife,
ready to kill his son. Such a picture tends to degrade our thought of God and
man. It is not many years since a man in Massachusetts was tried for the murder
of his child, and he declared it was a religious act, that through reading the
story of Abraham and Isaac he became convinced that God wanted his child. I
remember, when a boy, hearing a preacher tell the story of a father who had been
brought to love God through losing a favourite child. The man and the preacher
believed that God wanted for Himself the love which was bestowed on the child,
and that He took the child away in order to get it. These are relics of paganism
which cling to the Christian world. They are often supported by wrong views of
Bible stories, such as the story of Abraham and Isaac. We have seen already that
words are often attributed to God, which we must not consider His which we
cannot if we believe in Christianity. The story of Abraham and Isaac belongs to
the class of aetiological myths known in every nation i.e., myths which arise as
acceptable accounts of the causes of things, of some custom or institution. The
Greeks, e.g., found that they had dropped the custom of human sacrifices, and
substituted the sacrifices of animals. To account for that there arose the
mythical story of the goddess Artemis, demanding the life of Agamemnon’s
daughter, and then saving her at the last moment and providing a stag for
sacrifice in her stead. The Hebrews, too, found they had left off sacrificing
children and were sacrificing animals instead. And it is this tradition that is
thrown into the form of a tale in the story of Mount Moriah, and Moveh,
significantly enough, means * place of instruction.’ The sacrifice of children
to the gods was a common heathen practice. It was not unknown in Israel. The
story of Jephthah and his daughter reminds us of it (Judges 11:29-40). Mark
this: it is said that the spirit of the Lord came upon Jephthah, and he vowed,
if successful in war, to offer unto the Lord as a burnt- offering whatsoever
came forth of the doors of his house to meet him when he returned, and when he
found to his sorrow that his own daughter was the victim, he could not go back.
Jephthah and his daughter thought it right she should be sacrificed. Ahaz the
King passed his son through the fire; so did Manasseh. Jeremiah says they had
even built special places in order to do this, and he protested that God had
never commanded it (Jeremiah 7:31; Jeremiah 19:5; Jeremiah 32:35).

You can use the story in class to show how people have gradually been instructed
in the way of serving God, how they grew to know it was wrong to kill their
children. You might then show how a still higher point of view is given in the
words of Micah that God wants neither the firstborn, nor rams, nor rivers of
oil, but requires only that we should ’ do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly
before God.’ You could show how that revelation of the prophets rose to its
purer heights in Jesus Christ. ’ Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall
see God.’ The use of such tales is not to teach us what the will of God is for
us now, but to show us how God has led men up through darkness to larger light,
how revelation is an ever unfolding process, how in their thought of God men
have ascended by a rugged road, by a path marked with blood, to the knowledge of
God in Christ, where the real sacrifice is a heart loyal to God and a life in
harmony with His will. Then you can turn the story round, and show in what sense
God does ask from us the lives of our children; how we must do our best to give
them to God by consecrating them to high ideals of life; teach them that it is
better for them to suffer than to be dishonourable; better to be poor and
unsuccessful than get on in the world by dishonest means; that sometimes in
order to be true to conscience and to God they must be willing to climb the
sacrificial mount and submit to pain and suffering. All these and many more
beautiful lessons can be drawn from the old story. I have spent a little time
over it because teachers sometimes say, ’ We cannot teach in the old way, and do
not know what to teach.’ There is plenty to teach, and far more in the Bible in
the new light than in the old. The Elohist apparently regarded human sacrifices
as a temporary way of * proving ’ men. They were indeed a proof that man
belonged to God, and that all he had was God’s, but they proved also that he
very much needed a better knowledge of God’s character and will. The Elohist’s
conception of God’s moral character is also very different from ours to-day. In
the so-called ’ Book of the Covenant’ (Exodus 21:1-36; Exodus 22:1-31; Exodus
23:1-33) there are certainly many admirable moral precepts, and the Decalogue,
though not in its present expanded form, is in this document. Yet we must not
expect to find in the Elohist’s God a satisfactory moral character for our God
to-day. The Elohist, e.g., does not condemn polygamy God’s favourites may have
many wives, and no one thinks it wrong, any more than the Chinese think it wrong
for their Emperors. In war the Elohist’s God would approve things which, if done
now, would be denounced as barbarous. The utter destruction of men, women, and
children, and cattle by Joshua in Jericho, the hewing of Agag by Samuel, the
barbarities which David executed on the Amalekites, are all done by the command
of God. What has happened in our country recently? The way in which these Old
Testament commands to fight have been quoted even in some pulpits to justify war
shows how tremendously important it is to take the historical view of these
matters.

There is no atrocity which you cannot justify if you proceed by the other
method. The Elohist’s God would never be a party to the Geneva Convention. To
read these old commands as commands for us is simply to reverse twenty-five
centuries of progress and put us back in a semibarbarous age, and it is
certainly to make the Cross of Christ of none effect. In the Elohist’s
legislation no sorceress must be suffered to live. That was why 100,000 witches
were burned in Germany in one century after the Reformation. The appeal to the
Bible produced that result. The Elohist puts to death, utterly destroys, the man
who worships any god other than Jahweh. It is easy to see that the Spanish
Inquisition is nearer to that point of view than it is to the Christ. For
practical life, the historical interpretation of the Bible is of immense
importance. We must learn that such views of God as we have been considering,
though they are in the Bible, are not to be our views. In very early times, when
the Israelites were living a wandering, half-civilized life, it would have been
difficult to see in them any superiority over the other tribes about them. Their
religion was, of course, poor, like their life. Stocks and stones had taken the
same place in their worship as in that of the others. They had also seen the sky
with its wonders, and connected with its powers there were gods, they thought.
Probably when Jahweh first became the national god he was the god of rain and
thunderstorms.

There are traces of this at a comparatively late time. The Syrians are defeated
by Israel in battle, and they say ’ their god is the god of the hills.’ The
reference, probably, is to the belief that Jahweh was the storm god, and the
hills drew the rain from the clouds and urged the elements to battle. In the so
- called Song of Deborah we read: ’ Jahweh, when thou wentest forth out of Seir,
when thou marchedst out of the fields of Edom, the earth trembled, the heavens
also dropped yea, the clouds dropped water. The mountains flowed down at the
presence of Jahweh.’ He was still the storm god. In Psalms 18:7-15 is a
description of Jahweh as a storm god. Of course, he was much more than this to
the people at the time these passages were written, but they show how the old
conceptions lingered on, as old conceptions do, side by side with broader ones.

Amos, in the eighth century, tells us that the Israelites had worshipped stars
when they were in the wilderness. When they settled in Canaan they partook in
the Canaanite worship of Baal and Ashera side by side with Jahweh, and they had
household gods (teraphim) also. In Judges 8:27 we read that Gideon, the man who
refused to be made King, saying, ’Jahweh shall rule over you,’ nevertheless made
an ephod and worshipped it, and the people worshipped it. The man who wrote the
story thought this unfaithful to Jahweh, because he was judging by a later
standard; but Gideon saw nothing wrong in it. In Judg. xvii. we read of a man of
Mount Ephraim whose name was Micah. This man worshipped Jahweh, but he also had
a house of gods, and he made an ephod and images, and was not aware of any
inconsistency. Later on the children of Dan ’ set up Micah’s graven image all
the time that the house of God was in Shiloh.’ All this shows that at one time
Jahweh was one of many gods; other gods were real gods. The Israelites
themselves believed, for example, that Chemosh was as truly the god of the
Moabites as Jahweh was theirs, and they speak of Chemosh giving territory to his
people to inherit, just as Jahweh had given them territory (Judges 11:24). Some
years ago a stone was discovered on which there was an inscription by a Moabite
King called Mesha, written about goo B.C. This is part of the translation: ’ I
am Mesha, King of Moab.... I have raised this stone to Chemosh, for he has
delivered me from all my enemies, and given me vengeance upon all that hate me.
Omri, King of Israel, oppressed Moab many years, for then Chemosh was angry with
his land. But in my days Chemosh said, " I will look upon him and upon his
house, and Israel shall fall for ever."... Chemosh took pity on the people, I
laid siege to Kirjathaim, which the King of Israel had fortified, and I took the
city and slew all the inhabitants in honour of Chemosh. And Chemosh said to me,
" Go forth, and take the city of Nebo, from Israel." Then I went out by night,
fought against the place from the dawn of the day till noon, took it, and slew
all the inhabitants; and I took away all the sacred vessels of Jahweh and
consecrated them to Chemosh.’ Just as a King of Israel would speak of Jahweh,
the King of Moab speaks of Chemosh. His god sends him to battle. If he is
defeated the god is angry; if he succeeds the god is favourable. And we have
seen that there was a time when the Israelite believed Chemosh to be as real for
Moab as Jahweh for himself. You find the same thing everywhere. The old Assyrian
Kings said exactly the same thing of the god Assur. Assur sent them to battle,
gave defeat or victory as he thought fit. The history, however, is very obscure
up to the time of Samuel, and uncertain for some time after. Samuel organized a
Jahweh party. David worshipped Jahweh only, though he regards it as possible to
be driven out of Jahweh’s inheritance into that of other gods (1 Samuel 26:19).
Solomon was not exclusively devoted to Jahweh, for he built places of worship
for other deities as well. At a later time Jahweh was worshipped in the form of
a calf, the Canaanite Baal was worshipped at Court and by many of the people.
There was great danger lest the Jahweh religion should be absorbed in other
forms. It was a wonderful providence that rescued it, and secured that out of
that impure Jahweh worship, that poor idea of God, not from Moab or any other
people, was developed a religion which made possible that Christianity which is
God’s highest and richest revelation to the world. Providence used two weapons
to secure that victory: one was social trouble, and the other a succession of
prophets, such as the world has not known in any other nation. In times of
oppression the national feeling and faith were kindled afresh, and threw the
people back upon what was most peculiarly their own. And the prophets came.
Elijah and Elisha did much to root out Baalism, though they did not object to
calf- worship. With Amos, however, the new era was ushered in. The revolution of
Jehu had overthrown the idolatrous house of Ahab, but unrighteousness,
oppression of the poor, licentiousness and revelry, had become flagrant vices.
It was in this dark night of sin that the star of the new prophecy appeared. The
herdsman of Tekoa went up to the luxurious north to preach righteousness. They
did not like it. Such people never do like it. They wanted to be religious
without being righteous. Amos would not have it, and therefore they would not
have Amos. They stopped his preaching, but they could not prevent him writing,
and the writing is still in our hands. He and his successors preached a God who
had a distinct moral character. Their idea of God was not pure monotheism i.e.,
it did not utterly exclude the existence of other gods; but there must be only
one god for Israel Jahweh. Not only so, but Jahweh is supreme over all other
gods. They are real, but they are subordinate. Jahweh has rivals, but no equals.
There is no god like unto him. Jahweh even overrules the movements of other
nations. This prophecy represents a great advance in the conception of God, not
only on the governmental side, in the concept of power and supremacy, but also
on the moral side, in the concept of justice and mercy. God now is in a moral
relation to His people, not merely a national one. He would note not only
whether they were Israelites, but whether they were good. The logical outcome of
such a doctrine would be the universality and unity of God, but it took ages to
work out. The prophets of the eighth century worked at the foundations, but did
not see the completion of the structure. They did a noble work in the upward
evolution of religion. The world needed a still higher conception of God than
theirs, and their work made that higher conception possible. Jeremiah came with
his wonderful conception of God writing a new covenant in the hearts of His
people, making religion spiritual and free, and with his proclamation of Divine
forgiveness. And in Babylon there arose some great soul, whose name we do not
know, who climbed the mountain of Holy Communion to greet the greater day of
God, and to become herald of the larger light for the captives of darkness the
man who saw that it was a small thing for God to save one nation, and declared
that Israel must become a light to lighten the Gentiles, and Israel’s God a
Saviour to the ends of the earth. Here you reach the high-water mark in the Old
Testament conceptions of God. I have no time to follow the theme into the New
Testament; I will only say that it was in the succession of these great prophets
Jesus came, and it was their truth He rescued from neglect and carried to its
highest culmination at a time when the world’s greatest need was a universal
religion. Expanding intellectual life iu Greece had broken the national forms of
its first statements; Roman conquests had created something like political
unity; the idea of universalism was broadening philosophy and extending
government, and the time had come for a universal religion. And in the fulness
of time came Jesus, to whom God was Father of man, as man, the relation of God
to man personal, spiritual, universal, to whom the highest religion was love and
service, and who bequeathed to the world the grandest of all faiths, the faith
that God Himself is incarnate in humanity, working in it to will and to do His
own good pleasure, and will continue to work ’ till we all come, in the fulness
of faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God, to a full-grown man, to the
measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ.’


