What Is The Bible?
By Evangelist Percy George Cross
This article is from the April 1921 "The Bible Champion" monthly periodical.

The Bible is here. You must account for it in one or two ways: either man wrote it or God. How did the Bible get here? Before you were the Bible was, and after you are gone the Bible will be! Man oft condemns himself by condemning the Bible, without studying the Bible. This is absolutely certain: the more Bible there is in your life the better will be your life, and the less Bible there is in your life the worse will be your life. Bible men are best men; Bible light is brightest light; Bible ways are safest ways; Bible faith is noblest faith; and Bible life is the purest life.
1. The Bible is the Book of No Mistakes. It is the only Book without a moral or spiritual mistake. It is the only Book of sixty-six books that is a harmonious whole, a moral mosaic built by many hands in different ages and in various lands. Man has been much of a moralist, yet with all of his moralizing by all of his philosophers in all the ages man falls far below the moral code of the Bible. Not only has man failed outside of the Bible to make a perfect code of morals, but man has ignominiously failed to live up to the code of his own creation. His own work mocks him! The Bible is the Book of the perfect plans, built on a perfect plan, and containing the perfect plan for man.
Consider this irrefragable fact: destroy all the books of all the libraries of all the ages and leave one Bible, and you have lost no light for life and labor. Or put it this way: Collate from all the multitudinous writings of man the moral codes and standards for character and conduct and leave me just one Bible and you will have less than I have! Before the New Testament Bible was written, the greatest philosophers failed to give to man the perfect standard of life; since this Bible is in our midst, man has signally failed to give to man a better standard, or to live up to this standard with the New Testament writings to go by. The Bible has been imitated but never duplicated. The Bible is the one uncopyrighted Book. It is anyman's Book and everyman's Book, yet no man's Book. There is no law protecting it nor forbidding any infringement on its writings. All men can draw from it, and do draw from it, for any and all purposes. Many criticize it, others strive to destroy it, not a few are indifferent to it, some deny it, but "the Scriptures cannot be broken." (John 10:35)
2. The Bible is the Book of Perfect Reason. The Bible is the only Book that gives a reasonable and comprehensive account of the creation of man and the universe. The more you study the accounts of the creative evolution of the hypothetical sciences of man, all are built on the shifting sands of assertion and surmise, two facts are realized: Man looms up as a failing pigmy before the problem of life and eternity, and the Bible is more and more being vindicated in its reason and revelation of light for the facts of life and its future. If the Bible had come to you saying, "In the beginning God made man out of a tadpole," you would have refused the Book with scorn: "God made man out of an amoeba," or, "God created man out of a bit of floating protoplasm," or, "A water worm decided to leave its habitat and become a dry-land being and by wiggling grew into a man," you would have rejected such a book as the vapid sayings of an idiot being. Imagine, if possible, what it would mean if we were called upon to worship such a protoplasmic god, the father of tadpole man!
If the Genesis account is wrong, as some sinful men have asserted and never proven, why is it that some man has not by the fine force of his superior intellect given to erring man a better account than that of Moses? Some affirm that that age was crude and chaotic, an age of ignorance and superstition. Then how do you account for Genesis?
3. The Bible is the Book with the perfect man in it. It is the one lone Book containing the throbbing portrait of the only perfect character in all history - Jesus Christ. The Bible is the only Book with a Man in it. Here is a stupendous fact that defies the explanation of mortal man, let alone the creating of such a character by the mind of man. It is to be noted that the world's greatest philosophers all wrote their philosophies before Matthew, Mark, Luke and John wrote their biographies of Christ, the sinless One and the selfless One. Man failed before this fact of revelation to create the perfect character, and with this revelation to go by, man has failed even worse since! He has failed to put into literature such a life with the illustration before him, and has failed to live up to the illustration of his own creation, let alone living up to the illustration given of God in Christ Jesus. Further, it is easily proven that the very best characters man has created in literature appropriated their finest traits and sayings from Jesus Christ. You believe in Cicero? There are more quotations from the New Testament Scriptures in Tertullian of the second century than of the writings of Cicero in all writers of three centuries. Do you believe in the most popular writings of antiquity, the poems of Virgil and Horace, the annals of Tacitus, and the orations of Cicero? You say "Yes!" Why? These writings you say you accept and believe in have not half the solid proof as to authenticated authorship as have the biographies of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Do you believe in these? If not, why not? No school of thought, be it rationalistic, materialistic, or socialistic, that can lay any just claim to scholarship, dare deny that Paul the apostle wrote the four epistles of the contention, Romans, First and Second Corinthians and Galatians. Paul was an eye witness and spoke of those things that he knew. I am persuaded Almighty God designed the Bible to stand upon its own merits and not by the testimony of the pens of men. Truly it is the lonely Book and stands alone as The Book.
