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Testimony of the Scriptures to Themselves
(6) Another argument for the supreme authority of Scripture is the character of the investigation challenged for the Word of God. The Bible courts the closest scrutiny. Its open pages blaze the legend, “Search the Scriptures!” Ereunao —“Search.” It is a sportsman’s term, and borrowed from the chase. “Trace out,” “track out”—follow the word in all its usages and windings. Scent it out to its remotest meanings, as a dog the hare. “They searched,” again says St, Luke, in the Acts, of the Bereans. There it is another word, anakrino —“they divided up,” analyzed, sifted, pulverized, as in a mortar—to the last thought. What a solemn challenge is this! What book but a Divine Book would dare speak such a challenge ? If a book has been written by man, it is at the mercy of men. Men can go through it, riddle it, sift it, and leave it behind them, worn out. But the Bible, a Book dropped from heaven, is “God- breathed.” It swells, it dilates, with the bodying fullness of God. God has written it, and none can exhaust it. Apply your microscopes, apply your telescopes, to the material of Scripture. They separate, but do not fray, its threads. They broaden out its nebulae, but find them clustered stars. They do not reach the hint of poverty in Scripture. They nowhere touch on coarseness in the fabric, nor on limitations in hori- zon, as always is the case when tests of such a character are brought to bear on any work of man’s. You put a drop of water, or a fly’s wing, under a microscope. The stronger the lens, the more that drop of water will expand, till it becomes an ocean filled with sporting animalcules. The higher the power, the more exquisite, the more silken, become the tissues of the fly’s wing, until it attenuates almost to the golden and gossamer threads of a seraph’s. So is it with the Word of God. The more scrutiny, the more divinity; the more dissec- tion, the more perfection. We cannot bring to it a test too penetrating, nor a light too lancinating, nor a touchstone too exacting.
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