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  CHAPTER 3: 03 - CHAPTER 03
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’ DIFFERENT CONCEPTIONS OF PROVIDENCE IN THE BIBLE.’ IN the idea of God there is
involved the idea of His relation to the world the world of Nature and of man.
Our work is now to find how the latter part of this relation was conceived in
Jewish thought within Bible times. Like all other nations, the Jews felt that
they were having to do with a higher Power than themselves. How this Power was
dealing with them became a subject of reflective thought; it was, indeed, the
problem of Providence. This problem is raised by the changes, the alternations
of the world and of life. If life were an eternal day or an everlasting night, a
summer without end or a winter without break, there would be no problem of
Providence. An endless day would create no spectre; an endless night would
kindle no hope. But when these alternate, men ask what they mean. What a
multitude of myths can be traced to the mysterious impression made upon the
minds of ancient time by the dawn which dethrones the night, and leads in
victorious day, and by the spring which smiles in beauteous resurrection over
the graves of winter, by the apparent struggle between light and darkness! So in
human life, when brightness is changed to gloom, or sorrow turned to joy; when
trial becomes triumph, or victory turns into defeat; when waves and billows roll
over men whose sea was calm, then ’ deep calleth unto deep,’ the deep of life’s
great mystery calleth to the deep of human thought for some solution. So
theories of Providence arise. And to no ancient nation did changes occur to make
people think out what God’s way of dealing with them was in a more significant
way than to the Jews. They were, indeed, * tossed from vessel to vessel,’ as one
of their writers described it. From a wandering life they came through an awful
struggle into something like an ordered unity, and then through fights and wars
into settled government. After these victories, however, came new enemies.
Delivered from one, they fell into the hands of another: delivered from Egypt,
they had to fight with Syria, then with Assyria, and later with Babylon. After
the Babylonian Conquest came the Persian, then the Greek, then the Roman, until
Jerusalem was finally destroyed, and the old cultus fell to pieces. It is,
indeed, a story of storms, and no wonder we go back to see what conceptions of
Providence such a people had, and how the conception developed as time with its
wondrous events went on!

Early in the story you have the conception that the great concern of Providence
was to secure the good fortunes of Israel as a people. In Joshua 24:18 we read:
’ The Lord drove out from before us all the peoples, even the Amorites which
dwelt in the land; therefore we also will serve the Lord, for He is our God.’
But in Judges 2:21 the Lord is angry with Israel, and says He will not drive out
the nations which were left when Joshua died, but will retain them to 1 prove ’
Israel. ’ So,’ says the writer (Judges 2:23), ’ the Lord left those nations,
without driving them out hastily; neither delivered He them into the hands of
Joshua.’ In spite of the contradiction in the historical statement, which is of
no importance for my present purpose, the idea is the same in both passages:
that God is concerned with the fortunes of this particular people, and that all
other peoples must be either driven out of their land, or used for the good
fortune of Israel. It is an exclusively national view of Providence. It is
rooted in the old conceptions of primitive peoples. Robertson Smith, in his book
on ’ The Religion of the Semites ’ a book which is almost indispensable for
understanding the Old Testament, because it describes the old traditional
religion which lies behind Judaism, the religion of Semitic peoples, of which
the Hebrews were but one race, holding religious conceptions and usages in
common with the whole group of kindred peoples says that the social body was
made up of gods as well as men. The god of a clan was the chief member of the
clan, and he was therefore an enemy to the enemies of the clan; he took part in
the feuds of the clan, and therefore no individual could change his clan or
nation without changing his god. In those times hardly any but outlaws changed
their religion. You will find this old conception reflected in the Old
Testament. It lies behind the words of Ruth e.g., * Thy people shall be my
people, and thy god my god ’; to become a member of another nation meant
changing gods. In the words of David (1 Samuel 26:19), to be driven out from
Israel is to be driven out from serving Jahweh. I have asked you to read Judges
3:15-30; Judges 4:17-24; Judges 5:24-31. The first is the story of Ehud getting
at Eglon, Israel’s enemy, by deceit, and killing him an act followed by a great
slaughter of Moabites. The second is the story of Jael pretending to play the
friend to Sisera and then murdering him. The third is the eulogy of Jael for
doing so, as ’ blessed above women,’ in the so-called Song of Deborah. Here, you
see, Providence is only concerned with the fortunes of Israel; any deceit and
any cruelty is right which brings success to this people. Providence is not
concerned with morality; nor is it concerned with individuals, except as the
individual serves or opposes Israel. This old conception underwent considerable
change. You will find it very decisive in the eighth century B.C. Amos startled
the people of his day by giving a new idea of the Day of Judgment. The old idea
was that the ’ Day of Jahweh ’ meant the day of established good-fortune for
Israel and full deliverance. That was an entire mistake, according to Amos; the
Day of Jahweh would be darkness, not light. The new conception of God
necessarily involved a new conception of Providence. It was quite true, Amos
held, that Jahweh had chosen them; but the choice demanded character, and if
they were not good they must be punished: ’ You only have I known of all the
families of the earth; therefore I will visit upon you all your iniquities.’
Robertson Smith says that the prophetic view that Jahweh would vindicate the
right even by destroying his own people was alien alike to Semitic and Aryan.
Here, evidently, we are upon advancing thought in Hebrew religion. And this is
why I shall call Amos inspired, not because his conception is adequate for us
to-day, for it certainly is not, as we shall see, but because he was moving
upwards. Everything that tends upwards is inspired; every man who helps us at
all in the right direction is inspired. Inspiration is the Impulse of the onward
way flowing into man from God, the source of all. It has nothing to do with
infallibility of word or work. It does not mean that it is adequate to the needs
of the after-time; indeed, the more inspired a thing is the more sure it is to
create new life and new needs, which none of its own speech can ever satisfy.
The proof of inspiration in old Hebrew thought is not that it was at any point
final, or good enough, but that it kept rising and advancing. The inspired man
has been regarded as a goalkeeper; but he is the very opposite, ever engaged in
extending the course, and telling you that the goal is farther on. His words
have been treated as a terminus, but a terminus is a dead thing; inspired words
are rather to be taken as impulses of eternal progress. Think, then, of the
wonderful evolution of thought from the old conception that Providence was
concerned with the good fortunes of Israel apart from character to the
conception that righteousness of life was a condition of the love of God.

If it had stopped there it would not have been all we needed; but that it got
there showed noble progress, and was itself the condition of better things to
come. In Amos, too, Providence not only makes a definite moral demand, but takes
a wider range. It is still national in the sense of being specially concerned
with Israel, but it assumes a more positive control of the movements of the
great worldempires for Israel’s sake, and once, at least, it rises to the view
of the equality of some other nations with Israel. ’ Are not ye as the children
of the Ethiopians unto me, O children of Israel? saith the Lord. Have not I
brought up Israel out of the land of Egypt, and the Philistines from Caphtor,
and the Syrians from Kir?’ That view is not maintained in Amos; it seems like a
flash of light. He still regards Providence as specially interested in Israel,
but in a moral way, so much so that the sinners shall be slain, and the good
remnant remain for the ideal days to come. He also regarded other lands as
unclean. In Deuteronomy, which is later than Amos, Jahweh is still specially
Israel’s God. With this national conception of Providence goes also the national
conception of morality. The Israelite may behave towards the foreigner in a way
he dare not behave to a fellow-Israelite. E.g., you read in Deuteronomy 14:21,
’Ye shall not eat of anything that dieth of itself.’ It would probably be
diseased meat. What, then, shall be done with it? ’ Thou shalt give it unto the
stranger that is within thy gates, that he may eat of it, or thou mayest sell it
to an alien: for thou art a people holy unto the Lord/ English law is more
inspired than Deuteronomy at this point, for it will not allow diseased meat to
be sold to anyone, and we should execrate the Englishman who gave such meat in
charity to an alien. Yet the Deuteronomic law was once regarded as the law of
God. In the same way usury might be exacted from a foreigner, though not from an
Israelite (Deuteronomy 23:19-20). Here are laws which no one includes in the
Bible when he says it is his rule of faith and practice. Yet these old
enactments were inspired i.e., they were movements towards a letter life.

Better for one nation to abstain from diseased meat than none; better abolish
extortion within Israel than not at all. Establish wisdom and kindness within a
given area, and, even though you deny it beyond that area, still you are doing
good so far as you go, and you are making it certain, though you do not know it,
that others are coming after you who will extend the dominion of the good. It is
by instalments that progress comes. And the test of the inspiration of any
institution or law or teaching is not, Is it final and complete? but, Is it an
instalment? This national view of Providence and of morality which I have been
considering was certainly that. The prophets greatly enlarged the view, but you
find it surviving in considerable strength in the time of Jesus; the kingdom for
Israel was still the expectation of many. You know how far removed from that was
the highest conception of Jesus, in such teaching, e.g., as that God caused His
rain to fall on the just and the unjust, and was kind even to the unthankful and
the evil. With this wider view of the care of Providence came a wider conception
of moral duty; the neighbour to love was no longer a member of the same nation,
but anyone who needed help; and even enemies must be prayed for, and persecutors
blessed. In the highest teaching of Jesus, Providence is completely emancipated
from nationalism, and its concern is universal.

Now we must go back to look at our subject in another aspect the way in which
Providence dispenses rewards and punishments. In the old view we find that
rewards and punishments are external, and dispensed on the national scale. The
sinner may be an individual, such as Achan, but the whole host of Israel suffers
defeat before the men of Ai, though they are quite innocent. The nation was the
unit, and must be punished, because one member had violated the law of taboo
touched and appropriated the untouchable. When the people came to deal with the
offender they were obliged to take a smaller unit; but the individual sinner
would not do the whole family must be put to death. Men were not regarded as
individuals, but as members of the social body. This was why it was regarded as
right in 2 Samuel 21:1-22 to put to death two sons of Saul, and five grandsons,
for a sin which Saul was believed to have committed. The men themselves were
innocent, but Jahweh could only be pacified by seeing them hanged. ’ After that
God was entreated for the land.’ Sentence executed upon the innocent family of
the offender pleased God! The individual had not yet been properly conceived.
For a similar reason it was right to kill the Amalekites, men, women, and
infants, of one age because their ancestors 400 years before had offended
Israel. So popular was this belief that it became a proverb: ’ The fathers have
eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge.’ And it was
embodied in the Decalogue that Jahweh would visit the iniquity of the fathers
upon the children, upon the third and fourth generation (Exodus 20:5).

Providence was dealing with men, not as individuals, but on a wide scale, and
also in a very external way. I have asked you to read Deut. xxviii. There you
find the blessings and the curses with which the law of Deuteronomy was enjoined
on the people. You notice that they are external. If they obey and worship
Jahweh in this prescribed way, where do they find their rewards? In the city and
in the field, in increased families and increased property, and victory in
battle. If they disobey they are cursed in these same things, and they are taken
with terrible and loathsome diseases, and reduced to such straits that mothers
will even eat their own children. Have you ever tried to measure the contrast
between Deuteronomy 28:1-68 and Matthew 5:1-48? When you want an instructive
Bible hour you could scarcely do better than read the blessings and curses of
Deuteronomy side by side with the beatitudes of Jesus. The former are material,
the latter spiritual; the former outward, the latter inward. But I am
anticipating.

