The Reliable Word

Pick up a Bible. Any Bible will do. Now hold it up before your eyes. You are holding in your hand a miracle Book! Three miracles distinguish it from all the books of the world and defend it against ordinariness.

There is, first, the miracle of INSPIRATION: that work of the Spirit of God in the hearts and minds of the Scripture writers, which made their writings a record of divine revelation. That book is God-breathed! From its inception it was divine. In it is the mind of God, the way of salvation, and the revealed plan of God for man for time and eternity. It is divine in its initiation.

There is, second, the miracle of PRESERVATION: that work of the Spirit of God upon the hearts, minds, and hands of the Scripture translators, as well as upon the Scripture text itself, which guaranteed the perpetuation and protection of the original message of the Bible. Through the perils of translation and retranslation, changing times and cultures, the same Holy Spirit who breathed the original message to the first writer’s has been present to protect the text against deceit and error. So miraculously did the Holy Spirit work that the Bible has retained its impact and intent through hundreds of perilous years of translation. God did not leave the care of his Word to the hands of men alone. It is divine in its continuation.

There is, finally, the miracle of ILLUMINATION: that work of the Spirit of God upon the heart, mind, and life of the preacher, the teacher, and the student of the Word which discloses the inner meaning of the message of the Bible. No little miracle this! The same Holy Spirit which breathed the Word into the hearts of the writers and presided over its perpetuation now moves upon the preacher, teacher, and student to reveal its life-changing truths. It is divine in its communication.

Thus, you have physical, tangible, visible proof of the existence of miracles. You are holding a miracle in your hand! The Bible is miraculous in its initiation, in its continuation, and in its illumination. The Holy Spirit still guards his Word! If you doubt its miraculous nature, I challenge you to give the Holy Spirit an opportunity to speak to your heart through its contents as you read it. God’s eternal disposition regarding his Word is revealed in Jeremiah 1:12: “I will hasten my word to perform it!”

In this Book, the mind and plan of God are disclosed. It contains the plan of life for all men and all seasons and is eternal, unchanging, and complete…from eternity to eternity. The systems of man are collapsing and passing into antiquity. This should be no surprise to us. We have read the divine utterance which says, “And the world is passing away with its desires; but he that does the will of God abides forever” (1 John 2:17).

The Bible presents the rules of eternal life. Its principles dare to cut clean across the lines of modern reason, defy the best of our system’s experts, and extol values long since claimed obsolete by this world’s intelligentsia. The Bible claims things to be precious that the world abhors and abhors things which this world holds precious.

And the remarkable thing about all this is that the world’s claims make so much sense to the reasoning mind and the Bible seems to make so little. In the thinking of the world, the Bible seems preposterous and absurd…its claims far-out! I cannot argue this. But with as much sense as the deductions of the world seem to be making, they are not working! The world is falling apart, and its systems are failing! Man is scrambling to patch up his plans but they are passing away, despite it all. They simply are not working.

But I can tell you this…I affirm that the claims of the Bible are working! Right at this moment they are working! In the lives of men and women who dare to demonstrate their faith in the trustworthiness of the Word of God, heaven is happening! It is working! Its claims, as absurd as they sound, are standing. So I give you this Book, the Bible…laughed at, challenged, doubted, scoffed at, opposed, and refused…but whose principles stand!