Discerning The
Times
by Martyn
Lloyd-Jones
A Two Chapter Excerpt from his
book Knowing the
Times
From the Back
Cover of the printed booklet: There
are in our modern day two developments that threaten the
very foundation and fabric of Biblical Christianity: the
undoing of the Protestant Reformation and the denial of
the authority of the Bible. These two issues were
masterfully addressed by Martyn Lloyd-Jones, who was in
the opinion of many evangelicals the greatest preacher
of the twentieth century and pastor of Westminster
Chapel in London for thirty years. Preaching back in
1960 and 1961, he dealt with these two concerns with his
characteristic boldness and directness, citing Scripture
and history as irrefutable proof of the need to return
to the principles of the Reformation and Biblical
authority. As you read his words, you will be struck by
how they mirror our day, even though it’s over forty
years later. The same needs exist today, and we pray
that this booklet will have wide circulation. We also
highly recommend the book from which this booklet was
extracted, Knowing the Times
(Banner of Truth Trust).
[The report of an
address given in the Usher Hall, Edinburgh on 5 April,
1960, in commemoration of the Reformation in
Scotland.]
Remembering
the Reformation
Mr Chairman and
Christian friends, I would like to say immediately that
I regard this occasion as one of the greatest privileges
that has ever fallen to my lot. I prize the invitation
that I received from the friends of the Free Church of
Scotland very highly indeed. This is an historic
occasion. We are doing something that I am certain is
well pleasing in the sight of God and which I trust,
under God’s benediction and blessing, will prove to be
of value and of benefit to our souls and, let us hope,
to the whole cause of God in this nation and in all
nations at this present time. I always say, when I have
the pleasure of coming to Scotland, that I am interested
to come, not only because of my concern about the
gospel, but because of the deep feeling of admiration
which I have always had within me for you as a nation
and as a people. And there is certainly nothing in your
long history which is more glorious and more remarkable
than that great movement of God which took place four
hundred years ago, and which we are met tonight to
commemorate. Therefore, for every reason I was very
ready to come here to Edinburgh once
more.
Now our Chairman has
very rightly put to you one of the questions that I also
felt should be put, because it is a question which does
arise, apparently, in the minds of some people. Why,
they wonder, should we consider the Reformation in
Scotland at all at a time like this, with the world as
it is and with the multiplicity of problems that are
pressing in upon us on all sides? Why turn back and
consider what happened four hundred years
ago?
As I understand it
there are two main objections to doing this. The first
is a general objection to looking back, a feeling that
the past has nothing to teach us. For, after all, we are
the people of the twentieth century, the people who have
split the atom, who are encompassing all knowledge and
have advanced to such giddy heights as our forefathers
could not even have imagined. Why then should we, of all
people, look back, and especially look back four hundred
years? The whole climate of opinion today, and indeed
during the last hundred years, has been governed by the
evolutionary theory and hypothesis, which holds that man
advances from age to age and that the present is always
better than the past; this whole climate of thought is
inimical to the idea of looking back and learning from
previous history. That is one
objection.
The other objection
is that we should not hold a meeting like this because
the Reformation was a tragedy. Now this is a view which
is gaining currency very rapidly at present. We are told
that what we should .be considering today is unity, and
that if we spend our time considering the disruption and
division in the church which took place four hundred
years ago, we are doing something sinful. There is,
alas, an increasing body of opinion in Protestant
circles which is saying, openly and unashamedly, that
the Protestant Reformation was a tragedy and that it is
our business to forget it as soon as we can and to do
everything possible to heal the breach, so that we shall
be one again with the Church of Rome, and there shall be
one great world
church.
Those are the two
commonest objections, as I see the situation, which are
brought against what we are engaged in doing this
evening. Why then are we doing it? How do we justify a
gathering such as this, and the other gatherings that
are to follow? Well, let me say quite frankly that there
are wrong and false ways of doing what we are doing here
tonight. There are people who are interested in the past
merely in an antiquarian sense; history happens to be
their great interest in life. They like delving into the
past and reading about the past, not that they are
interested in it in any kind of active philosophic or
religious sense; they just like burrowing in ancient
history. There are people who do this in other realms;
some like collecting old furniture, and the glory of
anything to them is that it is old. They are not
interested in a chair from the standpoint of something
to sit upon; what they are interested in is the age of
the chair. Now that is antiquarianism, and it is
possible for us, of course, to be governed by a purely
antiquarian or historical motive. But there is no value
in that; the times in which we are living are too urgent
and too desperate for us to indulge a mere antiquarian
spirit.
Now the last time I
stood at this desk, I said that I could not speak
without having a text. Well, I am still the same. And it
seemed to me that there were two texts which would not
be inappropriate for this meeting, and for our
consideration this evening. There is a right way and a
wrong way of viewing a great event like the Reformation
and the great men who took part in it. The first, the
right way, we are told of in the Epistle to the Hebrews,
chapter 13, verses 7 and 8: ‘Remember them which have
the rule over you, who have spoken unto you the word of
God: whose faith follow, considering the end of [or, the
outcome of, their lives and of] their conversation.
Jesus Christ the same yesterday, and today, and for
ever.’ That is the right way to do it; we look at these
men in order that we may learn from them, and imitate
and emulate their
example.
But there is a wrong
way of doing this, and we find it in Matthew, chapter
23, verses 29-32. These are terrible and terrifying
words: ‘Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!
because ye build the tombs of the prophets, and garnish
the sepulchres of the righteous, and say, If we had been
in the days of our fathers, we would not have been
partakers with them in the blood of the prophets.
Wherefore ye be witnesses unto yourselves, that ye are
the children of them which killed the prophets. Fill ye
up then the measure of your fathers. Ye serpents, ye
generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of
hell?’
Now those are the
words of the Lord Jesus Christ and He was addressing His
own generation, His own contemporaries. He said, in
effect, You are paying great tribute to the memory of
the prophets; you are looking after and garnishing their
sepulchers and you are saying what great men they were —
How noble, how wonderful, we must keep their memory
alive — and you say what a terrible thing it was that
your forefathers should have put these men to death. If
you had been alive then, you maintain, you would not
have joined them in those wicked deeds; you would have
listened to the prophets, you would have followed them.
You hypocrites, says our Lord, you would have done
nothing of the
sort.
How, then, does He
prove it? Well, He does it in this way. He tests their
sincerity by discovering what their attitude is at the
present to the successors to the prophets. What is their
reaction to the people who are still preaching the same
message as the prophets? He says, You say that you are
admirers of the prophets and yet you are persecuting and
trying to compass the death of a man like myself who is
the modern representative of the same message, and the
same school of prophecy. Ah, says our Lord, it is one
thing to look back and to praise famous men, but that
can be sheer hypocrisy. The test of our sincerity this
evening is this: What do we feel about, and how are we
treating, the men who, today, are preaching the same
message as was preached by John Knox and his fellow
reformers?
So, you see, this
meeting is a very important one for us. You cannot do a
thing like this without examining yourself, without
coming under scrutiny. Our presence indicates that we
are admirers of these great prophets of God, but I
wonder whether we are in reality? So it is a good thing,
it seems to me, that we should come together, if only so
that we can examine ourselves in the light of this word
of our Lord and Saviour Jesus
Christ.