It was part, also, of the old view that all external calamity, that all
suffering was punishment the punishment of some sin. In 2 Samuel 21:1-22, e.g.,
a famine is taken to be a direct infliction for some transgression. David, with
this idea in his mind, tries to think it out; in Bible phrase, * He sought the
face of the Lord.’ ’ And the Lord said: It is for Saul and his bloody house,
because he put to death the Gibeonites’ i.e., David came to this conclusion, or
the writer of the story represents it so. Here is the idea whether it be David’s
or the writer’s does not matter that Jahweh sent a famine in David’s day because
Saul had done wrong. Every calamity was the punishment of some sin, and
therefore the cause must be found somewhere. This view persisted down through
Bible times, and it persists even yet. But I want you to note a great change
which it underwent in the hands of Jeremiah and Ezekiel. Jeremiah prophesied
before and during the Babylonian captivity, and Ezekiel was among the exiles in
Babylon. Jeremiah, at the approach of Nebuchadnezzar, counselled Judah to
surrender. This was heresy. It was contrary to the action Isaiah had taken a
century before; it was against the advice of priests and prophets of his own
time, who advised Zedekiah to fight and trust Jahweh to deliver him; and it was
considered most unpatriotic, but Jeremiah believed that this captivity must come
upon the people for their sins, and the sins of their fathers. Jeremiah 28:1-17
shows how acute the struggle was, where one prophet insisted upon one course,
and another on another.

There is no doubt that Jeremiah’s first doctrine of Providence was that of
Deuteronomy. National adversity was national punishment. You will find it
expounded in chapters xiv; and xv. A terrible drought is the result of the
people’s sin, and so are the ravages of war. Jeremiah intercedes for them, but
Jahweh says: ’ Though Moses and Samuel stood before me, yet my mind could not be
towards this people; cast them out of my sight ’ (15). He says he will appoint
the sword to slay them, and dogs to tear them, fowls and beasts to devour and
destroy. Jeremiah does not see that the sins of those then living were bad
enough to draw down all this punishment, so he goes back to the sin of Manasseh
for part of the cause.

Pass now to the time when Jerusalem had been destroyed, and the few Jews that
were left in Judah had taken flight to Egypt, Jeremiah among them, much against
his will. In Egypt the Jews fall into idolatry. Jeremiah rebukes them, and says
it is for idolatry their trouble has come upon them. But how do they answer him?
By the contrary assertion. Their conception of Providence is the same with his,
but they have come to a different conclusion as to the cause of their troubles.
It was when they did worship the Queen of Heaven they were prosperous, they
said, and it was since Deuteronomy was put in force, since Josiah’s reformation,
their calamities had come; Deut. xxviii. had not come true! And Jeremiah himself
had difficulties with the old conception. One difficulty was that Josiah, the
exemplary king, who did right in the sight of Jahweh, the very man who put
Deuteronomy in force, was himself killed in battle, and the reformation failed
to turn away the fierceness of Jahweh’s wrath (2 Kings 23:26). Instead of
getting all the blessings which Deuteronomy promised, Josiah lost his life, and
the national calamity was great; it was a terrible blow to the old conception.
The thinking out of this problem brought Jeremiah the vision of a new time when
things would be different. In that time men would have the law of God written in
their heart, and the individual who should commit the sin would have the
suffering to bear. * In those days, they shall no more say, "The fathers have
eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge " (Jeremiah
31:29-30). But "everyone shall die for his own iniquity; every man that eateth
the sour grapes, his teeth shall be set on edge." ’ Jeremiah found that the old
theory did not square with the facts, and he threw it over. There some of the
Old Testament prophets were far more sensible than many who worship them. They
knew nothing of an inspiration that was a bar to progressive thinking. In
Ezekiel 18:1-32 you have a very full enunciation of this new doctrine. It might
be called the charter of the individual. Man is not to be included in the fate
of the nation, or of his ancestors; he is free to strike a path for himself. The
son of a good father is free to be wicked, and if he be, he must accept the
result of it. His father’s goodness cannot be between him and death; the son of
a wicked father may be good, and if he be, he shall not suffer death through his
father’s sin. Ezekiel would not subscribe to Paul’s doctrine ’ In Adam we all
die,’ and he would have denounced a theology which condemned the race for Adam’s
sin. Further, man is not doomed on the one hand, nor is his salvation guaranteed
on the other, by his own previous life. The good man, if he depart from
goodness, may bring upon himself the death penalty, and the wicked man, if he
leave his sin, shall live. Providence here deals directly with the individual.
In the Decalogue, God is said to announce that He will visit the iniquity of the
fathers upon the children to the third and fourth generation; in Ezekiel, God
says He will do no such thing, but deal with each man according to his own
merits. This doctrine, however, had its difficulties when it faced the facts of
life. The case of Josiah could not be explained by it; nor would Jeremiah’s own
personal experience fit this theory. His whole endeavour was to do good, and he
was cruelly persecuted for it. Here, then, was a case of suffering, not for
wickedness, but for goodness! Jeremiah almost quarrels with Jahweh’s forbearance
towards his enemies ’ Why is my pain perpetual, and my wound incurable?’
(Jeremiah 15:18). ’ Take me not away in thy longsuffering; know that for thy
sake suffer reproach ’ (Jeremiah 15:15). Here he finds in his own experience a
case of suffering for goodness. Ps. Ixxiii. struggles with the problem that the
wicked man prospers and the righteous suffers. Surely washed hands and innocence
are vain things. The only solution the Psalmist offers is that things will be
adjusted in the end; these prosperous wicked men are on slippery places, and
shall one day be cast down to destruction. The problem of Job is: Why does the
righteous suffer? The author has no solution. He puts the theory of Ezekiel into
the mouth of Job’s friends, and they try to make out that Job’s sin accounts for
the calamities. But they preach to him so much about his sin that he feels quite
righteous, and thinks they are sinners for preaching such sermons. The author of
Job is evidently not satisfied with any theory, and he leaves the problem
unsolved, sure only of one thing viz., that the proper atitude for man is to be
humble in the presence of the problem. Jahweh speaks out of the whirlwind, and
Job is in dust and ashes. ’ Providence is a great mystery,’ he seems to say, ’
bow yourselves before it.’ Someone, who took up the book at a later time,
thought that was poor comfort, and he wrote an appendix, in which he describes
Job coming back to greater riches than ever. He would not let the idea go forth
that Providence could let the good man suffer in this way to the end, nor suffer
in this way at all without compensation in kind. Now, neither the new doctrine
of Ezekiel nor the old doctrine of the national unit is a large enough truth,
and we are to-day in possession of a more adequate conception than either. We
must stand for the reality of the individual, and allow no conception of his
relations to obscure the fact that he is a person, with a will, with sufficient
moral freedom to create personal responsibility. We believe that neither
heredity, nor environment, nor his own past is a final sentence of doom on any
man; we hold that the door is open for the most unfortunate and for the worst
into the kingdom of the blest. But it is also true that man is not an
independent unit, and that his life cannot be explained by itself: there are
joys and sorrows, pleasures and pains, abilities and dispositions in it to which
other lives have contributed, and are contributing. There is a solidarity, not
only of the nation, but of mankind, through which the innocent do suffer for the
guilty, and one generation for another. Heredity and environment, though they
are not all, are tremendous factors always to be counted with. It is profoundly
true that the sins of all are laid upon every one, and that every good man who
lives and dies does so for all the world. I believe it was this truth that was
struggling for utterance through the older conceptions of the Decalogue and
Jeremiah.

Now I pass to Isa. liii., where you get a conception different from the two I
have been considering. I do not enter now upon the difficult question as to who
is meant by the Servant of Jahweh. The point for us here is that the Servant was
good, and that he suffered. Here is a fact that cannot be explained by Ezekiel’s
doctrine of every man upon his own merits. The Servant is good: does he, then,
suffer merely as punishment for the sins of others, according to the older
doctrine? This prophet rises above the idea of suffering as punishment to think
of it as remedial and redemptive. The good Servant surfers for the sins of
others, but in order to make them righteous! Suffering here is vicarious, and
creates character; the good suffer for the bad to redeem the bad, so in the
pains of innocent suffering Providence is showing a care for the world. I need
scarcely point out the profound truth and lofty elevation of that conception.
This is, perhaps, the highest peak in the Old Testament revelation. This, too,
is the highest view of the suffering of the good in the New Testament. Jesus
probably regarded His own suffering in this light, and it came to be the view of
others concerning Him, that He died the Just for the unjust to bring us to God
suffered not to satisfy God’s appetite for punishment, but to redeem the sinner
from sin, and win him to goodness. Verily the light of God shines on it. It is
well to see that God gave men such visions of truth to transcend the common
sight. It is true that the theory of external rewards and punishments persisted,
that calamity and misfortune continued to be read as direct judgments and signs
of sin, and that external wealth and prosperity were looked upon as signs of
Divine favour. There were sceptics who denied it, as in Ecclesiastes 8:14, etc.
* There be righteous men unto whom it happeneth according to the work of the
wicked; again, there be wicked men, to whom it happeneth according to the work
of the righteous.’ The old theory will not do. You find the old theory in many
psalms, but it is impossible to read some of them without feeling that at times,
at least, men rose above the general notion. The singer of Psalms 51:1-19
(leaving out the last two verses, probably added by another), which is perhaps
the most marvellous of all psalms, did not ask for outward blessing, for rich
lands or a prosperous city; he only asked to be made what God wanted him to be
true in the inward parts, clean in heart, and right in spirit, so that he might
diligently serve God and men. In this psalm it is not the externally rich man
whom Providence favours most; the greatest favour of God here is the gift of
inward goodness itself. Here again the Old Testament touches the highest points
of New Testament revelation. The old theory of outward rewards and punishments
survived in the New Testament. There is a curious relic of it in Paul, when he
regards some deaths in the Corinthian Church as punishments for misbehaviour at
the Lord’s Supper. The story of Ananias and Sapphira and many others illustrate
the same point. You also meet with the idea of the postponement of rewards and
punishments to the future age, in the New Testament. But that will come up for
treatment in my next lecture. Spite of what I have said, no one can doubt that
there is a vast difference between the conception of Providence which prevails
in the New Testament, and that which prevails in the Old Testament. So great is
it that the saying is quite justified: * The blessing of the Old Testament is
prosperity; the blessing of the New Testament is adversity.’ An old psalmist had
said that he had ’ never seen the righteous forsaken, nor his seed begging bread
’; but the New Testament sees the most righteous of all not only without a place
to lay His head, and often dependent on charity, but at last hanging on the
Cross, and crying: ’My God! my God! Why hast Thou forsaken Me?’ And no
deliverance was granted back into this life. Yet this same New Testament regards
that assertion as only apparent, and rears the great faith that that Person, who
was not rich but poor, not successful in the world but a failure, crowned only
with thorns, was the great Son of God, and the Saviour of men. Calvary, with its
cross of shame, becomes the mount of our highest ascensions, and the altar of
our best thanksgiving. Instead of looking upon a calamity as a sign of Divine
wrath, Paul glories in tribulation, rejoices with a chain upon his wrist, spends
and is spent, ’ his joy to do the Master’s will,’ and he finds the reward in the
doing. Whatever may be God’s method of adjusting character to circumstances, let
us be quite sure at present that what the world calls success is not the proof
of God’s favour, as we are so often told in the Old Testament, and whatever may
or may not be true of external rewards or punishments, certain it is that the
greatest reward of goodness is goodness, and the severest penalty of sin is
sinfulness. When I ask’ the young to pledge themselves to high standards of
goodness, to take the vow of conscience, I cannot guarantee them worldly success
for such devotion. Whether or not they will ’get on’ depends much on the kind of
society in which they live. Success only demands average morality. If a man
falls below that he is put in prison; if he rises much above it he may be driven
to the Cross. We cannot promise blessing in the basket and in the store for
devotion to Christ; for devotion to Christ you may be rewarded as Christ was,
with derision, and persecution, and death. Even then you secure the one eternal
success the success of the soul itself. Is there a legitimate demand for more
than this? I believe there is. Read at its depths, perhaps the persistent
expectation of reward on the part of good men is but a demand that the world
should be good enough to recognise goodness. It is true that goodness is to be
its own reward, but if the individual good man suffers unjustly, we demand the
adjustment of circumstances to character, and this at bottom is only the demand
that all other men shall be good, so as not to inflict unjust suffering. We
cannot be content with being good ourselves; we must desire the universal
victory of the good. The fact is, we are quite content with ’the wages on going
on ’ ourselves; we claim that the world shall come on too. This, however, is a
moral and spiritual process, and we believe God is engaged in it. We believe in
a Providence which enables us to hold on to goodness in spite of adversity, but
which is also at work every moment on that mighty task of God, ’the restitution
of all things.’ Purified from crude forms, there is a legitimate demand, not
only for heaven in the heart, but for a heavenly world in which that heart shall
be for ever at rest.