4. The Bible is the Book of the Perfect God. It is the only Book that reveals to man a sensible and reasonable account of the Creator. Man's ideas of God are crude, cruel, and fantastic. Look at a few: "The First Cause." Think of praying to "O, Thou First Cause!" "God is law and law is God." Law is lifeless. Think of holding any communion with law! "Nature is God;" then go talk to a tree and get acquainted with God! God is not in a tree nor up a tree! This is bad enough, but think of the gods man has made where the influence of the Bible is absent. The paganism of Africa is appalling in the light of the Bible. Man left to himself is a polygamist and a polytheist, and in sin a polyglot! The Bible reveals to man, amid the blackness of sin, God as our Heavenly Father, a loving God, a just God, a suffering God, a sympathizing God, a merciful God, an all wise God.
5. The Bible is the Book of Perfect Love. Not only does the Bible reveal God as love, but the gift of His love; Jesus Christ, His only begotten Son, stands forth as the One lovable, loving Being, in all man's History. Before the Bible became the love of man was lust. In all the writings of man love looms forth as a thing based upon the flesh life. Plato's disquisitions on what purports to be love become drivel in the light of Paul's phillipic to the church of God at Corinth as found in the thirteenth chapter of his epistle. With that, the saying of Christ is, "Love your enemies, do good to them that hate you, bless them that curse you, and pray for them that despitefully use you." This is not of man for the world of man does not think that way, and here is one of the reasons man is found fighting the Bible. The lust of man is to kill his enemies, and not by any means love them.
6. The Bible is the Book of Perfect Prayer. The prayer wheel of the Tibetan is a fair sample of what man makes of prayer without the Bible. Prayer? Man knows not the meaning of prayer without the revelation of God as found in the Bible. The man of evolution knows not the privilege of prayer for such a theory leaves no place for prayer. Just as the Bible is God's means of talking to you, so prayer is God's means for You to talk to Him. Strange would be the child that never holds converse with his parent. A study of the prayers of Christ and the apostles reveals a wondrous working of this misunderstood and misused privilege and power. This age is in sore need of a New Testament revival of the practice of bent knee prayer.
7. The Bible is the Book of Promised Return. Here is thought that lies utterly beyond the mind of man. This Book reveals the death, burial and resurrection of the Sinless One who was made sin for man with the climax revelation that as He left so will He return. Jesus, the Sinless One, began His earthly life in a rniraculous birth. His earthly life was so lived as to make for history the outstanding miracle in character and conduct. His life ended in a miraculous going and must be consummated in a miraculous return. A sinless man is a life miracle completely foreign to the unaided mind of man. The raising from the dead of this Man is true to God's plan, and the return of this Raised Being is a revelation too colossal for unaided man to plan.
8. The Bible is the Book of Perfect Rule. It reveals to man the perfect rule for the individual life of man. Is is the only Book that brings to man the perfect plan for the government of man on Earth. The many plans of man for the society of, man have all failed or are failing. The aching fault with all of man's plans for the government of man is the failure to take into account - Man. The Bible reveals to man the government of grace for the growth of man in the goodness of God. Not until man becomes a new born being in Christ, circumscribed by the Lordship of Christ under the will of God will man be well governed within, and with peace, plenty, and contentment without. This is sustained by three pivotal facts that belong with peculiar force to the Bible, and the Bible only.