Why then are we
doing this? How do we justify our action? Our Chairman
has already dealt with one of the answers. The fact is
that you simply cannot understand the history of
Scotland unless you know something about the Protestant
Reformation. It is the key to the understanding of the
history of your great country in the last four hundred
years. What Scotland has been she has been, directly and
unmistakably, as a result of the Protestant Reformation.
So if we had no other reason, that is
enough.
You are a nation of
people famous for education, for knowledge, for culture.
Everybody knows that. The peasants of Scotland were
cultured and able, intelligent and intellectual people.
What accounts for that? It is not merely a matter of
blood, because before the Protestant Reformation they
were woefully ignorant, backward, and illiterate. What
is it, then, that has caused your nation to be regarded,
perhaps by the whole world, as supreme in her interest
in education and the pursuit of knowledge? The answer
is, the Protestant Reformation. So, apart from any
religious considerations we have this mighty and
all-important
consideration.
And then I want to
add a third reason. Why are we considering the
Reformation of four hundred years ago? Well, if I am to
be quite honest, I must confess that this is my main
reason: because of the state of affairs today. I am
primarily a preacher, not a lecturer, not an historian,
very fond of history, but not an antiquary, as I have
said. No, I am interested in this because, as a preacher
I am concerned about the present state of affairs which
is increasingly approximating to the state of affairs
that obtained before the Protestant Reformation. You are
aware of the state of the morals of this country, and of
Great Britain in general, before the Reformation: vice,
immorality, sin were rampant. My friends, it is rapidly
becoming the same again! There is a woeful moral and
social declension. We are being surrounded by the very
problems that were most obvious before the Reformation
took place. The moral state of the country, these urgent
social problems, juvenile delinquency, drunkenness,
theft and robbery, vice and crime, they are coming back
as they were before the Protestant
Reformation.
But it is not only a
matter of moral and of social problems. What of the
state of the church? What of the kirk? What about the
numbers who are members of the church? How many even
attend? We are going back to the pre-Reformation
position. What about the authority of the church? What
about the state of doctrine in the church? Before the
Reformation, there was confusion. Is there anything more
characteristic of the church today than doctrinal
confusion, doctrinal indifference — a lack of concern
and a lack of interest? And then perhaps the most
alarming of all, the increase in the power, influence,
and numbers of the Church of Rome, and the romanizing
tendencies that are coming into and being extolled in
the Protestant church! There is no question about this.
This is a mere matter of fact and observation. There is
an obvious tendency to return to the pre-Reformation
position; ceremonies and ritual are increasing and the
Word of God is being preached less and less, sermons are
becoming shorter and shorter. There is an indifference
to true doctrine, a loss of authority, and a consequent
declension, even in the matter of numbers. I wonder,
Christian people, whether I am exaggerating when I
suggest that at the present time we are really engaged
in a great struggle for the very life of the Christian
church, for the essence of the Christian faith? As I see
the situation, it is nothing less alarming than that. We
are fighting for an heritage, for the very things that
were gained by that tremendous movement of four hundred
years ago. That to me is the most urgent reason. We
cannot afford the luxury of being merely antiquarian; we
should be concerned about this because of the state of
affairs in which we find
ourselves.
But, somebody might
say, why go back for the answer to that? Why don’t you
do what is being done everywhere else, and in every
other realm of life? I read an article in a supposedly
evangelical weekly paper not so long ago, which said,
‘Why does the Church stand still?’ The man went on to
say something like this: ‘I see in business and
everywhere else that people are making experiments, they
are employing the backroom boys and the experimenters,
and they are trying to discover new methods, new
machinery, new everything — Why doesn’t the Church do
this? The Church always seems to be looking back.’ They
regard that as something which is wrong. Now the answer
to that, as I see it, can be put like this. I am not at
all sure but that the greatest of all the lessons which
the Protestant Reformation has to teach us is just this,
that the secret of success in the realm of the church
and of the things of the Spirit, is to go back. What
happened in essence four hundred years ago was that
these men went back to the first century, they went back
to the New Testament, they went back to the Bible.
Suddenly they were awakened to this message and they
just went back to it. There is nothing more interesting,
as one reads the stories of Luther and of Calvin, than
to notice the way in which they kept on discovering that
they had been rediscovering what Augustine had already
discovered, and which had been forgotten. Indeed I
suggest that perhaps the greatest of all the lessons of
the Protestant Reformation is that the way of recovery
is always to go back, back to the primitive pattern, to
the origin, to the norm and the standard which are to be
found alone in the New Testament. That is exactly what
happened four hundred years ago. These men went back to
the beginning, and they tried to establish a church
conforming to the New Testament pattern. And so, let us
be guided by them, as we look at them this evening and
as we try to garner certain lessons from
them.
What, then, happened
four hundred years ago? Well, whatever your views may
be, you will have to admit that it was one of the most
remarkable historical phenomena that have ever taken
place. It is no exaggeration to say that the Protestant
Reformation changed and turned the entire course of
history, not only the history of the church but secular
history too. There is no question about this, and it is
granted by historians, that the Reformation laid the
foundation of the whole democratic view of government.
That is a fact of history. All the nations of the world
at present are looking to the United States of America.
How did the United States of America ever come into
being? It would never have come into being were it not
for the Protestant Reformation. The Puritan fathers who
crossed the Atlantic in the Mayflower
were men who were products of
the Reformation, and it was the desire not only for
religious liberty, but also for democratic liberty, that
drove them to face the hazards of crossing the Atlantic
at that time and to establish a new life, a new state,
and a new system of government in the New World. You
cannot explain the story of the United States of America
except in terms of the Protestant
Reformation.
The Reformation gave
life-blood to the whole democratic notion in the realm
of politics, and the consequences, as judged from a
social and from a moral standpoint, simply baffle
description. This country of yours, from being a
dissolute, drunken, and illiterate country, became
famous throughout the world for her sober, righteous,
able, intelligent people. And it was the Protestant
Reformation that led to
it.
My difficulty on
this occasion is to know what not to say. The theme as
you see, is endless. But let me interject this before I
proceed, for it is one of the greatest lessons which
need to be learned at the present time. Everybody today
is aware of the moral problem, and they are trying to
deal with it along various lines: acts of Parliament,
prison reform, psychiatric treatment in the prisons, and
the various other expedients which are advocated. But
they do not seem to be very successful, do they? Why
not? For the reason that you cannot have morality
without godliness. The tragedy of the last hundred years
has been due to the fallacy of imagining that you could
shed Christian doctrine but hold on to Christian ethics.
That has been the controlling notion. But it cannot be
done. There is one verse in Paul’s Epistle to the
Romans, chapter 1, verse 18, which should have put us
right on this once and for ever: ‘For the wrath of God
is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and
unrighteousness of men.’ You notice the order —
ungodliness first, unrighteousness second. If you do not
have a godly people, you will never have a righteous
people. You cannot have righteousness without godliness.
