Sidney Collett
The Bible begins (as we should expect it to) with God: “In the beginning God” (Gen. 1:1). Indeed, these few words practically embody the whole theology of the Bible, and constitute the key, not only to the Bible, but to all created things.
The Bible ends with man — the last of all God’s creation: “The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all” (Rev. 22:21).
So that God is at one extreme end of the Bible, and man is at the other. But the Bible is a message from God to man, and its object is to bring man to God, and so we find that: In the middle verse of the Bible, which is Psalm 118:8, man and God, originally so near (Gen. 1:27), but by sin separated so far apart (Gen. 3:8-24), are brought together.
This little verse is in itself a miniature Bible, and contains the germ of nearly all its teaching. In it the golden link of faith which unites man to his Maker (Jer. 17:7 and Heb. 11:6), and by which all the redeemed are known (Gal. 3:7-9 and Heb. 11:13), is urged as the “better” thing; while “confidence in man,” which is really “confidence in the flesh” and is at the root of all evil (Rom. 8:8), and separates man from God (Jer. 17:5), is spoken of as the thing to be avoided! The verse is: “It is better to trust in the Lord, than to put confidence in man” — as if to indicate that the written Word, like the Living Word standing between God and the sinner, stretches out one hand with which to grasp the hand of God, and the other to grasp the hand of man, thus bringing the two together.
— From “The Scripture of Truth.”