First: The authority of the purpose of the Bible. The purpose of God is the salvation of man from man, and from sin within.
Second: The authority of the Spirit of the Bible to make men selfless where man is selfish. Holiness in man for all the sons and daughters, of man. Man must be made right within before you can right the world without.
Third: The authority of the Fruits of the Bible, which is to make man live soberly, righteously, and godly, in this present world. Sober with himself, righteous in his relationships in all the walks of life, and like God in his mental processes and heart sympathies.
Open the Bible and "Let God be found true." Amen.

'Dead Sea Scrolls on Stone'
Prof says first-century tablet tells of messiah who will die and rise.
Gordon Govier posted 8/15/2008 08:47AM
A 2,000-year-old inscription, written in ink on a stone, is being called "a Dead Sea Scroll on stone." But New Testament scholars scoff at the idea that the inscription "should shake our basic view of Christianity," as one scholar told The New York Times.
The inscription has been dubbed "Gabriel's Vision" since the phrase, "I, Gabriel," appears several times in the broken text. It was apparently discovered somewhere in Jordan about a decade ago, and was more recently purchased by an Israeli-Swiss businessman from an antiquities dealer. The legible parts of the Hebrew text are stylistically similar to the Dead Sea Scrolls, and so far no scholar has raised doubts about its authenticity despite its murky provenance.
An analysis of the inscription appeared in the Hebrew journal Cathedra a year ago and in Biblical Archaeology Review earlier this year. But few people outside the scholarly world paid attention until The New York Times featured an interview with Hebrew University professor Israel Knohl, who claims additional insight into some of the hard-to-read areas of the text.
Knohl says one illegible word is the Hebrew word for "live," which led him to translate one sentence as, "In three days you shall live, I, Gabriel, command you." He concludes the inscription is about a leader of the Jews who will die and be resurrected after three days.
That's in contrast to the typical Jewish image of a triumphant messiah, who is usually seen as a powerful leader like his ancestor King David. It suggests there were other perspectives on messianism in the first-century Jewish world from which Christianity sprang.
Darrell Bock, a professor of New Testament at Dallas Theological Seminary, says Knohl may be reaching too far with his translation. "The problem here is that there's not enough text to be able to be really confident about what the passage itself is reading in order to build a theory around it," he says.
Ben Witherington III, professor of New Testament interpretation at Asbury Theological Seminary, agrees that Knohl offers a lot of conjecture to fill the gaps and holes in the text. "But what if he's right?" Witherington asks. "It just means that there were more persons in early Judaism, other than Jesus and his followers, who were talking about a dying and rising messiah. That's not a problem for Christianity, as far as I can see."
Bock doesn't see much of interest for scholars. "The text deals with some type of angelic communication, but beyond that it's very hard to tell what all is going on," he says. "The connection to messiah is virtually absent."
But Witherington calls it an interesting document, beyond the rarity of an ink inscription on stone. He thinks scholars will continue to be drawn to it.
"It's some kind of prophetic, apocalyptic Jewish text," he says. "I think this stone is as significant as many of the Dead Sea Scrolls. But it doesn't seem to have any value for the discussion of Jesus except by way of general background text, like the Dead Sea Scrolls."
http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2008/september/6.17.html

The Evangelical Founding Fathers
Remember the concerns of those to whom Jefferson wrote on the separation of church and state.
Steven Waldman posted 3/25/2008 08:42AM

Much attention has been paid to the idea that evangelical Christians are, politically, in motion. Only 29 percent of "born-again" Christians now say they support Republicans, compared to 62 percent in 2004, according to Barna Research. Among those who participated in the Republican primaries, many went for John McCain, who once called certain Christian leaders "agents of intolerance." Many younger evangelicals are stressing issues like the environment and poverty, and, as Christianity Today readers know better than most, a new generation of evangelical leaders has emphasized different styles and modes of worship.
But while many Christians re-assess current alliances, practices, and beliefs, one characteristic relatively unchanged: their sense of history. A recent Beliefnet survey found that more than 70 percent of conservative evangelicals believe the Constitution created a Christian state. Whether it's prayer in schools or the Ten Commandments in courthouses, many evangelicals still believe that being a good Christian means advocating for a stronger government role in promoting religion.