And the Protestant Reformation is the most striking
proof of this that the world has ever known. Once you
have godliness, righteousness and morality follow. We
are today trying to have morality, righteousness,
and a good ethical conception without the godliness, and
the facts are proving, before our eyes, that it simply
cannot be done. So if you are a sociologist in this
meeting, if you are a politician, if you are just
interested in the moral problem, then I say to you, go
and read the history of the Reformation. There you will
see that the only way to exalt your nation, is to put
godliness first, and righteousness will then
follow.
As I have said, the
Reformation was not purely a religious movement. It was
a general movement and it was witnessed, not only in
Scotland, but in England, France, Holland, Switzerland,
Germany, and various other countries on the
Continent. It was a great movement of the Spirit of God
in which your country was given her share and
portion.
Well, what do we
find as we look at it? I can only give you some
headings. If you want the details, I commend to you very
warmly and happily the book by our Chairman, which has
already been mentioned to you. It gives a clear,
succinct account of what actually happened, and it is a
thrilling and moving story. Buy it, read it, and digest
it. He gives you the general setting and shows you the
peculiar features in Scotland. The one excellence, of
course, which we who come from south of the border have
to grant you is that your reformation was a pure
reformation. In Scotland, there was no question of a
king trying to get out of his matrimonial difficulties
and entanglements. You were free of that. It was a pure
reformation and the result was, I believe, that you had
a purer church. But, generally speaking, what happened
here was the same as what happened in most other
countries.
What do we see then?
Well, of course the first thing that attracts our
attention is the men, the men that God used. Look at
them, Patrick Hamilton, George Wishart, John Knox,
Andrew Melville, John Welsh, and many others. Here are
men worthy of the name! Heroic, big men, men of granite!
Our Chairman need not apologize for being a history
worshipper, I am a hero worshipper! Think what you like
of me, I like to look at and to read of a big man! In an
age of pygmies such as this, it is a good thing to read
about great men. We are all so much alike and of the
same size, but here were giants in the land, able men,
men of gigantic intellect, men on a big scale in the
realm of mind and logic and reason. Then look at their
zeal, look at their courage! I frankly am an admirer of
a man who can make a queen tremble! These are the things
that strike us at once about these men. But then I
suppose that the most notable thing of all was the fact
of the burning conviction that dwelt within them; this
is what made them the men they
were.
What were these
convictions? We have already been referred to some of
them; let me add some others. What did these men
believe? What did they teach? What were their
characteristics?
Here is the first,
obviously: their belief in the authority of this Book.
The pre-Reformation church was moribund and asleep under
a scholastic philosophy that displayed great cleverness,
with intellectual and critical acumen. But it was all in
the clouds and dealt with vague generalities and
concepts, while the people were kept in utter ignorance.
The men who did the teaching and the lecturing argued
about philosophic concepts, comparing this view with
that, and indulging in refinements and minutiae. But, in
contrast, the great thing that stands out about the
reformers was that they were men who went back to the
Bible. They said, nothing matters but this. This, they
said, is the Word of God in the Old Testament and in the
New Testament, this is not theory, supposition, or
speculation, this is the living God speaking to men: He
gave His Word to the prophets, they wrote it; He gave it
to the apostles, they recorded it; and here it is for
us. Here we have something which is in a category of its
own, the living Word of God speaking to men about
Himself, about men, about the only way they can come
together and live together. They stood for the authority
of the Bible, not for scholastic
philosophy.
You see, my friends,
the importance of looking back at the Reformation. Is
not this the greatest need at the present time, to come
back to this Word of God? Is this authoritative or is it
not? Am I in any position to stand above this Book, and
look down at it and say, That is not true, this or that
must come out? Is my mind, is my twentieth-century
knowledge the ultimate judge and decider as to the
veracity of this teaching? It is since the time, a
hundred years ago, when that notion began to creep in,
that the church has been going down. But the reformers
based everything upon this Book as the Word of God to
man, which they were not to judge but to preach. And you
and I have got to return to this. There can be no
health, there can be no authority in the church, until
she comes back to this basic authority. It is idle to
talk about this as the Word of God in a sense which
still allows you and me to decide that certain things in
it are not true! The Book hangs together, the Lord Jesus
Christ believed the Old Testament. After His
resurrection, He took His disciples through the books of
Moses and the Psalms and the prophets. He says, I am
there, let me show you myself there. Read them, why have
you not understood them? Why have you not believed all
that the prophets have written? That was their trouble,
it has always been the trouble of the church in periods
of declension, and we must come back to the Protestant
reformers’ position and recognize that we have no
authority apart from the authority of this Word of
God.
In this Book they
found also the mighty doctrine of the sovereignty of
God, which taught them not to approach their problems in
a subjective manner as you and I are prone to do. Their
concern was not, how can I get a bit of help, how can I
get some physical healing, how can I get guidance, how
can I get happiness and peace, how can I get a friend
who will help me in my loneliness? No, they saw
themselves before this almighty, sovereign God and the
one question was, How can a man be just with God? They
bowed before Him! They were godly men; they were
God-fearing men. God was at the centre of their
thoughts, the controller of their activities and their
lives. The sovereignty of God! They did not talk much
about free will, as I read them, but they knew that God
was over all, and He was to be worshipped and to be
feared.
And then there was
the great central doctrine of the Lord Jesus Christ and
His perfect finished work. They did not feel sorry for
Him as they looked at Him on the cross, they saw Him
bearing their sins, they saw God laying on Him the
iniquity of us all, they saw Him as a substitute, they
saw God putting our guilt upon Him and punishing Him for
our guilt. The substitutionary atonement! They preached
it; it was everything to them. The finished, complete,
atoning work of Christ. They gloried in it! And that in
turn, of course, led to the great pivotal central
doctrine of which we were reminded in the reading,
justification by faith
only.
Now, I may be
mistaken, but as I see the contemporary situation, the
greatest battle of all, perhaps, at the moment is the
battle for justification by faith only. ‘Works’ have
come back! I was reading a religious newspaper a
fortnight ago which carried the words ‘Saint Gilbert’ as
a heading to a paragraph. The writer of the paragraph
was of the opinion that this man whose Christian name
was Gilbert was undoubtedly a saint and we must accord
him the name and the dignity of a saint. Then he went on
to say this: ‘Of course I know that in actual practice
he called himself a rationalistic agnostic.’ Though this
man Gilbert called himself a rationalistic agnostic, a
so-called Christian paper says that nevertheless he was
a saint. And they justified their assertion on the basis
of his life: he was a good man, he was a noble man, he
had high and exalted ideals, he gave much of his life to
the propagation of the League of Nations union, and to
uplift the human race, he tried to put an end to war, he
made protests against war; therefore, the argument goes,
though he denied the being of God, though he did not
regard the Bible as the Word of God, though he did not
believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, nevertheless, he was a
saint. What makes a man a saint? Oh, his works, his
life!
We are confronted
again by a generation that no longer believes in
justification by faith only. We are told that ‘the
greatest Christian’ of this century is a man whose
belief in the deity of Christ, to put it at its mildest,
was very doubtful, who certainly did not believe in the
atonement, whose creed seemed to be what he calls
‘reverence for life’— yet we are told that he is the
greatest saint and Christian of the twentieth century!
