The Fundamentals - 1917: Vol.2

The Fundamentals All of which substantiates the declaration of Peter quoted earlier, that “no prophecy ever came by the will of man, but man spake from God, being moved by the Holy Spirit. Sure­ ly, if the will of man had nothing to do with the prophecy, he could not have been at liberty in the selection of the words. So much for the Old Testament, but when we reach the New, we have the same unerring and verbal accuracy guar­ anteed to the apostles by the Son of God, as we have seen. And we have the apostles making claim of it, as when Paul in 1 Corinthians 2:12, 13 distinguishes between the “things” or the thoughts which God gave him and the words in which he expressed them, and insisting on the divinity of both; “Which things also we speak,” he says, “not in the words which man s wisdom teacheth, but which the Holy Ghost teacheth. In Galatians 3 :16, following the example of His divine Master, he employs not merely a single word, but a single letter of a word as the basis of an argument for a great doctrine. The blessing of justification which Abraham received has become that of -the believer in Jesus Christ. “Now to Abraham and his seed were the promises made. He saith not, And to seeds, as of many; but as of one, And to thy seed, which is Christ. The writer of the epistle to the Hebrews bases a similar argument on the word “all’'’ in chapter 1:8, on the word “one” in 1 :11, and on the phrase “yet once more” in 12:26, 27. To recur to Paul’s argument in Galatians, Archdeacon Farrar in one of his writings denies that by any .possibility such a Hebraist as he, and such a master of Greek usage could have argued in this way. He says Paul must have known that the plural of the Hebrew and Greek terms for “seed” is never used by Hebrew or Greek writers to designate human off­ spring. It means, he says, various kinds of grain. His artlessness is amusing. We accept his estimate of Paul’s knowledge of Hebrew and Greek, says Professor Watts, he was certainly a Hebrew of the Hebrews, and as to his Greek .he could not only write it but speak it as we know,

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