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T h e K i n g ’ s B u s i n e s s
September 1932
“What authority have you for the dogmatic statement that Moses wrote the books of the Pentateuch? How can you prove that he wrote those five books, or any part of them ?” We simply replied, “ Sir, the burden of proof is not on us. We merely hold to what has been accepted as historic fact for thousands of years. When the entire Hebrew na tion, the great church of Christ, and all reliable historians agree on the truth of a matter for two thousand years, the man who denies the fact under discussion is under the necessity of proving his point. How can you prove that Moses did not write the books that are ascribed to him in the Bible ?” “ That’s easy,” our scholarly critic said. “ Since writing was not invented until five hundred years after Moses was born, how could he have written anything at all ?” With great weariness of spirit, having met this ancient but thoroughly exploded objection many times in the past twenty years, we proceeded to show the mentally anti quated brother the basis of his error. P roofs of M osaic A uthorship If we may digress from the issue for a moment, we will briefly summarize this evidence for the sake of the reader who may not be familiar with all the facts, so that when some other ignorant critic advances this argument in his hearing, he will be able to refute it and educate the critic of God’s W o rd ! The simple fact of the matter is that writ ing is perhaps the most ancient of all the arts, and was hoary with antiquity when Moses lived, and for at least two thousand years before Moses was born! Indeed, as far back of Moses as he precedes Christ, the art of writing had reached a high stage of perfection. Treaties of peace, letters of commendation, poems containing hundreds of verses, contracts, bills of sale, and other business records are now in the museums of the world, all taken from the buried heaps of civilizations that flourished some two and three thousand years before Moses. From the mound known as the Tell el Amarna alone, the science of archaeol ogy has gathered enough evidence to upset every conclu sion of the critic who disputes the historical value of the writings of Moses. These are facts that are at the disposal of every scholar in the world, and when a man today dis putes the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch, or criti cizes its historical value, he instantly brands himself «as fundamentally ignorant of a vast body of knowledge that is essential to an opinion on this subject. We have listened too long to the ignorant, as they parade in the guise of scholarship; it is time we allowed true and sane scholarship to announce once more the old fact of the accuracy and worth of the writings of Moses. When I called the attention of the noted minister to this great body of information of which he apparently was peacefully ignorant, he retracted his statement to this ex tent, by remarking, “ Well, maybe Moses could write, but I know he didn’t !” (And they call that kind of mentality a “ liberal” !) Highly amused, I retorted, “ Then, Doctor, since you cannot prove that Moses did not write, the case seems to be up to me. I will accept the burden of proof, and show conclusively that Moses did write the five books of the Bible ascribed to him. “ In the four Gospels, the Lord Jesus Christ makes, ninety-one quotations from the five books o f the Penta teuch. In these .references to the contents of those books, he says o f each of the five, and says it repeatedly, ‘As Moses wrote, saying,’ or ‘The words of Moses,’ or ‘In vain did Moses write, saying,’ and many other such expres sions. I do not believe that the Saviour lied ninety-one
times; so I will base my case on the testimony of Jesus; He said Moses wrote the first five books of the Bible.” To this, the great liberal ( ? ) answered, “ I don’t care what Jesus said; I graduated from Harvard, and I know better!” Archaeology has left the critic no single ground for in fidelity except the individual critic’s own exalted ego and ignorant conceit. This is so eminently true, that some of the greatest critics of the nineteenth century have been converted into the staunchest defenders of the Bible in the twentieth century, and the records of their conversions are the romance of the vindication of the Scripture records by the science we now discuss. God has at last unlocked the archives of antiquity, and for our day He has released priceless treasures of ancient knowledge, all of them forming a perfect defense of the science of the Scripture. But while we are saying, “ A is for Archaeology,” we are not forgetting the fact that the marvel of the inspired Book is enhanced by the manner in which this demon-, stration can be enlarged. We might just as well say, “ A is for Astronomy,” and be equally accurate in the evidence of God’s revelation of the contents of this Book. The eminent Jeans, who is so much in the public eye at present, has written two magnificent books on the struc ture of the universe; in the first one, he stated, “ The num ber of the stars is so far beyond the mind of man to grasp, that we can only liken them for multitude to the sands of the sea.” Does not that have a familiar sound ? Multiplied centuries before astronomy was born as a science, Moses wrote, saying that God had promised Abraham that his seed should be as numberless as the sands o f the sea, and as countless as the stars in the heavens! How did Moses know this fact that astronomy today announces with amazement and wonder? He did not, but the Spirit of God did, and when Moses wrote, he inscribed just what the Spirit inspired him to utter. [To be continued ] New Ways to Spend Tithes Some church officials were complaining lately that, although they had a good number of tithers, they seemed to get little more income into the church as a result. The church treasurer remarked that the trouble was with the people’s understanding of what tithing means. He said: “ They spend their tithe for anything and everything, and very little of it goes into the coffers of the church. I find a great many people using it to help dependent rela tives or to pay for church suppers; one family helped a poor family by giving them the children’s old clothes and then taking the tithe money to buy new ones for their own. Another took the tithe money to buy a half-bushel of wal nuts, because the boy selling them was from a poor family they thought was worthy of help. Another took the tithe money for vacation expenses. He argued that, if a poor neighbor’s wife needed a vacation, it would be all right to use tithe money to help her. If it was right to help his neighbor’s wife, it surely was all right to help his own, and so they took the vacation at the Lord’s expense. A girl could not go to church one Sunday, because she had no silk stockings. The next Sunday she was there wearing silk stockings. She had bought them out of her tithe, as it was for the church.” Such cases are strange, yet a man in Kansas took his family to the Grand Canyon, using tithe money because they were good Christians and needed a vacation. — S elected .
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