Look at his life, they say, look what he has done; he
gave up a great profession and he has gone out to
Central Africa, look what he has suffered, look what he
has given up, he might be wealthy, he might be
prosperous, but he is living like Christ, he is
imitating Christ, he has done what Christ has done! You
see, it does not matter what you believe. According to
this teaching, it is the life that makes a man a
Christian. If you live a good life, if you live a life
of sacrifice, if you try to uplift the race, if you try
to imitate Christ, you are a Christian, though you deny
the deity of Christ, though you deny His atonement,
though you deny the miraculous and the supernatural, the
resurrection and many other things, nevertheless you are
a great Christian and a great
saint!
My friends, John
Knox and other men risked their lives, day after day,
just to deny such teaching and to assert that a man is
justified by faith alone without works, that a man is
saved not by what he does but by the grace of God, that
God justifies the ungodly, that God reconciles sinners
unto Himself. It is all of God and none of man, and
works must not be allowed to intrude themselves at any
point or in any shape or form. The battle for
justification by faith only is on again! And if this
meeting and these celebrations do nothing else, I trust
that they will lead us to a rediscovery of the absolute
centrality of the doctrine of justification by faith
only.
These reformers were
also men who believed in possessing assurance of
salvation. Now I am somewhat more controversial, am I
not? Do you believe in assurance of salvation as the
Protestant reformers did? I have known people who have
paid great tribute to the memory of John Knox and
others, who deny the possibility of assurance and regard
it as almost an impertinence. I know that the
Westminster Confession of Faith is careful to say that a
man can be saved without assurance of salvation, that
saving faith and assured faith are not the same thing,
and I am happy to agree with the Westminster Confession.
But let me say this: The Protestant reformers were so
against the Roman Catholic Church which teaches that a
man can never be certain, that they did not draw that
distinction, and they would have been equally against a
modern movement, which likes to claim itself as
reformed, but which denies the possibility of assurance.
These Protestant reformers said that a man was not truly
saved unless he had assurance! Without going all the way
with them, we must notice this, that whenever the church
is powerful and mighty and authoritative, her preachers
and ministers have always been men who speak out of the
full assurance of faith, and know in whom they have
believed. It was for that reason that the martyrs could
smile in the face of kings and queens, and regents and
local potentates, and go gladly to the stake; they knew
that from the stake they would wake in heaven and in
glory and see Him face to face! They rejoiced in the
assurance of
salvation!
Then, to make my
little list complete, I must add a few more of their
main convictions. They were men who believed in the
universal priesthood of believers. They held to
simplicity of worship. Away with idols, away with
vestments, away with forms and ceremonies. A simple
service! And not least important, a pure church. The
three marks of the church that they taught are these: it
is a place where the pure gospel is preached, where the
sacraments are administered, and where discipline is
exercised. A pure church! No room for all and sundry; no
room for men who are doubtful, no room for men who show
by their lives that they love the world and its ways and
its sin. No! A pure church, because the church is the
body of Christ! Those were their convictions, those were
the doctrines which they
held.
The other thing I
want to note about them is this: their power in prayer.
We must not think of these reformers only in terms of
doctrine, though we must start with that. This other
thing was equally notable and remarkable about them,
they were men of prayer. Did not Mary Queen of Scots
fear the prayers of John Knox more than she feared the
English soldiers? Of course she did! Why? Because he was
a powerful man in prayer. Have you read about the prayer
life of John Welsh, the son-in-law of John Knox? There
was a man who spent nights in prayer; his wife would
wake up at night and find him on his knees almost
stone-cold. What was he doing? Praying for the
townspeople to whom he was ministering, asking for
power, asking for authority. These men, every one of
them, were men of great prayerfulness; they spent hours
of their lives in prayer, knowing that in and of
themselves, though their doctrines were right and
orthodox, they could do nothing. I like to hear that
story of another of these men, Robert Bruce. We read
that when he was praying with some ministers one day, he
felt they were lifeless and dull. He cried to God that
the Holy Spirit might come down upon them but nothing
seemed to be happening. Then as he began banging on the
table they were all conscious of God coming among them
and thereafter men spoke of Bruce as one who knocked
down the Holy Ghost among them! Is not that the kind of
man we need today? Where is the power, where is the
influence, where is the authority? These reformers were
only men like us but they knew these things. They were
men of prayer, who lived in the presence of God and who
knew they could do nothing without
Him.
This brings me to
the last point: their preaching. We have been reminded
that the reformers re-introduced preaching and that they
put preaching at the centre instead of ceremonies and
sacraments. Yes, but let us remember that there is
preaching and preaching. Merely to speak for twenty
minutes is not necessarily preaching. Though you may
have taken a text and divided it up very cleverly, it is
not necessarily preaching. Oh, there is preaching and
preaching! What is the test of preaching? I will tell
you; it is power! ‘Our gospel came unto you’, says the
apostle to the Thessalonians in the First Epistle,
chapter 1, verse 5, ‘not in word only, but also in
power, and in the Holy Ghost, and in much assurance’.
Who had the assurance? The preacher! He knew something
was happening, he knew God was using him, he knew that
he was the vehicle and channel of divine and eternal
grace. ‘Much assurance’! And that was the sort of
preaching you had from the Protestant reformers. It was
prophetic preaching, not priestly preaching. What we
have today, is what I would call priestly. Very nice,
very quiet, very ornate, sentences turned beautifully,
prepared carefully. That is not prophetic preaching! No,
what is needed is authority! Do you think that John Knox
could make Mary Queen of Scots tremble with some
polished little essay? These men did not write their
sermons with an eye to publication in books, they were
preaching to the congregation in front of them, anxious
and desirous to do something, to effect something, to
change people. It was authoritative. It was
proclamation, it was
declaration.
Is it surprising
that the church is as she is today; we no longer believe
in preaching, do we? You used to have long sermons here
in Scotland. I am told you do not like them now, and woe
unto the preacher who goes on beyond twenty minutes! I
was reading in the train yesterday about the first
Principal of Emmanuel College in Cambridge, Chadderton,
who lived towards the end of the sixteenth century. He
was preaching on one occasion, and after he had preached
for two hours he stopped and apologized to the people:
‘Please forgive me, I have got beyond myself, I must not
go on like this.’ And the congregation shouted out, ‘For
God’s sake go on!’ You know I am beginning to think that
I shall not have preached until something like that
happens to me. Prophetic! Authoritative! Proclamation!
Declaration! Their view of preaching was certainly not
our modern idea of having a friendly discussion. Have
you noticed how we have less and less preaching on the
wireless programmes? Instead we have discussion. Let the
young people say what they think, let us win them by
letting them speak; and we will have a friendly chat and
discussion, we will show them that after all we are
nice, decent fellows, there is nothing nasty about us;
and we will gain their confidence; they must not think
that we are unlike them! If you are on the television
you start by producing your pipe and lighting it; you
show that you are like the people, one of them! Was John
Knox like one of the people? Was John Knox a matey,
friendly, nice chap with whom you could have a
discussion? Thank God he was not! Scotland would not be
what she has been for four centuries if John Knox had
been that kind of man. Can you imagine John Knox having
tips and training as to how he should conduct and
comport himself before the television camera, so as to
be nice and polite and friendly and gentlemanly? Thank
God prophets are made of stronger stuff! An Amos, a
Jeremiah, a John the Baptist in the wilderness in his
camel-hair shirt — a strange fellow, a lunatic, they
said, but they went and listened to him because he was a
curiosity, and as they listened they were convicted!
