It is evidently an all-important question: Have we a revelation from God? Have I from God a revelation of His mind which is authentic and authoritative, such that I can know from Himself what God is?
I cannot trust in man, for without a revelation from God, man is lost in what degrades human nature. To have something on which I can rest, I need two things: I must have a revelation from God, and I also must have it communicated authentically to be able to reckon it. Man wants a god, but universal heathenism is the witness that men have not known God, nor His character, without a revelation. I cannot find a man among them that is not degraded, for he deifies his passions and adds degradation to them. More than this, they have not liked retaining Him in their knowledge when He was revealed to them.
The Word of God
And where is the Word of God? Where it always was, as light is in the sun. Those who have eyes walk, as they ever did, in its full, clear, and divinely-given light. It shines as it ever did, and the entering in of the Word gives light and understanding to the simple. They have a nature that can estimate it in the true character God gave it, which learned men have not, for He hides these things from the wise and prudent and reveals them unto babes. “They shall be all taught of God” is the declaration of the Lord and the prophet for those who can hear.
That the Old Testament scriptures were collected into their present form a good while before the Lord was on earth, no one is contesting; indeed, far from it, for Christ owns the divisions which now exist. Josephus tells us expressly that there are not a multitude of books, but just twenty-two; they had histories and writings after Artaxerxes, but these had not the same authority; they were not tested by prophets. That the books were collected, we can thank God for. Whether the history of Ruth is connected with Judges, or the Lamentations with Jeremiah, is of no consequence. Their place in the history is plain upon the face of them. To the believer, it is not a question of who wrote Ruth. He receives them as the Word of God; God is their author. It is also true that, in collecting the books, short notes may have been added, such as, “There they are to this day,” or other brief notes of this kind. These in no way affect the revelation. The book clearly shows that as a whole it is inspired and ordered in its structure by God, and when all this was done to make it a whole, this divine ordering of God’s hand and wisdom may be in such notes as elsewhere. The question is, Is this book given to us of God as a revelation, given to us as it is? Is what is in it revealed of God, or man’s thoughts?
An Account of God’s Ways
The book professes to be an account of all God’s ways from the creation (and even in purpose before it) till the Lord comes, and even to the end of time, till God can say, “It is done; I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending.” It professes further to give us a revelation of the Father in the Son. Is this immense undertaking a revelation of God, or only a development of national life in a little petty nation? “No man hath seen God at any time: the only-begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, He hath declared Him” (John 1:1818No man hath seen God at any time; the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him. (John 1:18)). Is this a revelation of God or not? That is, is the account I have of God, as God has given it to us? Otherwise it is no revelation to me or to anyone else.
These are serious questions, and the very undertaking proves its source. Had man done it, what should we have had? What have we outside this wondrous book? Man’s theory is that it is an imposture, but if so, it is the holiest production that ever appeared in the world, bearing to everyone that has any moral sensibilities a divine stamp upon it, which nothing else in the world has! Even Rousseau was forced to say, “It would have been a greater miracle for man to invent such a life as Christ’s, than to be it.”
J. N. Darby (adapted)