A PREACHER of great celebrity the other day gave expression to a very pithy, weighty sentence. He said, “What was once infidelity outside the Church, is now the higher criticism inside the Church.”
Satan from the beginning has sought to impugn God’s Word. He began his deadly work in the garden of Eden, when he uttered the first great infidel question, “Hath God said?” Once he has succeeded in weakening and impairing the authority of God’s Word over the minds of men, he has an almost omnipotent lever for evil at his disposal, but for the almighty power of God.
Now, God’s last great appeal to man is by His written Word. If that fails, all else fails. If that does not influence, nothing else can. Oh! Satan knows right well that he gains just in proportion as the Word of God diminishes in the eyes of men.
And at the present day the battle rages. Never has this precious volume―God’s heritage to man―been so assailed as at the present day. Never has it been so subjected to such microscopical examination from cover to cover. Never has the voice of hatred so heralded forth its seeming mistakes as at the present. And never has it received such confirmation as of late―if such it needed. Discoveries in Egypt, discoveries in science, discoveries in many fields of research, have unexpectedly brought stubborn facts upon the critics, which only prejudice and hatred to divine truth could shuffle out of.
And, alas! the easy-going indifferentism of the present day― “the Christian charity,” which is only such in name, which will forego any truth in order not to be thought narrow or bigoted―makes it difficult to discern which is friend or foe. What was infidelity in Tom Paine is now “Higher Criticism” in the hands of the Rev. Dr So-and-so. Oh, friend, beware of any, whatever robes he may wear, if he in any way weakens the authority of God’s Word―whether from Genesis to Revelation―or in the truths it teaches; whether it be the total depravity of man, the all-sufficiency of Christ’s atonement, or the eternity of punishment of the damned.
We state again, emphatically, that the Bible is God’s last appeal.
This receives confirmation from the Saviour’s own lips―confirmation from a source which will be strange and new to many.
It is found in the brief, telling parable, which fell from the Saviour’s lips, of the rich man in the lake of fire―Dives.
The rich man on earth is now bankrupt in eternity. His faring sumptuously every day had come to an eternal close. His short, selfish butterfly life had ended. The inexorable march of time had brought about what is described by Christ with such startling brevity: “It came to pass that... the rich man died, and was buried; and in hell he lift up his eyes, being in torments.”
Afar off, and happy, he sees the repulsed mendicant Lazarus. Now he is tormented and thirsty. Crying for one drop of water, Abraham reminds him of the impossibility of his getting it, ―the GREAT gulf is fixed for him forever!
Then―and oh! here is a voice for you, dear reader―he prays that Lazarus may be sent to his five brethren to warn them of their danger. What is Abraham’s answer? “They have Moses and the prophets, let them hear them.”
Moses and the prophets in Christ’s day were equivalent to the Scriptures in our day―the Bible.
Well, but the rich man had had Moses and the prophets in his day of opportunity, and he had heeded them not; so he prays further, and urges his request, saying “Nay, father Abraham: but if one went unto them from the dead, they will repent.”
He thought that if his brethren were startled out of their carelessness by an apparition from the dead―that if their ghostly visitor, knowing with certainty the awful realities of eternity as in the case of the rich man, and the happiness and joys of heaven as in his own case―sought by the earnestness and vividness of his speech to arouse them from their awful slumber, that surely it would encompass the desired end.
But no. Abraham replies, “If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded though one rose from the dead.”
He takes his stand firmly upon this, God’s last appeal to them. If they attend not to that, nothing can move them, nor avert the calamity into which their brother had fallen.
Oh, dear unsaved reader, we would earnestly warn you to pay heed to the blessed Word of God. A strange dream may affect you for a few days, a sad and sudden calamity may sober you for a few months, but nothing can divinely affect you for eternity but the Word of God.
Oh, take it up in sober earnest, and study it. It can make you “wise unto salvation.” Learn therein the first great lesson for a sinner to learn, ―that you are hopelessly lost, as far as your own strength and power goes. Learn that “God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” Study it, till you can rejoicingly say, in company with the apostle Paul, and thousands more besides, “I KNOW whom I have believed, and am persuaded that he is able to keep that which I have committed unto him against that day.”
“Blind unbelief is sure to err,
And scan His work in vain;
God is His own interpreter,
And He will make it plain.”
A. J. P.