Such a man was John Knox, with the fire of God in his
bones and in his belly! He preached as they all
preached, with fire and power, alarming sermons,
convicting sermons, humbling sermons, converting
sermons, and the face of Scotland was changed: the
greatest epoch in your long history had
begun!
There, as I see it,
were the great and outstanding characteristics of these
men. What was the secret of it all? It was not the men,
as I have been trying to show you, great as they were.
It was God! God in His sovereignty raising up His men.
And God knows what He is doing. Look at the gifts He
gave John Knox as a natural man; look at the mind He
gave to Calvin and the training He gave him as a lawyer
to prepare him for his great work; look at Martin
Luther, that volcano of a man; God preparing His men in
the different nations and countries. Of course, even
before He produced them, He had been preparing the way
for them. Let us never forget John Wyclif and John Hus;
let us never forget the Waldensians and all the martyrs
of these terrible Middle Ages! God was preparing the
way; He sent His men at the right moment, and the mighty
events followed.
Shall I try to draw
certain lessons for ourselves? The conclusion of all
this is that righteousness, and righteousness alone,
exalts a nation, and there is no righteousness without a
preceding godliness. The times are cruel; the world is
in a desperate plight; there is an appalling moral
breakdown before our eyes. Marriage is breaking down,
home life disappearing, little children not knowing home
and loving parents. It is a tragedy! Can nothing be
done? Is there no hope? To me the main message of the
Protestant Reformation of four hundred years ago is to
point us to the one and only hope. Things were bad in
Scotland when God called John Knox and sent him out as a
burning flame and the others with him. Our position is
not hopeless, for God remains, and with God nothing
shall be impossible! The conditions could not have
been worse than they were immediately before the
Reformation; yet in spite of that the change came. Why?
Because God was there and God sent it. So the only
question we need ask is the old question of Elisha face
to face with his problem: ‘Where is the Lord God of
Elijah?’ And I want to ask that question this evening:
Where is the God of John Knox? Our meeting will have
been in vain if we do not ask that question. If we stop
with John Knox it is not enough; the question is, Where
is the God of John Knox, He who can give us the power,
the authority, the might, the courage, and everything we
need, where is He? How can we find Him? I suggest to you
that the answer is to be found again in the Epistle to
the Hebrews, in chapter 4 this time, in verses 14 to 16.
They seem to me not inappropriate as I end this
evening.
How can we find this
God? Here is the answer: ‘Let us hold fast the
confession.’ It does not actually mean there, of course,
the Westminster Confession, though in reality it
does! Hold fast the old Scots Confession. You will never
find the God of John Knox without that. ‘Seeing then
that we have a great high priest that is passed into the
heavens, Jesus the Son of God, let us hold fast the
confession’. What is the confession? It is the
confession about ‘Jesus the Son of God’, our great high
priest; the Scots Confession, the Westminster
Confession, the faith of these Fathers. We must have it
because without it, who dares go into the presence of
God? As it is put there in Hebrews 4:26: ‘Let us
therefore come boldly unto the throne of grace.’ What is
the ‘therefore’? The knowledge that we possess, that we
have got this great high priest that has passed through
the heavens, Jesus the Son of God, and that He is
‘touched with the feeling of our infirmities, but was in
all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin’.
Where is the God of Elijah? How can we find Him? How can
we receive the power that we need? We must go back to
the confession, go back to the faith, go back to the
Word, believe its truths, and in the light of it go with
boldness, confidence, assurance, to the throne of grace;
to obtain mercy and find grace to help in time of need.
We are living in an appalling time of need, sin and evil
rampant; the whole world is quaking and shaking. Is the
end upon us? The times are alarming- ‘time of need’. The
one thing necessary is to find this God, and there
seated at His right hand, the One who has been in this
world and knows all about it, has seen its shame, its
sin, its vileness, its rottenness face to face; friend
of publicans and sinners, a Man who knew the hatred and
the animosity of the Pharisees, scribes and Sadducees,
the doctors of the law, and Pontius Pilate. The whole
world was against Him, and yet He triumphed through it
all; He is there, and He is our representative and high
priest. Believe in Him, hold fast to the confession. Let
us go in His name with boldness unto the throne of
grace, and as certainly as we do so we shall obtain the
mercy that we need for our sinfulness and
unfaithfulness, and we shall be given the grace to help
us in our time of need, in our day and generation. The
God of John Knox is still there, and still the same, and
thank God, Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today,
and for ever. Oh, that we might know the God of John
Knox!
How Can We See a Return to the
Bible?
[An address given at
the National Bible Rally, organized by the Evangelical
Alliance, at the Royal Albert Hall on 24 October,
1961.]
As we are met together on this
great and interesting occasion, it seems to me that
there are two main things which we need to do. The first
is to remember and commemorate the printing of the
Authorized Version of the Bible in it 1611. The
second great purpose of this gathering is to call back
the people of this nation to the
Bible.
I will take the second purpose
first. Why should we come together in this manner and
call the men and women of this country back to the
consideration of this book which we call the Bible?
There are many answers that can be given to that
question. But what I regard as the most urgent reason of
all is simply that the conditions in which we find
ourselves at this very moment are, in the main, due to
the departure of men and women from the Word of
God.
This is true, in the
first place, with regard to the Christian church
herself. We are here, I take it, to be honest and to
search ourselves. These are no days for coming together
just to enjoy ourselves. The times are evil; the times
are out of joint. I trust we are all here animated with
a desire to do something, and to discover what we have
to do, in order to deal with the appalling conditions
which prevail round and about us. I say that the
condition of the church herself is due to her departure
from the authority of the Bible. The Christian church in
this country is in a deplorable condition. The
statistics tell us that only some ten per cent of the
people of this country claim to be even nominally
Christian; ninety per cent of the population is entirely
outside the church! It was not always thus.
What has been the cause of this;
why the difference in the condition of our churches
today as distinct from what they were a hundred years
ago? I know there are many explanations put forward.
People point to the world wars, and I do not dispute
that they did contribute to it. They also point to the
wireless, the television, the motorcar, and all these
other agencies that are militating against the work and
the appeal of the church. I am prepared to grant to such
causes a certain amount of influence, but when you come
to examine this question seriously and soberly, there is
only one adequate answer for the fact that the masses of
the people are no longer attending places of worship. It
is due to the loss of the authority of the Scriptures.
And to what is that due? Without question, it was the
devastating Higher Critical movement, so called, which
began in Germany around the 1830s, and which
subsequently came and infected this and most other
countries. This meant the substitution of the mind of
men and of what is called ‘philosophy’, for divine
revelation. It was claimed that this Book must be
regarded as every other book, and examined in the same
way as every other book is examined. Added to this,
there was the Darwinian teaching which came in 1859 and
immediately became so popular. Then psychology played
its part. And in these ways men began to look at this
Book, not as they had hitherto looked on it throughout
the centuries as the Word of the living God, but as a
human word. They began to talk more and more, not about
the power of the Holy Spirit in the preacher, but of his
scholarship, of his knowledge of philosophy and the
sciences, and of psychology. Human reason was put upon
the throne, and the very pulpits of the church herself
were engaged in undermining the faith of the masses of
the people in this Book as the Word of
God.
