In the various and fruitful light of Scripture, fresh wonders cast themselves forth before the eye of the soul. Its seed is in itself like the trees of Eden. Its witness is in itself like all the works of God. Its honors and its virtues are all its own—made ours, indeed, only by the power of the Holy Spirit. Its worth and its excellency proceed from itself, and we want only the faith that walks in the light of it, apprehending and enjoying Him whose wisdom and grace it reveals to us.
That each of the four gospels has its own character and purpose under the Spirit of God is sufficiently familiar to us. This was a judgment among the people of God from the earliest days of Christianity. They perceived then, as we do now, variety in unity, so that some of them said, "It is not so properly four gospels that we have, as a four-sided gospel." The one life is seen in different relations—the same Jesus passes through the same scenes and circumstances in different characters.
This is variety in unity. And this leads me to suggest that in like manner the Book of God has also unity in variety. We see our world in all the parts of it, and ourselves in all the persons of it. We listen, for instance, to the grace which addresses us as sinners, and learn ruin and redemption now as Adam learned them in the day of Gen. 3. When putting on the righteousness of God by faith we find ourselves in the family and fellowship of Abraham (Gen. 15). At the table of the Lord spread in the midst of the redeemed every resurrection-day, we sit in one spirit with the congregation of God (Ex. 12). In the conflict of flesh and spirit we not only see what manner of people the saints in Paul's day were, but we read our own well-known and everyday experience.
Thus we are at home throughout the whole volume, tracing our own world in all the scenes of it, and ourselves in the actors. This is unity in variety. Such is the wondrous character of the Book.
Thousands of years are but one and the same day. The Book is one, though Moses and John, the earliest and the latest writers in it, were separated by centuries and centuries, and though kings and fishermen, scribes and herdsmen, prophets and publicans, separated by all the habits of human life and human circumstances, were called to put their hand to it.
It is a book of wonders, but the Book itself is a principal wonder, as this may show us. Its naturalness and its beauty are admirable beyond expression. This quality of the Book of God once reminded another of a striking analogy in the kingdom of nature. "It is," he said, "as a noble tree of which the inward energy, the freedom of the sovereign vital power, produces a variety of forms in which the details of human order may appear to be wanting, but in which there is a beauty which no human art can imitate.”
True indeed, and true also is what he adds after contemplating the materials which form and furnish this Book. "All combine to crown with divine glory the demonstration of the origin and authorship of the Book which contains these things.”
May meditation on it be mixed with faith, that the soul may be profited while the heart is charmed!
J. G. Bellett