The Word of God in Print

The Bible is accepted as one of the greatest masterpieces of the world's literature. The grandeur of the opening chapters of Genesis and of John's Gospel, the moving poetry of the Psalms, the fiery denunciations of the Hebrew prophets, the compelling records of the life and work of Jesus, and the apocalyptic mysteries of the Book of Revelation-all these serve together to set the Bible in a class of its own. It is quite unrivalled by any other work, in any language or from any age. But it is more than this: the Bible claims to be the written Word of God.

The World's most Remarkable Book
The Bible's contents are of the greatest antiquity. Parts of it are over 3,000 years old and, as any historian worth his salt will tell you, it contains the oldest and the most reliable records of ancient history ever written. Time and again its narratives have been shown to contain a remarkably accurate account of people, of places, and of events of bygone ages. No other book in the world can begin to compare with the Bible for the way it helps us both to understand the past and thereby largely to explain the present.

The Bible's influence on the history of civilisation has been enormous. As the text-book of two of the great religions of the world (Judaism and Christianity) it has been a source of morality and enlightenment to countless millions down the centuries. Translated into almost 1,500 different languages, it has also been. produced in braille, shorthand and, in recent times, in machine- readable format for use on computers. In an age of rationalism and materialism, when disrespect for ancient traditions has almost become a fashion, the Bible has still managed to preserve something of an aura of uniqueness. It stands head and shoulders above all the very greatest in the literature of the world and has strong claims on our attention and respect.

Big Business
The Bible is also very big business. Ask any of the dozen or so Bible publishers who compete so fiercely for this particular corner of the world's book.market! In the last forty years alone the eight new Bible versions published in English have sold well in excess of 100 million copies. Worldwide sales of the Good News Bible (1976) stand at over 7 million; the New English Bible (1970) has sold over 10 million; about 23 million copies of the Living Bible have been bought since 1971; and sales of the New International Version topped a million copies within less than a year of its publication date in 1979. Even King James's allegedly outdated Authorised Version of 1611 still brings in every year over a million pounds in revenue for its publishers. The Bible is without doubt the world's bestselling book. And if to these mind- boggling commercial publishing statistics are added all the Bibles distributed freely in the U.K. and throughout the world by the Gideons (over 70 million copies) and the Bible Society (a staggering estimated 1,000 million), the numbers of Bibles produced must far outstrip anything ever printed and published in the history of mankind.

"The most valuable thing that this world affords"
Most people know that it has long been traditional in an English court of law for a witness to swear the oath of truthfulness on a copy of the Bible. Many will be aware that in an Anglican wedding the marriage vows are solemnised by placing the ring on a Bible before it is transferred to the bride's finger. But few will have memories detailed or long enough to know that when a king or queen of England is crowned, a copy of the Bible is presented to the monarch for the swearing of the Coronation Oath, when the solemn words are heard: " ... to keep your Majesty ever mindful of the Law and the Gospel of God as the Rule for the whole life and government of Christian Princes, we present you with this Book, the most valuable thing that this world affords. Here is Wisdom; This is the royal Law: These are the lively Oracles of God."

There is, in all these ceremonies, a recognition that the Bible is something special, something sacred, something more than just a work of purely human literature. It is, if only in a faintly superstitious way, an acknowledgement that the Bible has an authority greater than that of any man, of the law of the land, and even of the crown itself. But what a different place the world would be if every ruler (and every resident) of each so- called 'Christian' country were to obey truly the "royal Law" of God which the Bible contains! Sadly, these token recognitions of respect for the Bible do not generally lead individuals to commit their lives fully to its demands. We need to give the Bible a much more central place in everyday life if we are to demonstrate the truth of the above quotation.

Unread Bestseller
It is perhaps one of the greatest paradoxes of the modern world that, in spite of its high-volume sales, the Bible is generally so little read. As Sir Frederic Kenyon once remarked: "Bible reading has been a notable characteristic of the English-speaking peoples from the Reformation to the end of the Victorian Age", and the decline in Bible reading has undoubtedly been "a serious loss to the moral and cultural equipment of the nation to-day". But why have people continued to buy the Bible while no longer reading it? How can we explain the paradox?

There are many reasons for this general decline in the reading of the Bible; but three principal causes may be identified for consideration here: the growth of certain popular misconceptions, the advent of scientific materialism, and the desire to exclude the miraculous element from religion. Rationalistic criticism of the Bible has succeeded over the last hundred years or so in persuading popular opinion that the Bible has been largely discredited.