It is time we face
these facts. We are trying to do all we can to improve
the existing condition. But, if this is the major
problem, is it not obvious that nothing except a
rectifying of this
can deal with the situation that
confronts us? There is no question about the reason for
what has happened. Men began to talk about ‘the assured
results’ of scholarship and of criticism, and the masses
of the people believed these ‘great experts’. Tonight,
of course, we know that ‘the assured results’ are not
quite as assured, and increasingly, we find the scholars
having to abandon the positions which were put with such
dogmatism before the people at the end of the last
century and in the first fourteen years or so of this
century. Not only so, we know that liberalism, the
modernism, so called, which was so popular up until
1914, has become utterly outmoded. The First World War
shattered it; the confidence in man and in man’s own
ability ended with that war. The old liberalism which
emptied our churches is as dead as the dodo and utterly
discredited.
Unfortunately, that
does not mean that people have returned to the Book.
They seem to be prepared to do everything except come
back to the Book and submit themselves to it. Some of
them are cleverly trying to say that you must take the
message of the Book, but not the facts. Others say that
God speaks in the Book through great acts, but not in
propositions and not in teaching. In other words, they
still will not submit to the authority of the Book. It
is they who decide what to accept and what to reject,
what to believe and what not to believe, so that though
the old liberalism and modernism are utterly
discredited, the position in reality is no better. I am
here to assert that this is one of the main causes, if
not indeed the main cause, of the decline of the
Christian church.
There is one other
cause of present conditions which I add with regret, and
that is statements made by Christian ministers from
Christian pulpits, which are nothing but blank
contradictions of the basic teaching of the Bible. We
hear the ridicule that is poured on the doctrine of sin,
the rejection of the miracles and of the precious blood
of Christ, and, to cap it all, recently, a statement to
the effect that we can ‘expect to meet atheists in
heaven’. If this is true, if we are to expect to meet
atheists in heaven, if a man who does not believe in God
can go to heaven, why should we ask him to believe in
the Bible? Why should we have a Christian church at all?
If an atheist who lives a good life is to go to heaven,
there is no need for the Christian church and all the
organizations, and there is absolutely no need for the
Scriptures. The masses of the people are outside the
Christian church because they have been given the
impression that the Christian church herself no longer
believes in the Book as
authoritative.
I say that this is
the explanation not only of the state of the church, but
also of the world in general, and conditions in general
in this country. Look at our industrial problems which
are so acute at the moment and so dangerous. Look at our
social and moral problems, to which reference has
already been made. What are these due to? It seems to me
that there is only one adequate answer: it is that the
whole notion and concept of law and of duty, of
punishment and retribution, has gone. As men have ceased
to believe in the Bible, they have ceased to believe in
law, in justice, and in righteousness. So the whole
notion of punishment and retribution is derided and
dismissed. Indeed, I am afraid we can go a step
further and say that one of the major problems in this
country tonight is this, that the whole idea of
responsibility is disappearing rapidly. We are
approaching a state in which a prisoner standing in the
dock in a law court will be examined in terms of
disease, or what they call ‘diminished responsibility’,
rather than in terms of crime. The whole notion of crime
is going out. A man behaves as he does, it is argued,
because of the odd combination of the ductless glands in
his body, or because he was not well at a particular
moment. Today it is a case of diminished responsibility;
there is no such thing as a crime, there is no such
thing as a criminal; it is all a problem for the
doctors. So with the disappearance of the law of God
goes the disappearance of belief in any law, in the
notions of punishment, correction, and discipline. Thus
— and I could elaborate so easily — the state of the
church and of the world in general is due to this one
major cause: there is no authority, no ultimate
sanction, to which men feel compelled to
bow.
If that is so, the
question that should be uppermost in our minds here
tonight is how to get the people back to the Bible? How
can we bring them back again to this Book? There are
many suggestions put before us on this subject, and I
want to look at one in particular. We have been reminded
tonight, and very rightly, of the part that this Book
has played in the history of the life of this country.
There is no question about it; the true greatness of
this country was laid down and established, whatever you
may think of it politically, in the Cromwellian period
and by men in the House of Commons who believed this to
be the Word of the living God. You do not understand the
history of this country if you do not know something
about the influence of this
Book.
However, I do not
hesitate to say tonight that it is not the appeal to
history that is needed. There are people who are so
ignorant that they are not interested in the past, or in
the past glory of this country. They think they have got
something better. Others — and the statesmen
particularly are very fond of doing this — talk about
the Bible and praise it as literature. Of course, as
literature, it is incomparable, but merely to tell
people that this is ‘great literature’ is not going to
make them submit to its message. Look, they say, at the
influence it has had upon the great masterpieces of our
literature. Perfectly true, but the average man is not
interested in that sort of thing; he is out for his
bingo, or whatever he may chance to call his pleasure.
That is not the way to bring them
back.
What else can we do?
Well, there are many who are engaged in a kind of
defence of the Bible. That is sometimes called
apologetics. I am not here to say a word against it.
Archaeology comes into that department, and we thank God
for it and for Professor Wiseman as one of the
distinguished people who are practising in this realm.
But that is not going to be enough either. I agree with
what Spurgeon said about this: ‘You don’t defend a lion,
you just let him loose’, and the same is true of the
Bible. Apologetics are all right as far as they go and
they can be helpful in strengthening the faith, but we
are living in a period when we need something much more.
Still less must we fall back upon any tendency to
accommodate the teaching of the Bible to modern learning
and to modern views. Sometimes, I fear, I see a tendency
to do that, even among evangelical people. Why should we
be afraid of the scientist? He has no facts which
interfere with this Book. We must not accommodate them;
we must not try to placate people and please them. That
is not the way to handle this
Book.
And now I must say a
word — and I do so with considerable hesitation and
trepidation — but it seems to me that, if we are to face
the facts, this is unavoidable. I suppose that the most
popular of all the proposals at the present time for
bringing people back to Scripture is this: Let’s have a
new translation of the Bible. We have had one in this
year, 1961 [The New English Bible]. The argument
is that the people are not reading the Bible any longer
because they do not understand its language, its archaic
terms. ‘What does your modern man, what does your modern
Teddy boy know about justification, sanctification, and
all these biblical terms?’ That is the question. No,
they say, it is no good; they cannot understand the
Bible. And so we are told that the one thing necessary
is to have a translation which Tom, Dick, and Harry will
understand. I began to feel about six months ago that we
had almost reached a stage at which the Authorized
Version was being dismissed, to be thrown into the limbo
of things forgotten, no longer of any value. Need I
apologize for saying a word in favour of the Authorized
Version in this
gathering? Well, whatever you
may think, I am going to do it, and I am going to do it
without any
apology.
As I read the
Christian periodicals earlier this year-and I am sorry
to have to add, even the evangelical ones — and all the
articles about this new translation, I almost began to
think for a moment that the letters NEB stood for New
Evangelical Bible. Everybody seemed to have succumbed to
the ballyhoo, the propaganda, and the advertising.
I began to wonder whether evangelical people really had
lost the vital spark; but, thank God, by tonight I think
I see signs of a recovery and a return to
sanity.