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  CHAPTER 4: 04 - CHAPTER 04
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’THE CONCEPTIONS OF A FUTURE LIFE IN THE BIBLE.

IF a religious man of to-day, who believes that at death men are either doomed
at once to eternal torture as a punishment for sin, or translated as saved men
to a heaven of happiness, were to search for this belief in the Bible, one of
his surprises would be that he could not find it in the Old Testament. To
general Hebrew thought the only future life is life on earth; there is no
heaven, and in hell there is no life in any full and proper sense. In the older
thought, also, and for the most part throughout the Old Testament, this future
life on earth is secured for the nation, not for individuals. This is the
general statement; how it must be modified we shall see as we go on. To Hebrew
thought death was a descent into the Underworld, called Sheol. If you use the
revised version you will find this word in the margin, where the English
translation may use ’ hell ’ or ’ grave.’ Pfleiderer suggests that they
conceived of the other world as under this one from seeing the sun apparently
going down, or from the fact that the dead body was put down in the earth. Now,
the first thing to remember about this Sheol is that it was the place to which
all mortals went alike, irrespective of character; it was not a place of rewards
and punishments. There was a sort of existence there, but not proper life; the
dead in Sheol were ’ shades ’ had a kind of shadowy, unsubstantial life. There
speech was a whisper or sort of echo; they had no real interest in life; they
were cut off from God and men. A psalmist (Psalms 88:10) is eager to get his
prayer answered during his lifetime, because there is no revelation from God,
nor any human praise of God possible after death. ’ Wilt thou show wonders to
the dead? Shall the shades that are deceased arise and praise thee? Shall thy
wonders be known in the dark, and thy righteousness in the land of
forgetfulness?’ To die was to go into the dark and into the land of
forgetfulness. Psalms 6:5 says, ’ In death there is no remembrance of thee: in
Sheol, who shall give thee thanks?’ Psalms 30:9 says, ’ What profit is there in
my blood when I go down to the pit? Shall the dust praise thee?’ < The dead
praise not the Lord, neither any that go down into silence ’ (Psalms 115:17).
And into this silence the good men went as well as the bad. That is why these
good men express themselves so eager to praise God while life lasts, because
they know there is no chance after death. Here are parts of the teaching of the
Bible which no Christian believes to be true. He may say that the whole Bible is
infallible, but he does not believe it. The Bible itself, in other parts, has
made it impossible for him to believe these parts. There is no doubt that the
conception of Sheol, which I have described, was the prevailing belief. It is
brought out very vividly in the Song of Hezekiah (Isaiah 38:10-20). Hezekiah is
sick unto death. What is death according to this song? It is a going unto Sheol,
where he shall not see the Lord, nor shall he see man. According to the margin
of the Revised Version he will be among ’ those who have ceased to be ’; he will
be ’ cut off from the loom ’; God will ’ make an end ’ of him. He prays to
recover, so that he may praise the Lord. ’ For the grave cannot praise Thee,
death cannot celebrate Thee; they that go down into the pit cannot hope for Thy
truth. The living, the living, he shall praise Thee, as I do this day; the
father to the children shall make known Thy truth.’ Here you have an Old
Testament saint, of whom it is said that he did that which was right in the eyes
of the Lord, one who was a great religious reformer, facing death without hope!
He knows that death even for him is a hopeless pit! I think we all see that the
Bible itself enables us to put aside this part of the Bible as untrue, and how
thankful we ought to be that we are not obliged to believe it. Sheol is never
spoken of as a place of hope; there was no happiness in it even for the best
man.

Neither was it a place of active torment for the bad. In the general conception
it was a colourless existence in which those who had been good could not be
distinguished from those who had been wicked. We must, however, notice two
passages which do make some approach to the idea of a place of punishment,
though the idea is not properly and fully reached.

One is a very remarkable funeral dirge over Egypt and her multitude, sung by
Ezekiel (xxxii. 18 et seq.). He speaks of ’ Sheol ’ and the ’ pit.’ The pit is
probably regarded as the same with Sheol, or possibly as the entrance to it.
Ezekiel pictures the great nations which had been a terror on the earth lying in
Sheol, slain by the sword. One great grave is in the middle, perhaps for the
King, and the graves for the people all round the sides. Here the whole nation
is conceived as continuing some sort of existence, a shade existence in the
Underworld. It is evident that Ezekiel does not wish to represent Sheol as a
place of real life, for he constantly contrasts it with ’ the land of the
living.’ At the same time he does represent the people in jt as having some
emotion. The nations in Sheol are said to ’ have borne their shame ’; of some it
is said that their 1 iniquities are upon their bones. 5 These statements,
however, ma^ only mean that in being themselves killed by the sword these old
warriors bore their shame; the very helplessness in which they now lie is their
own iniquity upon their bones. These statements do not necessarily mean that
they are tormented by the memory of their past life. In verse 30 there is a
different statement, which says that the princes of the north ’ are ashamed ’;
but these words are omitted in the Septuagint, and it is therefore doubtful
whether they were in the original of Ezekiel. However, there are here two notes
of indisputable emotion in Sheol. When Pharaoh goes down some of the mighty dead
speak to him out of the midst of Sheol. It is implied that they know him, and,
perhaps, are not sorry that at last he, too, has been broken, and it is
definitely stated that Pharaoh would be ’ comforted ’ in seeing all the other
mighty nations there. This was the only ’ comfort ’ that he could find in hell
that a good many others were there, too. You see that Ezekiel’s hell is not
truly a place of torment; it is a hell without any fire, very different from the
hell we were taught to think of when we were young. Yet it is easy to detect in
this passage the germ of the idea of a place of torment the fire will be kindled
by-and-by. In Isaiah 14:9-12 there is a nearer approach to it. The oppressor of
Babylon goes down to Sheol, and those already there greet his entrance. ’Sheol
from beneath is moved for thee to meet thee at thy coming: it stirreth up the
shades for thee, even all the chief ones of the earth; it hath raised up from
their thrones all the kings of the nations. All they shall answer and say unto
thee, " Art thou also become weak as we? Art thou become like unto us? Thy pomp
is brought down to Sheol, and the noise of thy viols: the worm is spread under
thee, and worms cover thee. How art thou fallen from heaven, O day star, son of
the morning! How art thou cut down to the ground, which didst lay low the
nations!" ’ Here undoubtedly is depicted conscious life in Sheol. Memory is
active; it is not here 1 the land of forgetfulness,’ and there is a kind of
malicious satisfaction among the shades, and they at least seek to torment the
King of Babylon. Whether he felt it or not we are not told. This is the nearest
approach to the conception of a place of torment in the Old Testament, and it
is, as you see, still very far removed from our traditional conception of hell.
It is pretty certain, too, that even this conception came late. Scholars do not
attribute the passage to Isaiah, but to the period of the Exile, or later, when
the King of Babylon was a prominent object of thought to Hebrew prophets. The
general conception of Sheol, however, remains as a sort of negative existence,
with no semblance of joy and no real active pain, and with no separation between
good and bad. It was into this underworld all men went at death. The idea of
Sheol does contain the idea that death was not the absolute end of man, though
it was the end of all real purpose and effectiveness in life. This world was to
be the scene of all active principles, human and Divine. God would punish the
sinner, and reward the good, in this life. So the blessings and the curses all
through the Pentateuch are due here; not one falls on the other side of the
grave. Dying was not going to meet the Judge; living was meeting the Judge. The
greatest sign of Divine favour is long life, and the greatest deliverance is not
to be given over unto death. The only way in which death and Sheol were regarded
as penalties and used as motives for right action was through the reminder that
at death all action would cease, that in Sheol there would be no communion with
men or with God. Nor was there in the general conception any hope of deliverance
from Sheol, any hope of resurrection. The common thought is put in such words as
these: ’ As the cloud is consumed and vanisheth away, so he that goeth down to
Sheol shall come up no more ’ (Job 7:9). ’ There is hope of a tree, if it be cut
down, that it will sprout again... but man dieth and wasteth away; yea, man
giveth up the ghost, and where is he?’ (Job 14:7-10). Death is a fact, but there
is no resurrection. The gloom of this conception, however, was broken by
flashes, sometimes of hope, sometimes of positive faith. When the author of Job
makes his hero ask, c If a man die, shall he live again? J his answer is
negative. No; God changes his countenance, and sends him away. His sons come to
honour in life, but the father shall not know it. But this author, while he says
it is so, wishes it were not so. ’ Oh that thou wouldest hide me in Sheol; that
thou wouldest keep me secret until thy wrath be past; that thou wouldest appoint
me a set time, and remember me.’ It is in the longings of the heart and in the
felt needs of life that great ideas have often been born. And here you have in
the form of a desire the germ of the conception of an intermediate state, a set
time, and then deliverance.

It is very unfortunate that the text of the famous passage in Job 19:25-27, ’ I
know that my Redeemer liveth,’ etc., is so uncertain. What the genuine Hebrew
text here is no one feels quite certain. I am not speaking of those words, so
sacred to us all, as they have become charged with Christian meaning. Like many
other Old Testament words they have come to mean for us what they could not have
meant to their original author, because we read them in a light which had not
shone upon him. I am only concerned here with the historical meaning. In the
face of an uncertain text we cannot be dogmatic about it. But probably this
reading would give the meaning best, * I know that my vindicator liveth. You ’
as if Job said to his friends ’ are blaming and charging me with sin; but I know
that he who vindicates me is alive, and that he shall stand at last upon the
dust; and after my skin hath been destroyed, yet without my flesh shall 1 see
God, whom I shall see on my side.’ There is no probability that the words refer
to any belief in a resurrection of the body, but contain a grand assertion that
a clearer vision of God may be granted to a man after death. If this thought is
really in these words, then, though the vision of God is only as the vindicator
of Job, yet you have here the germ of a conception that may bring all heaven in
its train the conception, viz., of a vision of God and of right after death.
Here the author of Job by a flight of faith rises above what he himself has said
of Sheol, and contradicts it. It often happens, thank God, when an earnest mind
struggles hard with a problem, that in a moment of rare insight it catches the
light resting on the gleaming peaks of truth far away, and takes wing for the
heights.

There are other evidences in the old literature of the triumph of spiritual
imagination over the gloom of common thought. There was a story that Enoch had
gone to God, not to Sheol; gone up, not down; and that Elijah had passed in a
whirlwind to heaven. It is quite possible that these are relics of the old
primitive belief that heroes were promoted to places among the gods. But, all
the same, they enshrine the thought that extraordinary character was a mightier
thing than death. It is true that necromancers were believed to have the power
to call back the spirits of the departed, and necromancy at one time was very
common. You all remember the story of the witch of Endor. The prophets fought
against this practice; they did not dispute that the thing could be done, but
denounced it as wicked. Even necromancy, however, shows how the ancient mind
kept interfering with the absoluteness of death.

Elisha was believed to have actually waked the dead. Apart altogether from the
historicity or otherwise of the tale, it embodies the idea of a resurrection,
not in an immortal body, and not to immortality, but back to temporary life in
this world. Here is Divine power in the prophet interfering with the reign of
death. Ezekiel’s vision of the re-animation of the dry bones in the valley does
not, I think, count in this discussion, as it is an allegory of national
revival, not an announcement of the literal resurrection of dead individuals.
Nor must we count the words of Hosea 13:14 as evidence: ’ I will ransom them
from the hand of Sheol, I will redeem them from death.’ Paul quotes these words
as meaning resurrection. We can use them in that sense. But Hosea was not in
sight of that conception. He meant that, in spite of the terrible danger which
threatened the nation, and in spite of there being no King to save it, and that
Sheol was putting forth its hand to take it, Jahweh himself would effect its
deliverance. The closing words of Ps. xvi. have uncertain meaning. Wellhausen
translates thus: ’ Therefore glad is my heart, and my honour rejoices. My body
also shall abide in peace, for Thou dost not commit me to Sheol, nor sufferest
Thy faithful ones to see the pit.’ According to this, it is the nation that
speaks, and it is national safety in this life that is asserted. Psalms 17:15 he
translates thus: I, who am righteous, shall look on Thy face, and be refreshed,
at Thy awaking, with a vision of Thee.’ The Psalmist is praying for the
destruction of the wicked, and declares that when God awakes to do it he will be
refreshed with the vision.