I'd like to respectfully suggest that the important dialogue within the evangelical community would be enriched if it were to more boldly re-examine its historical roots. What it would find is that evangelicals of the founding era had very different attitudes about the separation of church and state than many of their modern counterparts. In fact, we would not have religious freedom or the separation of church and state without a key alliance between heroic evangelicals and James Madison and Thomas Jefferson.
In 1784, Virginia's leading politician, Patrick Henry, proposed taxing citizens to sustain and support churches. This was a liberal bill, as these things went. The proceeds of the "assessment" could benefit any church, not just the dominant church. But a young James Madison opposed the idea — which he called an "establishment" — on the grounds that it would, by entangling the state with the church, actually harm religion. Madison eventually won, in large part because of support from Virginia's Baptists. Even though tax support was non-coercive and could directly benefit the Baptists, one Baptist petition stated that the measure "departed from the Spirit of the Gospel and from the bill of Rights." Responding to the argument that the assessment would help battle the spread of heretical views like deism, the petition declared that virtuous religions would win in a marketplace of faith: "Let their Doctrines be scriptural and their lives Holy, then shall Religion beam forth as the sun and Deism shall be put to open shame."
The Baptists further argued that Henry's approach ignored an important lesson from Christian history: that the greatest flowering of Christianity occurs without government support. During its first few hundred years, Christianity was oppressed, yet "the Excellent Purity of its Precepts and the unblamable behaviour of its Ministers made its way thro all opposition," one petition declared. After Constantine endorsed Christianity, persecution subsided but "how soon was the Church Over run with Error and Immorality." Another Baptist treatise projected how seemingly beneficial government support could lead to constraint: because money would be collected through the tax system, the "Sheriffs, County Courts and public Treasury are all to be employed in the management of money levied for the express purpose of supporting Teachers of the Christian Religion." In all, some 28 counties sent in petitions arguing that the gospel required rejection of the assessment.
The alliance between evangelicals and Madison and Jefferson reappeared at critical junctures. When Madison ran for Congress in the first elections, against the charismatic war hero James Monroe, it was the Baptists who rallied to him because of his support for the separation of church and state. It was the evangelicals who prodded Madison into proposing a Bill of Rights that guaranteed religious freedom and limited the government role in religion.
The most pungent illustration of the alliance rolled toward the White House on New Year's Day in 1802. Standing at the door of the new presidential mansion in Washington, President Thomas Jefferson saw two horses pulling a dray carrying a 1,235-pound cheese with an inscription: "Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God." The cheese was a gift from evangelical activist the Rev. John Leland of western Massachusetts — a "thank you" for Jefferson's support of the separation of church and state.
It is commonly assumed that Baptists supported the separation of church and state to avoid persecution. That was certainly partly true. The Baptists of Virginia suffered a wave of persecution at that time. But the evangelical passion for keeping church and state separate had theological roots, too. Christians were to render unto Caesar what was his — the religious and political spheres were meant, by Jesus, to be separate. Just as important, both the Baptists and the philosophers believed in the primacy of individual freedom. For Madison and Jefferson, individual liberty trumped the rights of kings or governments; for evangelicals, an individual's personal relationship with God was more important than church and clerical authority. Let's remember who will provide the final assessment of a life well lived, Leland wrote: "If government can answer for individuals at the day of judgment, let men be controlled by it in religious matters; otherwise, let men be free."
If alive today, 18th-century evangelicals might well agree with their theological descendants that the nation needs more religion. But they would disagree that it requires more state support or advocacy for religion. It was the evangelicals who worked with Madison to shape the true "founding faith," which was not Christianity or secularism. It was religious liberty — a revolutionary formula for promoting faith by leaving it alone.
Steven Waldman, editor-in-chief of Beliefnet.com, is the author of Founding Faith: Providence, Politics and the Birth of Religious Freedom in America, published by Random House.Copyright © 2008 Christianity Today.