We must examine this
for a moment. Let us, first of all, be clear about the
basic proposition laid down by the Protestant reformers
that we must have a Bible which is, as they put it,
‘understanded of the people’. That is common sense; that
is obvious. We all agree too that we must never be
obscurantist; we must never approach the Bible in a mere
antiquarian spirit. Nobody wants to be like that, nor to
defend such attitudes. But there is a very grave danger
incipient in much of the argument that is being
presented today for these new translations. There is a
danger of our surrendering something that is vital and
essential.
Look at it like
this. Take the argument about the terms that the modern
man does not understand, the words ‘justification’,
‘sanctification’, and so on. I want to ask a question:
When did the ordinary man ever understand those terms? I
am told the modern Teddy boy does not understand them.
But consider the colliers to whom John Wesley and George
Whitefield used to preach in the eighteenth century. Did
they understand them? They had not even been to a day
school, an elementary school. They could not read, they
could not write. Yet these were the terms which they
heard, and the Authorized Version was the version used.
This is a very specious argument, but it does not hold
water. The common people have never
understood these terms. However,
I want to add something to this. We must be very careful
in using such an argument against the Authorized
Version, for the reason that the very nature and
character of the truth which the Bible presents to us is
such that it is extremely difficult to put into words at
all. We are not describing an animal or a machine; we
are concerned here with something which is spiritual,
something which does not belong to this world at all,
and which, as the apostle Paul in writing to the
Corinthians, reminds us, ‘the princes of this world’ do
not know. Human wisdom is of no value here; it is a
spiritual truth; it is something that is altogether
different. This is truth about God primarily, and
because of that it is a mystery. There is a glory
attached to it, there is a wonder, and something which
is amazing. The apostle Paul, who probably understood it
better than most, looking at its contents, stands back
and says, ‘Great is the mystery of godliness’ (1 Tim.
3:16).
Yet we are told, It
must be put in such simple terms and language that
anybody taking it up and reading it is going to
understand all about it. My friends, this is nothing but
sheer nonsense! What we must do is to educate the masses
of the people up to the Bible, not bring the
Bible down
to their level. One of the
greatest troubles in life today is that everything is
being brought down to the same level; everything is
being cheapened. The common man is made the standard and
the authority; he decides everything, and everything has
got to be brought down to him. You are getting it on
your wireless, your television, in your newspapers;
everywhere standards are coming down and down. Are we to
do this with the Word of God? I say, No! What has always
happened in the past has been this: an ignorant,
illiterate people in this country and in foreign
countries, coming into salvation, have been educated up
to the Book and have begun to understand it, and to
glory in it, and to praise God for it. I am here to say
that we need to do the same at this present time. What
we need, therefore, is not to replace the Authorized
Version with what, I am tempted at times to call, the
ITV edition of the Bible [in 1961, ITV was the only
British television channel financed by advertising]
We need rather to teach and to train people up to the
standard and the language and the dignity and the glory
of the old Authorized
Version.
I am here to suggest
that we ought to protest against the dropping of great
words like ‘propitiation’ and ‘redemption’ which are
very essential to a true understanding of our gospel.
And I protest against a translation that translates 2
Timothy 3:16 like this: ‘Every inspired scripture has
its use for teaching the truth.’ That is an obvious
statement but it is not what the apostle Paul wrote. The
correct translation is ‘All Scripture is God-breathed
and is profitable’. Paul does not speak of ‘every
Scripture that is inspired’ because every Scripture
is inspired. The translators
have perpetuated the error of the Revised Version, which
even the Revised Standard Version of America has
corrected and brought back to the translation of the
Authorized
Version.
As I leave this aspect of the
matter, my only remaining comment upon this new version,
which is so popular, is to quote two statements, first
from the Times Literary
Supplement of the 24 March. This is not a Christian
publication, but it is a very scholarly one, and a very
learned one, and this is what a contributor says: ‘What
then is lost in this new translation is dimension in
depth and in time, and with dimension, beauty and
mystery. In short,’ he goes on, ‘insofar as religion is
rational, social, simple, communal, historical, the new
Bible may help. Insofar as religion touches and
satisfies men’s deepest aspirations and needs, it is
almost all loss.’ Such is the opinion of the Times Literary
Supplement. It is not the view of some ignorant
evangelical like myself, or of Mr Terence Brown [The
General Secretary of the Trinitarian Bible Society] who
has been so vilified. Here is a learned writer in the Times Literary
Supplement. But let me also quote to you an
Archbishop of the Anglican communion, the Very Rev
Philip Harrington who is the Anglican Archbishop of
Quebec, a learned, scholarly man and the author of two
massive volumes on the early Christian church. This is
how he writes: ‘The intelligent reader will find much of
it that is helpful and even illuminating, but he must
keep his old Authorized Version by his side in order to
find out what the apostles or prophets actually said, if
that is what he wants to know.’ I am free to confess
that I came nearer to becoming an Anglican when I read
that than ever in my life! But the Archbishop does not
stop at that point — there are archbishops and
archbishops it seems to me! — he adds: ‘When the old and
new differ in meaning, King James, at least in the
Revised Version of 1881, will be correct ninety-nine
times out of a hundred.’ That is the opinion of the
Anglican Archbishop of Quebec, writing this year on the
New English
Bible.
Very well, my
friends, let me say a word for the old book, the old
Authorized Version. It was translated by fifty-four men,
every one of them a great scholar, and published in
1611. And here is another thing to commend it to you:
this Authorized Version came out at a time when the
church had not yet divided. I mean by that she had not
yet divided into Anglican and Nonconformist. I think
there is an advantage even in that. They were all still
as one, with very few exceptions, when the Authorized
Version was
produced.
Another important point to
remember is this. The Authorized Version was produced
some time after that great climactic event which we call
the Protestant Reformation. There had been time by then
to see some of the terrible horrors of Rome and all she
stood for. The early reformers had too much on their
plate, as it were; Luther may have left many gaps; but
when this translation was produced, there had been time
for men to be able to see Rome for what she really was.
These translators were all men who were orthodox in the
faith. They believed that the Bible is the infallible
Word of God and they submitted to it as the final
authority, as against the spurious claims of Rome, as
against the appeals to the Church Fathers, and
everything else. Here, I say, were fifty-four men,
scholars and saintly, who were utterly submitted to the
Book. You have never had that in any other version. Here
and here alone you have a body of men who were
absolutely committed to it, who gave themselves to it,
who did not want to correct or sit in judgment upon it,
whose only concern and desire was to translate it and
interpret it for the masses of the
people.
In view of all this,
my argument is that the answer does not lie in producing
new translations; they are coming out almost every week,
but are they truly aiding the situation? No, and for
this reason: men no longer read the Bible not because
they cannot understand its language, but because they do
not believe in it. They do not believe in its God; they
do not want it. Their problem is not that of language
and of terminology; it is the state of the heart.
Therefore what do we do about it? It seems to me there
is only one thing to do, the thing that has always been
done in the past: we must preach it and our preaching
must be wholly based upon its
authority.
We must not come to
the Bible to find out whether it is true or not; we must
come to find the meaning of the truth that is there.