There is a remarkable passage in Psalms 49:13-20. The argument is that death is
the great leveller of earthly inequalities. The rich cannot take his riches with
him, nor enjoy happiness after death. However rich or popular, he must follow
his fathers where there is no light, and die like the beasts that perish; his
very form will decay in Sheol. ’ But,’ says the Psalmist, ’ God will redeem my
soul from the hand of Sheol, for He shall receive me.’ Wellhausen translates
this: ’ God alone can redeem my life from the hand of Sheol when it seizes me,’
and, according to him, the man who is redeemed is not yet in Sheol, and is
preserved by God from it i.e., from sudden evil death. The wellknown verse in
Psalms 73:24, ’ Thou shalt guide me with Thy counsel, and afterwards receive me
to glory,’ reads in Wellhausen’s translation: ’ Thou leadest me according to Thy
counsel, and takest me by the hand after Thee,’ and it is a declaration as to
the present life. The Psalmist’s conviction is sure and strong that his life is
one of communion with God, and one proof of that he finds in the fact that those
who break faith are suddenly put to death, which is their destruction. The
conclusion here is that there is not in all the psalms one absolute expression
of faith either in immortality or resurrection. And the psalms were the
hymn-books of the Church. This shows that that faith, so important to us, had
not then become the faith of pious people. We have now to consider one more
passage Isaiah 26:19 : ’Thy dead shall live, my dead bodies shall arise. Awake
and sing, ye that dwell in the dust, for thy dew is as the dew of herbs (light),
and the earth shall cast forth the shades.’ Some have held that this is
figurative language to denote the revival of a nation as good as dead, like that
in Ezekiel’s vision of dry bones. I cannot accept that opinion. The prophet’s
faith under the pressure of calamity sees the better day coming, and then thinks
how sad it is that those who had believed in it and worked for it should not see
it, and his faith refuses to be checked by the thought of death. It bursts the
bonds of common opinion, and says: ’ Thy dead shall live.’ Here is, as I think,
a declaration of a resurrection, a resurrection for Israelites only, and for a
future life on earth. This belongs to a group of chapters which are not regarded
as Isaiah’s work, and whose date is uncertain, but which were probably written
during the captivity in Babylon. The words, however, were one of those wonderful
flashes of faith which do not represent any common doctrine.

There is no reason to believe that there was in Israel any doctrine of future
states of happiness and misery up to the second century B.C. No doubt some minds
had cast curious glances across the gulf. National immortality on earth had long
been believed, but when the doctrine of individualism arose national immortality
was not enough. The individual, once keenly conscious of himself, would wonder
what was to become of him. So Job longed to be hid in Sheol for a set time, as
we saw. And, no doubt, there were some who came to believe that somehow or other
they would triumph over death. But there was no doctrine of it, so far as we
know, before the second century B.C. This is very remarkable. Many other nations
believed in immortality. There was, e.g., a definite doctrine of a double future
state in ancient Egypt. Why did it not appear among the Jews earlier than it
did? This may have been due to their religious optimism, their intense
realization of God’s presence in this life, of His control of all things; their
confidence that even here justice would be done, and that they would be lifted
into supremacy over all nations, prevented them from speculating about another
life. But the recurrence of disappointments, the fact of inexplicable trouble,
the rise of the doctrine of individualism, and possibly the influence of the
thought of the nation forced them at last to believe that when the Golden Age
came the old saints who had hoped for it should come back and see it. The review
of the past led the writer of Ecclesiastes straight into scepticism. ’ Who
knoweth,’ he says (Ecclesiastes 3:21), ’ the spirit of man whether it goeth
upward, and the spirit of the beast whether it goeth downward?’ He did not
believe this, but declared that the same fate befell man and beast. If the same
writer was also the author of the words which occur later in the book, ’ The
spirit returns unto God who gave it,’ he may have been only thinking of the
Greek idea of re-absorption in Deity, and not of personal life with God. Anyway,
in a part of the book he flatly denies immortality. But that means that there
were some who believed it. The first Jewish book we know of which distinctly
declares for immortality is the Book of Wisdom, which belonged to the second
century B.C. There it is said (chap, 2) that the souls of the righteous after
death were in the hands of God, that, though they seemed to die, they had in
truth entered into peace, and their hope was full of immortality. God had proved
them, found them worthy, and now rewarded them. You see this is quite different
from the old doctrine of Sheol. And, with this changed view of the future, his
view of the present is changed. The great thing now is not to live long, but to
live well; in fact, an early death may be a token of Divine favour. God may take
a man away from the wicked world early because he pleases Him. To this writer
all the problems of life will be solved, and all its wrongs righted, in the life
beyond the grave. To this same century belongs the Book of Daniel, and this is
the only book in the Old Testament which holds a distinct formulated faith in a
real existence after death, and in a resurrection from the dead. ’ Many of them
that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and
some to shame and everlasting contempt.’ In the Book of Wisdom there is no
resurrection of the body; it is only the soul’s immortality that is emphasized.
In Daniel there is a resurrection, but, mark, it is a resurrection of
Israelites, not of all men Israelites good and bad, and it is to a renewed
existence on this earth that they come back. If you come down well into the
first century B.C., 63-45, you have a book called the Psalms of Solomon, in
which immortality and resurrection are explicit and indisputable doctrines. When
we come to the New Testament we find the doctrine of a future existence, in
which there are rewards for goodness and punishments for badness accepted. And
in this was included the doctrine of the resurrection of the bodies at least, of
believers. The Sadduces, however, denied this, but the Pharisees believed it,
When we seek to discover the ideas of the New Testament concerning the future we
shall soon find their variety and mixture. To set them out with any adequacy is
a task which I cannot possibly attempt now. It involves a vast amount of work on
the New Testament documents which must be done with great care, and by the help
of the best scholarship. Let me, however, indicate some points. The first, and
perhaps the most crucial, difficulty rises upon the question, What view of the
future did Jesus Himself take? The answer largely depends upon how we answer
another question: What did Jesus mean by the kingdom of God? You find two
conceptions attributed to Him. By one set of passages He means an external
establishment which He Himself is going to set up on the earth. The kingdom is
future, and He says that that generation should not pass away without seeing it.
This is the old national idea of a Messianic kingdom slightly transformed; the
difference is that the subjects are not Jews, but disciples of Jesus. We know
that Jesus did not come back within the time mentioned, and we know that that
kingdom in which the twelve Apostles were to sit on twelve thrones judging the
twelve tribes of Israel was not established at all. By another set of passages
it could be shown that by the ’ kingdom Jesus did not mean the external
establishment at all, but the reign of God in the souls of men, and the
fellowship of such men. He who is reported to have said that they should see the
Son of man coming in His kingdom is also reported as saying: * The kingdom of
God cometh not with observation;’ they were not to believe when men said: ’ Lo,
Christ is here;’ or, ’ Christ is there.’ To men expecting the kingdorii in the
future, He says: ’ The kingdom of God is in you,’ or, ’ in your midst.’ Many of
the parables are hi line with these latter passages, and show us Jesus teaching
that the kingdom of God is a Divine principle of life in man, through which God
comes to reign in his soul. It comes by no catastrophe, but grows like a seed,
or permeates like leaven. Now it is impossible to deny that these are very
different conceptions. Could Jesus hold both? Some maintain that the more
spiritual view came later than His day, under the influence of His spirit. That
I cannot believe. It seems to be certain that the high spiritual view of the
kingdom in the soul was the view of Jesus. Then what of the other view? Some
attribute all this to the Jewish biographers; they, unable to grasp the
spiritual conception of Jesus in its fulness, mixed it up with their own
traditional ideas, which they also attributed to Him. I have no doubt that part
of the explanation lies here. Every historian puts some colour of his own upon
the history. This was especially the case in ancient times, and that the sayings
of Jesus, as reported, are more strongly Jewish than they were in fact is
probable enough. But there is a third view, which I think the soundest viz.,
that Jesus did give some expression to the traditional Jewish faith in which He
grew up, but that His own contribution was the spiritual view; the kingdom was
in the soul. Now the future which Jesus promised in connection with the
traditional view did not come no such kingdom was established. In connection
with the other view, Jesus gave no details as to what the future life was to be.
He made no direct addition to the doctrine of immortality, and He said very
little about it, but he made the most overwhelming contribution of history to
the faith in immortality. He made men feel that God was so good and man so
great, and the union between them so strong, that believers in Him could not but
believe in a future life. The inherent potency of the soul itself calls for
eternal growth. Jesus magnified man so much that one world could not contain
him. His great emphasis was on the present, but it was such a present that a
future must be found for it. If it be asked what Jesus taught about the future
of the wicked, that again is a question beset with difficulties. It seems to me
impossible to avoid the conclusion that He did sometimes teach their
destruction. At other times, He so portrayed God as to encourage the hope that
sometime, somewhere in the vast wilderness of being, there should not be one
lost sheep. I have no time now to analyze the Book of Revelation. If you read
Ezekiel and Daniel, and the parables of Enoch, you will find its sources. A
Christian writer fitted old Jewish visions into a sort of Christian framework to
encourage believers in Jesus at a great political crisis, and, in the old Jewish
spirit, he consigned the unbelievers to the lake of fire. The future he
describes was to be a future on earth; the New Jerusalem came down, and God
dwelt with His people on the earth; they did not go up to live with Him. The
book teaches us nothing about the end of the world, and to consult it for dates
of final catastrophes and information about the future state, in Mr. Baxter’s
fashion, is mere unhistorical fantasy.

Paul’s views of the future life changed and varied a good deal. In Thessalonians
he looks for the speedy Second Advent of Christ to establish His kingdom, to put
an end to the present order by force, and kill all the wicked. He believed that
would happen before he died; that when it did, the believers who were dead
should arise, and he and others, who would be still alive, should go up to meet
the Lord in the air. This, we know, did not come to pass.

Paul rose to higher views of the future than these, but I have no time to
describe them, except to quote what is, perhaps, the most inspiring vision in
the New Testament that in which he sees the last enemy of man conquered, and
even Christ’s kingdom is delivered up to the Universal Father, and God becomes
all in all. If it be asked what is the final verdict of the New Testament on the
question whether man’s destiny is sealed at death, or whether there is hope
after death, I can only say that no conclusive answer can be given. In most
places which could be quoted, destiny is fixed at death; a man is then either
saved or lost for ever. But there may be another belief in the story of Jesus
going down to Hades to preach to the spirits in prison, and there is in many
passages a magnificent faith that a God of love is going to have His own way in
a universal victory, which must almost mean that badness cannot be eternal, nor
evil ultimate. The fact is that the New Testament does not settle the question.
The men who wrote in it had different ideas; the same man had different ideas at
different times. The New Testament leaves us with the sacred burden of life on
our hands; it calls upon us to live to live at our best. It does not draw out
for us the detailed programme of the future, but it assures us that this is life
eternal, to know God and Jesus Christ, whom He sent. It is for us to give our
present to God; it is for God to assure our future to us. The great function of
the New Testament is to inspire life upon the loftiest principles, to guarantee
help from the eternal sources, to kindle within us the consciousness of the
Divine presence, and to set all natural virtue aflame with a sense of God.


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  CHAPTER 5: 05 - CHAPTER 05
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’THE IDEA OF A DEVIL.

