Old Testament Criticism and New Testament Christianity 147
or He did not. If He knew it, why did He not correct them as in so many other and detailed instances ? If He did not know it-but I will not finish. Nor can this witness to the Old Testament be met by asserting that the limitation of our Lord's earthly life kept Him within current views of the Old Testament which need not have been true views. This statement i gn ores the es sential force of His personal claim to be "the Word." On more than one occasion our Lord claimed to speak from God, and that everything He said had the Divine war rant. Let us notice carefully what this involves. It is some times said that our Lord's knowledge was limited, and that He lived here as man, not as God. Suppose we grant this for argument's sake. Very well; as man He lived in God and on God, and He claimed that everything He said and did was from God and through God. If, then, the limita- tions were from God, so also were the utterances; and, as God's warrant was claimed for every one of these, they are therefore Divine and infallible. (John 5 :19; 5 :30; 7 : 13; 8 :26; 12 :49 ; 14 :24; 17 :8.) Even though we grant to the full a theory that will compel us to accept a temporary disuse or non-use of the functions of Deity in the Person of our Lord, yet the words actually uttered as man are claimed to be from God, and therefore we hold them to be infallible. We rest, therefore, upon our Lord's personal claim to say all and do all by the Father, from the Father, for the Father. There is, of course, no question of partial knowledge after the resurrection, when our Lord was manifestly free from all limitations of earthly conditions. Yet it was after His resurrection also that He set His seal to the Old Testament. (Luke 24 :44.) We conclude that our Lord's positive statements on the subject of the Old Testament are not to be rejected without charging Him with error. If, on these points, on which we can test and verify Him, we find that He is not reliable,
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