One of the first things about this Book that evokes our wonder is the very fact of its existence, for there was never any order given to any man to plan the Bible, nor was there ever any concerted plan on the part of the men who wrote to write the Bible.
The way in which the Bible grew is one of the mysteries of our time. Little by little, century after century, it came out in fragments, written by various men, without any concerted arrangement. One wrote a part in Arabia, another in Syria, a third in Palestine, another in Greece and Italy, and the first-part was written hundreds of years before the man who wrote the last part was born.
Here is a Book that took at least fifteen hundred years to write, spanning sixty generations of this world's history. It enlarges our conceptions of God and gives us new ideas of His infinite patience as He watched the strain, the haste and restlessness of man across the feverish years, while slowly the great Book grew. Here a little, and there a little, history, prophecy, poetry and biography, it came forth before a needy world in its finished completeness.
There was no pre-arrangement by men. It is not as if Matthew, Mark, Luke and John met in committee and after solemn conference and seeking for the leading of the Spirit, Matthew undertook to write of Christ as the King, and Mark agreed to write of Him as the Servant,
Luke undertaking to delineate Him as the Man, and John determining to crown it all by writing of Him as the Son of God. It was not as if Paul and James met and after talking and praying about it agreed that Paul should write of the doctrinal and James of the practical aspects of the Christian faith. There is no trace of such a thing.
They simply wrote as they were moved by the Spirit to meet a present need, to teach some glorious truth, to express some earnest longing, and from the aggregation of their writings came this miraculous unit that we call the New Testament.
Page 1 The Wonder of The Book
The worst opposition of all has been during the last two hundred years, with rationalism and modernism seeking to • undermine the authority, inspiration and inerrancy of the Holy Scriptures.
It was Voltaire's boast that within one hundred years of his death not a Bible would be found save as an antiquarian curiosity. Many more than one hundred years have passed, and other pens and other voices have joined in the attack, but the Bible remains and is being more widely distributed and used than ever before.
The supreme wonder of the Book is Christ, Who is its fullness, its centre, its great subject. Of the whole Book it may be said, "The glory of God does lighten it, and the Lamb is the light thereof ".
As long as men live upon the face of the globe, the Book that tells of Christ the Revealer, Redeemer, the Risen, Reigning, Returning Lord will draw men's hearts like a magnet, and men will stand by it, and live for it, and die for it.
Do not think that we ought to read this Book as we read any other book, and study and analyse it just as we do any text book in literature or science. No ! When you come to this Book, come to it with reverence. Read it with a plea for the Spirit's help. "Put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground".
Other books are of the earth. This is from heaven, it is the living Word of the Living God, supernatural in origin, divine in authorship, regenerative in power, infallible in authority, personal in application, inspired in its every part.
It changes men's lives and alters their destinies. It inaugurates world-wide movements. A single-text transformed Luther ,and launched the greatest of modern epochs. It comes today into communities of unrighteousness as a regenerating force.
(Summarized and selected from "
The Wonder of the Book "by Prof. Dyson Hague, M.A.)
THE WONDER OF THE BOOK
The wonder of the Book grows upon us as our experience is enlarged, for the more deeply we search it, the more we feel that the Bible is not merely a book, but The Book
The Bible, though regarded as a Book, is in fact a library of sixty-six volumes, written by between thirty and forty different authors, in three languages, on totally different topics and in extraordinarily; different circumstances.
One wrote history, another biography, one wrote on theology, another poetry, another prophecy, others on philosophy, jurisprudence, genealogy, ethnology, and narratives of wonderful journeys. Here in the Bible we have them all, in a little Book that a child can carry in its little hand.
The strangest thing of all is that, although their subjects are so diverse and difficult, and although it was impossible for the man who wrote the first pages to have the slightest knowledge what others would write 1500 years later yet this collection of writings is not only unified by men in one Book but so unified by God the Author, that we can never think of it today as anything else but one Book ! And one Book it is indeed — the miracle of all literary unity.
The Bible has withstood ages of ferocious and incessant persecution. Century after century men have tried to burn it and to bury it and to extirpate it. Kings of the earth set themselves and rulers of the church have taken counsel together to destroy it. Diocletian the Roman Emperor inaugurated in AD 303 a terrific onslaught upon the Book.
Bibles were destroyed, Christians were slain, and the Emperor boasted that the very name of the Christians was blotted out, and yet after a few years, the Bible came forth as Noah from the ark to repeople the earth, and in AD 325 Constantine enthroned the Bible as the Infallible Judge of Truth in the great council of the Church held in that year.
Later the Church of Rome denied the Scriptures to the people and for ages the Bible was practically an unknown book. Martin Luther was a grown man when he said that he had never seen a Bible in his life. No jailor ever kept a prisoner closer than the Church of Rome kept the Bible from the people.