That has been the fatal error of this so-called Higher
Criticism that has come to the Bible to find which part
is true and which part is not. The moment you do that
you are already wrong, irretrievably wrong! We do not
come to the Bible to discover whether it is true; we
come to discover its meaning and its teaching. And
therefore I say the only hope is that we preach its
message to the people. We must preach it to them as the
Word of God. Yes, this Book is the very thing that it
claims to be. Look at its original writers! Did any one
of them say it was his own idea? No, they are all
unanimous in saying that it was given to them. Some of
them did not even want to write it. Isaiah, given his
commission, says, ‘I am a man of unclean lips’; I am not
fit to do this. It is not a question of a great man, a
great philosopher, a great thinker, who has got to tell
the people what to do. No, Isaiah is given a mission and
a commission. He says, I am not fit. Jeremiah says, ‘I
cannot speak: for I am a child.’ Ezekiel, when he was
given his commission and message, sat stunned and amazed
for seven days, and it needed the Holy Spirit to put him
on his feet again. Amos said, I am a herdsman, a man
tending sycamore trees. I am no prophet, nor the son of
a prophet. That is what they all say. They say it is not
their
message. Well, what is it? Oh,
they say, it is ‘the burden of the Lord’, the message of
the Lord; the burden of the Lord came unto me. Jeremiah
did not want to speak, but he could not refrain; it was
like a fire burning in his bones. God had given him a
message and was sending him out with it. You and I must
come back to this: ‘No prophecy of the scripture is of
any private interpretation. For the prophecy came not in
old time by the will of man: but holy men of God spake
as they were moved by the Holy Ghost’ (2 Peter 1:20-21).
That is the authority. Look what our Lord says about it.
He refers to the Scriptures using phrases such as ‘It is
written’. He believed the Old Testament; He believed it
all. He says, ‘the scripture cannot be broken’ (John
10:35): who are we to dispute it? And the apostles —
look at their attitude to Scripture; they constantly
refer to it and quote it. For them it is the final
argument; it settles all
disputes.
We must present the
Bible as the Word of God, not the words of men, but the
Word of the living God: God speaking about Himself; God
speaking about men; God speaking about life; God telling
us what He is going to do about a fallen world. That is
what we need to preach with certainty, with assurance.
Let us tell the people about its marvel, that though it
contains sixty-six books, written at different times and
in different centuries, there is only one message in it.
Let us tell them about fulfilled prophecy. Let us point
out to them how things prophesied and predicted hundreds
of years before the events were actually verified in the
fullest and minutest detail. Let us tell
them: they do not know it. It is
for us to proclaim the Word of God, and especially at
this critical time in our history. Let us tell people
something about its message. It is the only book that
explains life. It is the only book that explains the
world as it is tonight. We have been told now for nearly
a century that the world is advancing, that man is
becoming more and more perfect, that with more and more
education and scientific knowledge there will be no more
war. The problem was, they said, that people did not
know one another. They did not meet. If only they met
they would all love one another and embrace one another;
but now that we are meeting so constantly, we cannot
live together for even a few seconds! You see, there is
no explanation except the explanation that is given in
this Book.
‘There is no peace,
saith my God, to the wicked’ (Isa. 57:21). You
can be clever, you can be
mighty and great and strong, you can be a great
philosopher, and be very wealthy, you can own the whole
world — but you will never know peace, either as an
individual or among men and nations, while you are
wicked. The Bible alone has the explanation. It is man’s
sin, man’s rebellion against God.
You see, you must come
back to theology; you must seek the Book and discover
its message, its theology, its doctrines. If you
evangelical people are against doctrine you will never
get people back to the Bible. It is not enough just to
read a few verses. You must dig down and get the
doctrine, the doctrine of a wholly absolute God, who is
the creator of the ends of the earth, and who is the
judge of the whole earth. Man is not something that came
out of some primeval slime, but a creature made in the
image of God, given something of the stamp of the
eternal Lord of creation, meant to live in communion and
correspondence with his creator! But man has fallen into
sin, has asserted his own will-power, has said that he
is autonomous, that he can arrange his life, that he
does not need God, he does not need God’s direction and
God’s Word: that is why the world is in
trouble.
This is what we must
tell people; we must try not just to defend the Bible
but to preach its truth. Tell men that they are in their
present state because the world has turned its back upon
God. That is why this twentieth century is so appalling.
It is the century of all centuries that has asserted
itself and its own will and, its own understanding over
and against God and His truth and His eternal will. We
must tell, them this, we must tell them very plainly and
without any apology that the wrath of God has been
revealed from heaven ‘against all ungodliness and
unrighteousness of men’ (Rom. 1:18). We must tell them
that the very history of this century, with its two
awful wars and all its present horrors, is due to the
same thing. These things are a part of the judgment of
God. The apostle Paul puts it thus in Romans 1, that one
way in which God punishes men is, that He abandons
people to themselves. He ‘gave them over to a reprobate
mind’ (verse 28). I believe this is what is happening
tonight; it is to me the only explanation of this
present century. God is saying to us, Very well, you
said you could live without me; you said you could make
a perfect world without my laws, without my Word,
without my truth — get on with it, see what you make of
it! And this is what we have made of it: man a creature
of lust, self-centred and selfish, fighting all others.
War is inevitable while man is in that condition. The
Bible alone explains this. And when you turn to the
future it is exactly the same thing: there is no light
for the future anywhere except in this Book. There are
people who, in the name of Christianity, are still
saying that if we only preach this message we can put an
end to wars. Never! The Bible asserts that there shall
be wars and rumours of wars right to the end. While man
is evil and sinful and the creature of lust, there will
be wars. Christianity has not come into the world to put
an end to war; it has not come to reform the world. What
has it come for? It has come to save us from the
destruction that is coming to the world. This Book
asserts a judgment, an end of history. God in Christ
will judge the whole world in righteousness, sending
those who have turned their backs upon Him, refused His
offer of salvation in Christ, to everlasting perdition,
and ushering the saints into the glory of ‘new heavens
and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness’ (2 Pet.
3:13).
Christian people, we
must proclaim to the world that we are not afraid of the
morrow. We are not afraid of what the nations may do. We
know that an evil world is under condemnation, and that
the only course of safety and of wisdom is to come in
penitence and contrition to the Son of God, our blessed
Lord and Saviour, who came out of eternity, who died for
our sins, and who will come again to receive His own
unto Himself. That, it seems to me, is the thing to
which we are called. We must preach the Bible’s message
without fear or favour and with the holy boldness of the
apostles of old, not merely to say it, but to have the
Holy Ghost upon us as we do so. Pray for power to
proclaim it so that it shall become like ‘a hammer that
breaketh the rock in pieces’ (Jer. 23:29). Or in the
words of the apostle Paul, the message must be seen to
be ‘mighty through God to the pulling down of strong
holds; casting down imaginations, and every high thing
that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, and
bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience
of Christ’ (2 Cor. 10:4,
5).
That is our
calling.
O Word of God
incarnate,
O wisdom from on
high,
O truth unchanged,
unchanging,
O light of our dark
sky!
O make thy Church,
dear Saviour,
A lamp of burnished
gold,
To bear before the
nations
Thy true light as of
old.