ANYONE who has not given attention to the subject Jr\. would probably be
surprised at what he would find if he turned up the two words, ’ Satan ’ and ’
The devil,’ in a good concordance, say Dr. Young’s. The surprise would be that
it is in the New Testament they figure. In the Old Testament the title The devil
’ does not occur once, and the word in the plural, ’ devils,’ only four times.
In the English Bible (Authorized Version) the word ’ Satan ’ is only found in
four places in i Chron. xxi., in Psalms 109:6, in Zech. iii., and in the
Prologue of Job. In the Hebrew Bible the word ’ Satan ’ occurs in a few passages
where the English Bible reads ’ adversary,’ but there the meaning is simply an ’
opposer ’ e.g., the angel of the Lord stood in Balaam’s way as an adversary, as
a Satan (Numbers 22:22). The Philistines object to take David with them into
battle, lest in battle he should become an adversary, a Satan (1 Samuel 29:4).
It was best to translate the word into adversary in those places, because there
is no reference there to a special being or person known as Satan. In Psalms
109:6, also, we ought to read * adversary ’ for the same reason, and this
correction is made in the Revised Version. That leaves us with only three
references to Satan in the Old Testament, and these three, I take it, are after
the exile in Babylon. Zechariah is post-exilic; Chronicles is also post-exilic;’
the date of the Prologue of Job may be more debatable, but the point is not
vital. It is a notable fact, and one whose significance we must try to
understand, that the idea of a devil, in, the sense of an arch-enemy of God and
man, as head of a host of evil spirits, does not appear in any Hebrew literature
which we can surely date before the captivity of Babylon, nor is it well
developed in any Old Testament passage even after that date.

It may be well here, perhaps, to step a little out of our path to point out that
the story of the serpent in Eden tempting Eve is not at all the same with the
later idea of the devil. There is no suggestion in the Genesis story that the
serpent is some other being in disguise; it is merely an intelligent and talking
serpent. It is a remarkable fact, too, that the incident is nowhere referred to
in the Old Testament. It was a long, long time before the people began to think
that the serpent was the devil in disguise; the writer of the story had no such
notion. Centuries after his time, when the belief in a devil had arisen, it came
to be believed that if sin had come into the world through the seductions of a
serpent, that serpent must have been the devil in disguise. But this theory is
not to be found at all in the Old Testament. In all their teachings about sin
the prophets never refer to it, which is certainly a fact of great importance.
The author of the apocryphal Book of Wisdom (second century B.C.) says: ’ God
created man to be immortal, and made him to be an image of his own eternity.
Nevertheless, through envy of the devil came death into the world’ (Wis
2:23-24). This looks like an allusion to the Genesis story, though it is not
quite definite. If it is an allusion, it is the earliest we know of. In the
Genesis story, then, you have no idea of the Satan; but you have soon after the
consciousness that something has gone wrong, that there has been opposition to
God, and that is the consciousness, as we shall see, out of which the idea of a
devil arose later.

It does not belong to my subject now to discuss the serpent story itself, but
the difficulties which any modern mind may feel in it, when it finds
intelligence and speech attributed to a serpent, vanish when the modern mind
makes the acquaintance of the ancient mind. Professor Robertson Smith says that
the kinship of gods and men, in antique religion, is only one part of the larger
kinship of these with the lower creation. There was no difficulty at that stage
in ascribing living powers and personality to a stone, a tree, or an animal. In
old Babylonian legend, beasts as well as men were formed of earth mingled with
the blood of a god. In Greek stories men spring from trees or rocks, and races
have a tree for a mother and a god for a father. These things, Robertson Smith
says, are often explained as allegories by those who forget that primitive
thought treats all nature as a kindred unity; a speaking, intelligent animal was
no difficulty to that mind. We are told further that the snake is an object of
superstition in all countries, and endowed with a supernatural character. Men
everywhere had a peculiar horror of it; when wild beasts had been driven into
the desert, the snake came creeping about the dwelling, and continued to molest
men, and the snake was the last animal to be deprived of its supernatural
character. When it is known that such ideas were general, the Genesis story
falls into its proper place, and we see that intelligent men to-day, in order to
be religious, do not need to believe that a serpent knew the mind of God and
persuaded men to sin. It is a striking fact that the Persians had a very similar
story. God had promised men, they believed, endless happiness if they would be
good, but the devil disguised himself as a serpent and tempted them to sin. The
difference, you observe, between the Persian story and the Genesis story is that
in the former the serpent is avowed to be the devil in disguise. In the thought
of Israel before the exile there were, of course, * spirits ’ and ’ evil spirits
’ too. But, mark you, ’ evil ’ does not there mean apostasy from God, for the
evil spirits themselves were the servants of God. Thus, in Judges 9:23 we read
that ’God sent an evil spirit between Abimelech and the men of Shechem, and the
men of Shechem dealt treacherously with Abimelech.’ Now, treachery to us is
wicked; but it was not wicked then if it brought about the desired result. The
spirit that made the men of Shechem treacherous was sent by God for that
purpose, and it was called an evil spirit, not in the sense of ’ bad ’ or
’wicked,’ but in the sense of one who brought calamity from God.

Again, we read in 1 Samuel 16:14; ’ The spirit of the Lord had departed from
Saul, and an evil spirit from God troubled him.’ Saul suffered from mental
disorder, and this calamity is regarded as the work of a spirit sent by God. The
evil spirits dwell in God’s presence. The fullest description of the heavenly
court is in 1 Kings 22:18-23. Ahab and Jehoshaphat want to know whether they
shall go to battle to Ramoth Gilead. Micaiah, the prophet, is consulted, and he
says to Ahab: ’ Hear thou the word of the Lord: I saw the Lord sitting on His
throne, and all the host of heaven standing by Him on His right hand and on His
left. And the Lord said, Who shall deceive Ahab that he may go up and fall at
Ramoth Gilead? And one said on this manner; and another said on that manner. And
there came forth the spirit, and stood before the Lord, and said, I will entice
him. And the Lord said unto him, Wherewith? And he said, I will go forth, and I
will be a lying spirit in the mouth of all his prophets. And He (the Lord) said,
Thou shalt entice him, and shalt prevail also; go forth and do so. Now,
therefore, behold, the Lord hath put a lying spirit in the mouth of all these
prophets; and the Lord hath spoken evil concerning thee.’ If I were now
discussing the conception of God I might say that not one of us could believe in
the God of this passage the God who proposed and deliberately arranged to make a
large number of prophets tell a lie in order to entice Ahab to his ruin. Those
who say they believe the whole Bible do not consider what they say. But the
point of the passage for our discussion now is that the evil spirit is a member
of the Lord’s Court, and one of His servants to execute His purpose, not the
devil, the enemy of God, as conceived later. All the spirits were subordinate to
Jahweh. When you come to the prophets of the eighth century B.C. you find no
doctrine of a supreme evil spirit. Israel knew calamity and wrong, but insisted,
nevertheless, that the empire of the world was not divided. When Isaiah says, ’
The princes of Zoan are become fools, the princes of Noph are deceived; they
have caused Egypt to go astray,’ how does he account for this? Not by any idea
of a devil, or tempter, but * the Lord hath mingled a spirit of perverseness in
the midst of her.’ The prophet of the exile pleads against the notion of two
ruling powers, against dualism, and expresses the climax of the faith of the
period when he says: " I form the light and create darkness; I make peace and
create evil; I am the Lord that doeth all these things ’ (Isaiah 45:7). Here, in
Babylon, during the captivity, the strong monotheistic trend of Jewish faith
reaches its highest utterance. Up to this time God Himself is the author of
fortune and misfortune; He gives health and He sends disease.

Now, we must note the fact that soon after this there appears in Israel the
figure of the Satan. I take Job to be post-exilic at least, the prologue. And in
the prologue Satan is a prominent figure. If, however, a pre-exilic date is
claimed for Job, it would not much modify the foregoing statement, because the
Satan of Job is still a member of God’s court, and appears in the company of the
sons of God. His distinction among them seems to be that he is a great tourist.
Each time when he is asked whence he has come he replies: * From going to and
fro in the earth, and walking up and down in it.’ He wants to put Job to the
test, and upon presenting the case to God he receives a commission to do so. It
is God who gives Job into Satan’s power, and (Job 2:3) God identifies Himself as
the Author of the calamities which Satan was said to have inflicted on Job. Job
is still good, * although thou movedst Me to destroy him without cause,’ said
God. This, as you see, is not at all the devil of our traditional theology; he
is still a servant of God. God and Satan are working together with a perfect
understanding, and Satan does nothing but what God definitely agrees that he
shall do. We do feel, however, that he distrusts Job too easily, and that he is
too eager to put him to the test of affliction. Here, perhaps, is the seed,
though a small one, of the later conception of an arch enemy. In Zechariah
3:1-10, whose date is about 520 B.C., the figure of Satan appears against
Joshua, the high-priest. Joshua is the representative of the people who are home
in their own land, but in evil fortune, a brand plucked from the burning; and
now the Satan definitely appears as an adversary, and the Lord rebukes him. It
is not said that he is a member of the heavenly court now; his only character is
adversary, and as such God rebukes him. You see the conception has developed
since Job, though the immediate withdrawal of Satan from further mention still
leaves him far from the later conception.

More than two centuries after this, in i Chron. xxi., you find a deed attributed
to Satan which, a few centuries before, had been attributed to God. David had
taken a census, and that came to be regarded as a sin. According to 2 Sam. xxiv.
it was God Himself in His anger who had moved David to commit this sin, and
afterwards punished him for doing it; but, according to 1 Chronicles 21:1-30, it
was Satan that moved David to do it. The explanation is that when the Book of
Samuel- was written there was no Satan. God made light and darkness, created
peace and evil; but by the time Chronicles was written Satan had arrived, and
the sin of David, formerly attributed to God, was transferred to him. After
this, Satan does not appear in the Old Testament. So far as the Old Testament is
concerned the charge-list against Satan is very light. He has put Job to the
test, appeared once for a moment as the adversary of Joshua, and tempted David
to take a census. Surely the most severe tribunal would admit that this is a
comparatively inactive and harmless devil. In other Jewish literature, however,
which lies between our Old Testament and New Testament, Satan assumes a much
greater significance. In the Book of Wisdom, as I pointed out, he is the author
of death. In the Book of Enoch he is the head of a great army of evil spirits,
acting in direct and avowed antagonism to the good. In Tobit, under the name of
Asmodeus, he opposes Raphael the angel. How can we account for this development
of thought in Israel? How did those people who repudiated dualism come to
believe in Satan, an apostate from God, with an army of wicked spirits fighting
against God?

There must be significance in the fact that the belief arose after the captivity
in Babylon, and was elaborately developed after the people of Israel made the
acquaintance of the Persians. In old Persian religion there was a battle from
the beginning between the good God and the wicked spirit. For thousands of years
the wicked spirit was in the ascendant, but a great prophet was born to break
his power, and ultimately to overthrow him. That is the Persian counterpart to
the Christian faith, that Jesus came to undo the works of the devil. It is very
interesting and encouraging also to find that in Persia, where the belief in the
devil was so definite, and where the power and dominion of the devil was
supposed to be so great, evil was not to be ultimately triumphant; God would
conquer at last. That was the old Persian faith. Did Israel learn their
Satanology from Persia? They went to Babylon without it; they had some of it
soon after the exile, and developed it later. That other nations influenced the
development of Jewish thought there can be no doubt. One nation cannot have
intercourse with another without influencing and being influenced. Jewish
Satanology, however, though probably influenced by Persian beliefs, need not be
considered a Persian product. George Meredith, somewhere, says that if a man is
in the habit of regarding himself as a favourite child of Providence he will
require some day to believe in a devil. He means, of course, that some things
will happen to him which he cannot ascribe to a favouring of Providence. So to
Israel, long accustomed to believe itself the favourite child of God,
intensified trouble, persistence of disappointment, and blighted hope might well
produce the idea of some great oppressor, some adversary working against them.
The exile in Babylon had been a great disappointment, and made impossible the
Deuteronomic regulations for worship at one sanctuary. The Jews saw their cultus
fall to pieces, and the few who returned from exile saw no fulfilment of the
glowing promises the prophets had made to them. Instead of returning into
dominion and supremacy, and receiving the merchandize of Ethiopia and the labour
of Egypt, their land, within fifty years, was a Persian province. This might
well give them the sense of a great adversary acting against them. This is the
sense that is reflected in the vision of Zechariah 3:1-10.

