Tke Bible in tke
Ligkt o f tke Bible What tke Bible Says About Itself, and tke Scriptural Waÿ of Studying It. Address Given at Bible Institute. • By DR. A . C . D IXON
John 5:39; 2 Tim. 3:16, 17; 2 Pet. 1:9.
Scriptures” meant, a body of writings marked off from all other writings as inspired and authoritative, what we have from Genesis through Maiachi, the Old Testament writings. It is interest ing to trace in them their own history. God said to Moses, “ write a book” and we have the record that he wrote the book, and the Levites placed it beside the ark of the covenant, if not within it. Just what material he used in writ ing that book I don’t know. He wrote a part of it upon stone. He might have used the papyrus plant, or linen cloth, such as I have seen wrapping -mummies in the British Museum, al most as fresh in appearance as if it had been woven fifty years ago in a New England loom, 4000 years old! He might have used vellum, the skin of animals; but whatever he used, he wrote that book of the law. And it does not strain my faith a bit to be lieve that the very manuscript that Moses wrote was in the hands of Joshua, the very manuscript that Moses wrote Josiah found in the Temple a thousand years afterwards, right where it sometimes gets lost today, and that very manuscript may have been in the hands of Ezra as he read from the pul pit of wood, a great revival the result; and the same manuscript might have been in the hands of the translators 280 years before Christ when they rendered the Old Testament scriptures from the ^Hebrew and Chaldean into the Greek. I have seen two manuscripts older than
?E BIBLE is like the sun; you can study it only in its own light. You cannot study the sun in the light of the moon or the stars, much less of an electric light or a candle. The moon, the
stars, and even the candle light have their places; they are useful, but not useful as substitutes for the sun, and there are other books that are useful, but all of them together are not use ful as a substitute for the Bible. When you read another Book, bring it into the light of the Bible, not the Bible into the light of that. A friend said to me, “ I have just read a book which has thrown immense light on the Bible.” I hastened to buy it, and I had not gone into it 50 pages until I saw that the Bible thre,w a thousand times more light on that book than it did on the Bible. We will now look at this sun in the heavens in its own light. Out of these three Scriptures comes a four-fold definition, a synthetic defini tion, “ Search the Scriptures,” and an analytic definition, “ every Scripture is God-breathed,” a utilitarian definition, “ every Scripture is God-breathed and profitable,” and then, the climax of it all, a comparative definition, “ we have a more sure word of prophecy” . A Synthetic Definition “ Search the Scriptures.” Every Jew to whom Jesus spoke knew what “ the
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