Again, there is another fact to be considered. The prophets, as we have shown
before, had discovered the moral character of God His righteousness and purity.
As this deepened its hold upon the people, and as the consciousness of sin
became more acute, the notion of God as author of sin became more and more
impossible. Surely there must be a devil who was the source of it all. So, I
think, the idea arose, and under Persian and other influences it grew to its
later proportions. It is necessary to remember, however, that Israel did not
relinquish the supremacy of God. The devil was at best only partly independent,
and to be at last surely subdued.

Now it is the Satan ology and demonology of the Book of Enoch that we meet with
in the New Testament. Here it is a kingdom of evil spirits with a chief,
sometimes called by the Hebrew name Satan; sometimes by the Greek word ’
Diabolos,’ devil or adversary; and sometimes ’ Beelzebub.’

He can tempt to sin; he can inflict bodily disease; he is the enemy of truth;
his legions enter into men, and once even into swine; he is the ’ god of this
world,’ the ’ prince of the power of the air.’ He has immense power, and yet one
writer thinks he is a considerable coward. ’ Resist the devil,’ he says, ’and he
will flee from you.’ The devil and his hosts are said to be sound in their
theology, though they are bad in spite of it. ’ The devils believe and tremble.’
The Satan of the New Testament, like the Persian Ahriman, is the personification
of all wickedness. Nor is there any hope of his salvation. For him and his
angels is reserved ’ eternal fire ’; he must be cast into the lake of fire and
brimstone. The salvation of Satan is not suggested anywhere. He is to be crushed
and tormented, but nevertheless left alive, apparently for ever. God is to
conquer, and yet His conquest is not complete, for Satan shall have hell to rule
over. The whole universe will not be won for God. There are evil ones whom God
Himself neither saves nor kills. In the Book of Revelation we have the notion
that God, who is quite able to chain up Satan, for a time lets him loose. Of
course, if we took such a notion seriously into our idea of God, our God would
be no better than a man who, though quite able to control his passions, yet for
a time gave them license to work what havoc they could on society, then chained
them up when it suited his convenience. That would be an immoral view of God.
God must be as just now as He ever will be. A God who can postpone justice is
unjust. At the end, too, even when justice is done, Satan in Revelation is still
alive.

It must, however, be said that, though the New Testament in many passages
records these beliefs, yet there are in other passages points of view gained,
and heights reached, from which a larger and brighter vision is afforded. Does
it not speak of ’ the restitution of all things ’? Does it not look forward to a
time when Jesus shall deliver up the kingdom, and ’ God be all in all ’? Will
God be ’ all in all as long as there is a spot of hell anywhere, or a devil in
existence? Listen to these magnificent words of the Epistle to the Ephesians: *
It is in accordance with the loving design which God planned from the first to
carry out in Christ the establishment of a new order when the times were ripe
for it, when He would make everything, both in heaven and on earth, centre in
the Christ. I say " in the Christ," by our union with whom we also became God’s
own possession, having from the first been marked out for this in the intention
of him who, in all that happens, is executing His own fixed purpose.’ I take
Paul to be the writer of these words, and I take them to represent his deepest
thought. In this whole letter you get Paul at his highest. For breadth of view,
for grandeur of conception, for magnificent scope of promise, for wealth of
hope, for depth of insight, for a triumphant realization of power, it stands, to
my mind, with Colossians, transcendent in literature. He looks upon the whole
universe, and thinks of Christ, and says: ’All has been created through Him and
for Him.’ If all is for Christ, what of hell, what of doomed men, what even of
an unredeemable devil? Paul declares that Christ is the key to the solution of
the mystery of being; He is the explanation of creation. He is also the
explanation of history; all time, all space, all existence take their meaning
from Christ. Is there room in this kind of philosophy for a host of evil spirits
doomed for ever? I take it there is not. At his highest point of view, it seems
to me that to Paul evil is not an ultimate power. I believe, further, that here
Paul was at one with Jesus, and that it was from a vision of Jesus he got the
truth. Jesus grew up amid the traditional belief of His time that the empire of
the world was divided between God and the Evil One, and that under Satan there
were hosts of evil spirits working mischief in the world. The physical disease
which we now treat as lunacy was regarded as possession by devils. According to
the New Testament, as it stands, Jesus shared these beliefs, and I must honestly
say that I think it is impossible to resist that conclusion. I am thankful,
however, for the measure of relief in this matter which historical criticism
affords I mean that allowance must be made for the fact that the accounts were
written by men who had inherited these beliefs, and the strong colour is often
due to that fact; and further that the accounts were also written years after
the events, when the historic fact would have grown considerably in oral
tradition.

If Jesus, then, by the operation of strong psychic and spiritual forces, and by
tenderness, soothed poor, fevered lunatics who were cruelly treated by society,
this, in the language and opinion of the time, would be recorded as casting out
devils. This very kind of disease exists under its old name to-day.
Subscriptions are being asked for now in this country for the first hospital for
the insane of Syria. You will find that those now in Syria treated by medical
men as insane persons show the same symptoms as the demoniacs of the new
Testament, and their own countrymen regard them as possessed by devils. Many of
them, we are told, are curable by kind, gentle treatment. This, I believe, is
the key to many of the stories in the Gospels of the casting out of devils by
Jesus. Whether He believed in demoniacal possession, and so used the language of
that belief, or whether He simply used the words as an accommodation to the
belief of the patient in order to help his cure, or whether the mere fact of the
cure is recorded in the language of the time, it is almost impossible to tell.
The certainty is this: that the gentle method of treatment, which we have only
come to after so many centuries, was adopted by Him so long ago. Up to a
comparatively recent time the insane in this country were regarded as possessed
by devils, and treated with barbarous cruelty in consequence, and when medical
science was opposing that theory it was denounced as heresy. The infallible
Bible theory required the old belief. Men asked then, as now: ’Shall we give up
the Bible?’ The right answer now, as then, is: ’ No; but you shall give up your
false theory of the Bible, and cease to talk ignorantly about it, or else in the
march of thought you will be left behind.’ Now, though I do not claim that Jesus
was clear of the traditional beliefs, I do most certainly think that the records
are exaggerated. There is not, e.g., to my mind, the slightest reason for
believing the absurd story of the swine of Gadara. The old-fashioned infidel has
had many a turn on that story. It was quite possible, however, for such a story
to grow when you remember that the scene was placed in a heathen part of the
country, and that the Jews often called the heathen swine. The belief in the
Evil One, too, was probably part of the creed which Jesus inherited by His
incarnation into Jewish life. But if you want to estimate an outstanding
personality fairly you must, as Harnack maintains, put into the foreground, not
what He shared with His contemporaries, but what was most characteristic of Him.
What He had in common is the proper background. On this principle we must give
to Jesus the highest ranges of the teaching found in the Gospels, for we find no
one else to take His place. When we do this, I think the conclusion of Edward
Caird is well taken: ’ In any case it may be said that the idea of an absolute
power of evil, which does not exist with a view to a greater good, is
essentially opposed to the whole spirit of the teaching of Jesus, and must
ultimately be set aside by the development of His thought, even if it was
included in traditional conceptions of the time which He was unable to
repudiate.’ Now, it is this ’ spirit of the teaching of Jesus ’ which I think
Paul had at last caught when in the Ephesian letter he sees the whole universe
and all history, past, present, and to come, centred in the Christ, and God ’ in
all that happens’ fulfilling His own fixed purpose of grace and salvation. The
value of the belief in a devil is not that it is a satisfactory explanation of
sin, but that it has been man’s assertion that sin does not belong to his own
real self, nor does it belong to God. The belief in a devil is a witness to
man’s consciousness that sin is alien to the highest purposes of his own life,
and also to the true end of the world-life, and is therefore to be conquered,
that God and man may come to their own. It is a witness to the grandest fact in
human experience viz., the refusal of man to identify the essence of his being
with sin, and his consciousness that God must be absolutely good. Now this
remains when man ceases to believe in a personal devil, and believes with James
that when a man is tempted he is ’ drawn’ away by his own lust and enticed.’ It
is his own in the sense that he must accept responsibility for it, but it is not
of his very self, because his own proper, higher life can only be realized by
its conquest. Evil, in our belief, only exists to be overcome by the power of
God in man. We cannot believe in two ultimate powers which will somehow divide
the world between them at the finish. Just as we refuse to believe that the seat
of authority in ourselves belongs to sin, so we refuse to believe that the seat
of authority in the universe belongs to evil. It is God the Eternal
Righteousness, God the Eternal Truth, God the Eternal Love, who reigneth over
all. Whatever sin may be, we cannot believe that it belongs to the eternal
order. It shall not, therefore, break our heart, or silence our song, or take
away our prayer. Fall we may, but climb we must. If we fail to-day we will renew
the struggle to-morrow. The speech of the angel of faith comes upon the night
with prophecy of a brighter day, the day of perfect righteousness, the promised
day of God.


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  CHAPTER 6: 06 - CHAPTER 06
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THE ENHANCED VALUE OF THE BIBLE THROUGH HISTORICAL INTERPRETATION.

IT is no doubt true that the criticism of the Bible has caused pain and distress
to many good people. So did the Protestant Reformation. Many pious souls
trembled as for the very ark of God, and were quite sincerely afraid that the
foundations of religion would be destroyed. So did even Christianity itself.
Jesus Christ was not crucified by bad men; He was crucified by the good men, who
believed that all religious authority was going to pieces in His hands. In their
view He came to destroy; the Law and the Temple were being undermined; the very
guides of their life and the fountains of their inspiration were threatened;
they drove Him to the Cross in order to save religion. How appropriate the
prayer, ’Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do ’! The Jews who
persecuted Paul were not bad men. They had a great care for things which had
grown sacred. No doubt they sometimes did very wicked things because they were
so religious told the lie often to serve the truth; but undoubtedly it was a
deep and profound concern for venerable religion that lay at the bottom of the
persecution of Paul, and his pain at having the cause of progress thwarted was,
perhaps, no keener than theirs at having the religion of centuries transcended.
Great movements are never brought to birth without soul-travail; the age of
expansion is the age of much distress; progress is always bought at the cost of
suffering. The man who is on the onward march should neither delight in the pain
it inflicts, nor, on the other hand, should he stop the march to relieve the
pain. Enlargement is imperious, progress divine; knowledge has an irresistible
movement which can never be finally stopped for the most sacred attachments.
What we may do is to pause now and then to show to those who are distressed, if
they will listen, the real gain of the onward movement. The historical
interpretation of the Bible often alarms good people who do not understand its
principles and the immense service it is doing. And I know nothing much more
despicable in reference to this subject than for a man to undertake to discuss
it, and, instead of really going into it and dealing with it in a manly way, try
to work upon the fears of the ignorant, create new prejudices, and inflame old
ones. Biblical criticism was not an arbitrary choice. It was undertaken under
compulsion the compulsion of the law of development. For a thousand years the
Roman Church had claimed the right to interpret the Bible. The Protestant
Reformation broke with that authority. And once liberty was claimed for the
private interpreters, then the so-called higher criticism was inevitable as soon
as the machinery arrived that made it possible. The Protestant Reformer is
indeed the proper father of the higher critic. Once the Reformers called in
private judgment, Biblical criticism was only waiting for its apparatus of
scholarship. For if we are to judge by the Bible, we must know the Bible; and
that is the one aim of the Historical Interpreter to know what the Bible says,
how it came to say it, and what it means. In order to understand it, we must
know how it grew. And the critic’s great inquiry is, How did the Bible grow? The
story which the critics have told us has certainly transformed our idea of the
Bible, and changed our intellectual attitude towards it. My contention is that
this change is an immense gain, and fruitful of excellent results to those who
will take the trouble to understand it.

1. It has brought us to see that the Bible is a living Book. For a time
criticism spent itself upon the text of Scripture, as if the only thing
necessary to understand the Bible was to find the proper text. There were
various readings; the original reading must be followed if possible; anyway,
that reading must be found which had most ancient authorities in its favour.
This was the ’ Lower Criticism,’ and a very necessary piece of work it was. But
it was borne in upon the mind of the student that, though the right text might
be settled, the meaning of the passage might still be unsettled. And what was
necessary to find the meaning? If an Englishman to-day wants even to understand
Shakespeare he must not always attach the meaning to words which he would give
to those same words in his own speech. Every school-child knows that there are
words there which have a different meaning from what they have now. In order to
find that meaning a great deal must be known about the period in which those
pieces were written. Language is always related to the general life, and cannot
be understood apart from it. In the same way the life of the time not only
moulds the language, but also moulds the ideas and the sentiments of the time.
So the student of the Bible found that to settle the text, though a necessary
thing, was, after all, only a small fragment of what was necessary. He must also
go outside the Bible for light on the Bible; he must gather all possible
information concerning the national life and read every writing in the light of
the period which produced it. This was called the Higher Criticism. It is simply
a wider effort to understand. Its pre-supposition is that, like all literature,
the Bible is the outcome of life, and life is therefore the commentary on the
Bible. God did not write the Bible, but He was present in that life which the
Bible records, and the Bible therefore is a revelation of God at work in
humanity. There were blunders and mistakes in that life, and there are
inevitably blunders and mistakes in the Bible. But there was a guiding and
correcting Spirit at work among that ancient people; that guidance and
correction may be plainly traced in the Bible, and so these Scriptures become
profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in
righteousness. This does not mean that the teachers of Israel were not inspired
from above. Most assuredly they were. I can never understand development without
Divine action. Every man who seeks to draw people forward and upward must be
inspired from some source above their level; and the best men are quite aware of
the Spirit greater than theirs which is in them. But this does not make their
speech and action unrelated to the general life of the people, for, indeed,
their only chance of success lies in the fact that the people also know
something of the striving of that same Spirit! The teachers of Israel were real
living men, steeped in the life of their time; their thoughts and ideas and
sentiments were in vital relation to those of their time, even when ahead of
them and differing from them. Inspired many of them undoubtedly were, but
superhuman they were not. Now, when the Bible is thus discovered to be a vital
part of human life, it becomes a living Book. It ceases to be mechanical, it is
not a supernatural machine produced in some laboratory in the sky; it is a
natural flower grown on earth, but only possible because the sun was shining in
the sky. If upon that nation of old the Sun of Righteousness had not arisen, and
if the human spirit had not drunk the Divine influences, then this Bible garden
could not have been. All the same, it is a natural garden, with weeds as well as
precious flowers and fruit. Now, the full appreciation of the Bible, as a part
of human growth under Divine cultivation, is one of the beneficent results of
Historical Criticism. Again I say the Reformers prepared the way for it. For
what does the right of private interpretation mean? The man who claims it may
not take the full scope of his principle the Reformer certainly did not but the
real meaning of it is that the Bible must be the outcome of a life like unto my
life. It is this likeness that makes interpretation possible. It is only when we
find ourselves in the Bible that the Bible properly finds us. If it had dropped
from the sky no man could interpret it. To-day, thanks to the critics, this
feeling is in full consciousness. We feel that the Bible is ours. Isolated it
can no longer be. Set aside as an ornament, or fixed on a pedestal to be bowed
to, or retained as an oracle for emergencies it shall not be; it is daily food;
it is literature; it is a companion; it is alive with human interest. The Bible
now can take its place in that larger revelation of God which is as wide as the
world. The idea of the thirteenth century that God had given two books Nature
and the Bible; that Nature was to be studied independently, and the Bible left
to be interpreted by the Church would not work. Truth is one, and must be sought
in the whole, and all must have access to the whole. The greater Bible is the
whole world in all its history, and the Hebrew Scriptures are part of it. In the
whole evolution of life is to be found the mind of God. The most important
chapters of that wonderful story are written in the Bible, and their value is
not diminished but increased, when their relation to the whole is recognised.

One of the results of this is that it was never so much studied. Our generation
has seen an output of books on the Bible of which no other generation could have
had the slightest conception. Think of the enormous expense of producing the ’
Encyclopaedia Biblica,’ Hastings’ ’ Bible Dictionary,’ and the Polychrome Bible;
and yet these are deemed safe ventures for the book markets. You know what that
means. It means that publishers can calculate on a sufficient public interest.
Those are but a fraction of the output. Think, too, of the number of scholars
who are giving all their time to Bible work. Do you suppose they are working as
machines without vital interests? The fact is that the criticism, much abused by
the ignorant, and sometimes made the subject of poor jokes by men who have only
touched its fringes with incompetent fingers, has effected the resurrection of
the Bible into modern life. With the old theory, in the face of rising modern
science, nothing could have saved the Bible from falling into disuse. It would
have been put on the shelf as a discredited book. But criticism has shown it to
be a well of living water, teeming with points of vital interest for man.

2. It has enabled the Bible to speak for itself. The Protestant Reformation said
to the Catholic hierarchy: ’ I claim the right to go to the Bible for myself.’
That was a step forward. But another was needed. The Protestant often took his
own system of theology to the Bible, and so the Bible’s own voice was still
stifled. The critic must come along and say: ’ I claim the right of the Bible to
speak for itself.’ And never did sectarianism receive such a blow. Protestantism
had divided hopelessly, and every sect claimed the Bible for itself. When the
Bible is freed from dogmatic interpretation it is seen to belong to no sect; the
variety of a nation’s life for fifteen hundred years is in it; and in its best
teachers it reaches a universalism too great for any system or sect. Upon the
old theory, the Bible, being the word of God throughout, was all of equal value.
Any sect could run off with a set of texts and build its own fort, from which it
felt at liberty to shoot at every other sect, while every sect made the same
claim to have built upon words of Scripture. When historical interpretation sets
the Bible free to speak for itself it is found that one of its main features is
the constant displacement of standards by higher standards in the march of
progress. We are to find the will of God, not in isolated texts, but in the
drift of the development portrayed; and nothing is plainer from the Bible than
that God wishes us to be always growing in knowledge, in purity, and in love,
and that there is no final system of doctrine nor final form of worship. Again
and again the Bible shows you standards, taken as Divine, giving way, ethical
and theological ideas transcended by better ones, until when you reach the
highest revelation in the Bible it contains no formulated creed and no moral
code; it is just simply the religion of love to God and man, the vision of the
pure in heart, and an exhaustless impulse to go for ever into more of these, ’
Be ye therefore perfect, as your Father in heaven is perfect.’ So Paul
understood it. His religion should not be a religion of the letter, but a
spiritual principle; no bondage from the outside, but a living, working spirit
within, which would never be tied to the past, but, forgetting the things
behind, press forward. When the sects will come to read their Bible in the light
of criticism we shall have done with the wars of creeds, done with sectarian
bigotry, done with the odium theologicum, done with the popes of all
denominations; our artificial barriers will be broken; a text here and there
will be no foundation for building separating walls; everyone will see that the
New Testament was never meant to settle the pattern of the Church nor even the
ordinances; the Baptist will not think that a commandment of Jesus makes
immersion necessary; the Congregationalist will see that the Friend who does not
take the Lord’s Supper may be as near the Lord as he; all will know that the one
great commandment is, Love God and one another. Thus the Bible, instead of being
taken in fragments and dividing men, will be taken as a whole and unite them.
What a tremendous gain this would be to Christendom! The Federation of the Free
Churches which has already taken place would have been impossible but for the
relaxation of the old view of the Bible, though that relaxation is often
unacknowledged and even unconscious. Thousands who still think they hold the old
views have ceased to emphasize them. The good Spirit of the age extracts this
practical concession from them; and but for this, union would have been as
impossible as in the old time.

Again, we gain immensely in the ethical sphere, through the breakdown of the old
theory, by letting the Bible speak for itself. By giving authority equally to
all parts, the old theory made the Bible a very dangerous book.

I have no time to illustrate, but one illustration is unavoidable. Have we not
heard of Christian pulpits justifying the war in South Africa from the wars of
the Old Testament? This is the sort of atrocity which the old view of the Bible
made possible. The old theory allowed you to take a verse from the Old
Testament, and go out and shoot your enemy on the strength of it; the new theory
asks you to find the will of God, not in the hewing of Agag, but in that ascent
of life from the barbarism of Samuel to the prayer of Jesus on the Cross. Watch
that line rising, ever rising, leaving the ape and the tiger behind, until the
man stands on the heights of manhood in love and compassion and prayer, and then
say: ’ That is God’s will; that is God’s will in the Bible; that is the way He
wants the world to go; that is the way I must help it to go.’ As a moral guide,
the Bible on the old theory was most dangerous. It proved a source of cruelty
again and again; it burned thousands of witches upon Divine authority; it has
given nations a pretext for barbarity; it has made many a wicked King think he
had a Divine right to his throne; it inflicted indescribable suffering on poor
lunatics through giving authority for the belief that they were possessed by
demons. The Bible is not responsible for these horrors, but the old view of the
Bible is. Upon the new interpretation, the Bible, instead of being dangerous,
becomes the most fruitful source of moral inspiration. The highest morality the
world has seen is found in the Bible, and the Bible itself, on its highest
levels, is the severest condemnation of all that is lower, in its own pages.
Nothing can be more inspiring than the vision of triumphant morality in Jesus.
Let the Bible speak for itself, and it will tell you that life must for ever be
an up-line from bad to good, from good to better, ever on towards the best.

3. Again, by letting the Bible speak for itself, it gains immensely as a
comforter. One of the chief values of the Bible has always been its power to
comfort, and here many people are afraid lest criticism should destroy it. I
think it greatly increases its use. I see no element of real comfort lost, but
much gained. Take a verse where the word itself occurs: ’ Comfort ye, comfort
ye, My people, saith your God.’ If the old theory is right, that was spoken by
Isaiah a hundred and fifty years before it was wanted. Just think of a man
writing down by miraculous foreknowledge a prescription for comfort a hundred
and fifty years before the need for it arose. How much comfort do we ever get
from men who have known nothing of our sorrows? How mechanical all that is, even
if you could believe it to begin with! It makes it almost worthless, even if it
were true. But take the other theory. Historical criticism tells you that Isaiah
did not write those words. They were written by some prophet who was himself in
captivity. In the very heart of the trouble here is a man who found the comfort
of God, and is able, therefore, to comfort his fellows; it is a declaration to
all the world for ever that God may be found in the fire, that the allegory of
Daniel and the three youths is true. Instead of being words from the outside of
trouble, given by some miracle to the writer, and of no use for a hundred and
fifty years," they come from the inside, spring from the human heart that has
found God, and are therefore an assurance that every stricken child may find the
Father near. When the best things in the Bible are thought of as written things
let down from heaven, or dictated from the sky, they are not in touch with life;
but when we realize that these things were the outcome of actual human
experience, then a thousand hopes light up all around us, for we, too, are men,
and may experience the same things. If I thought that some supernatural aid was
given to Paul to write his letters, which cannot be given to me, then I could
only say that he was too far away from me to be any real help; he is in the
clouds and I am on the earth. But if I find that Paul struggled with passions
and prejudices and weakness and opposition and imperfect knowledge just as we
do, and yet rose to such heights of victory, I see up along the mountain of
moral obligation a shining track of possibility for me; and, though the rocks
are there and the precipices; though there will be storms and mountain torrents;
still, since Paul said, ’ In all these things we are more than conquerors
through Him that loved us,’ I may, too. The Power which availed for him will
avail for me, and I can link my feebleness to it as he did. The heroes of the
Bible had no help either to live or to write, except by natural endowments,
which you may not have. And so, what they were, and what they said, is a source
of constant inspiration to deeper and diviner life. Let us see to it that we are
never content with any mere historical knowledge of the Bible. The Lower
Criticism concerned the text; the Higher Criticism found the historic
interpretation; but there is a highest, and that is the meaning which a kindred
experience finds. Knowledge of facts is never all we need; experience of forces
and powers we must also have. We must know the Bible in the sense of finding for
ourselves the Power it reveals for lifting life, and cleansing from sin, and
opening for us the gates of God’s eternal day. { This is life eternal, that they
might know Thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom Thou hast sent.’ THE
END


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Source: https://sermonindex.net/books/williams-thomas-shall-we-understand-the-bible/
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