It is commonly thought that the Bible contains many errors and internal contradictions which stamp it as the work of fallible men. This view is now the 'received wisdom' and, sad to say, very few of each rising generation even bother to check it out for themselves, for surely the experts and majority opinion cannot both be wrong?

An Age of Materialism
In fact, of course, 'majority opinion' is notoriously dangerous to rely on; and this popular misconception about the Bible has only grown in the fertile, generally atheistic, soil of scientific materialism. First, we live in the era of the expert -- and especially of the scientific expert -- whose opinions are rarely questioned by the layman. And secondly, this is an age of materialism, in which man's ability to provide himself with all the comforts of modern life has brought him to rely largely upon himself, to the exclusion of God and, ultimately, even of his fellow- men. And if God no longer matters, why bother to read what claims to be His Word?

But saddest of all, perhaps, is the growing desire on the part of some, in the wake of this general desertion of Bible-based religion and morality, to make Christianity more 'acceptable', by removing from it all trace of the miraculous. It is hoped that this new religion of convenience will satisfy the popular scientific belief that miracles simply 'cannot' happen, in spite of what the Bible so clearly teaches.

Modern Scepticism
This then is the sorry state to which popular opinion has brought the world in relation to its attitude to the Bible. But is it not remarkable that all this was foreseen almost 2,000 years ago in the Bible itself? "For", said the apostle Paul to Timothy, "the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but after their own lusts shall they heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears; and they shall turn away their ears from the truth ... " (2 Timothy 4:3-4). The world, it seems, is in a kind of vicious circle. For if men will not read the Bible, how can they know for themselves what it contains and whether or not it is true? Like any book, the Bible needs to be read to be estimated at its true worth. The circle has to be broken if faith in its message, and in the God Who gave it, is ever to be restored and sustained.

A "Divine Library"
What then is this book which so many buy and so few take the trouble to read? It is, to begin with, a collection of books -- sixty-six to be precise -- written by about forty different authors over a period of many centuries. It was brought together gradually until its present form was fixed, after long usage and by common consent, towards the end of the fourth century of our present era. It claims, of course, to have God as its one ultimate author, and we shall be looking at this claim to Divine inspiration a little later on. But the Bible also explains that the variety and diversity of its contents were God's chosen way of communicating appropriately in different ways to men of every age, as the writer to the Hebrews says: "God, who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time past unto the fathers by the prophets, hath in these last days spoken unto us by His Son" (Hebrews 1:1).

It was Jerome in the fourth century who described the completed Bible as the "Divine library", thus recognising that its multiple parts had a single, Divine source. Even earlier, Origen is on record as having this @to say also: "There are many sacred writings, yet there is but one Book. All the writings breathe the spirit of fulness, and there is nothing, whether in the Law or in the Prophets, in the Evangelists or the apostles, which does not descend from the fulness of the Divine Majesty."

Many of the individual books of the Bible claim for themselves this Divine origin which these early Christian 'fathers' so rightly recognised; and this internal hallmark is one of the many elements which have to be taken into account in assessing each separate book's relation to the Bible as a whole. Referred to together, subsequently, by the plural Greek word Biblia ('the Books'), the intrinsic unity of the different parts of the Bible was ultimately acknowledged when the same word was later read as a Latin singular, meaning 'the Book' and from which our English word 'Bible' has come. In this way, even the term by which we now refer to Jerome's "Divine library" recognises the indivisibility of the Word of God.

The Golden Thread
The unity of the Bible resides not merely in the fact that its many ancient books have been brought together between two leather covers. Once read, it becomes obvious that these books are one in message, principle and aim. In revealing to men the purpose of God with the earth, the Bible presents a single Gospel of salvation from Genesis to Revelation. From the Garden of Eden to John's vision of the heavenly Jerusalem coming down to earth, the same Divine purpose can be seen to continue unchanged: the glorification of God through the salvation of man. And this golden thread is woven with many other basic strands into the very fabric of the Bible. The mortality and sinfulness of man, the promise of a Saviour, the need for sacrifice and faith, the place of God's chosen people Israel in the Divine plan, and the coming Kingdom of God -- these and countless other themes weave their way through Old and New Testament alike, binding them together and stamping them as the product of a single mind. The Bible claims to be God's Book. In its themes and structure, in its purpose and direction, it shows a unity consistent only with an omniscient designer. Coincidence would be a quite inadequate explanation of the beauty and intricacy of the Bible's texture. Such wonderful design does not happen by chance. Seen under the microscope of the closest examination, the consistency of Bible themes reveals the evidence of God at work. As an earlier writer so aptly put it: "Here is a book written by forty authors, living in different ages, without possible concert or collusion, producing a book which in all its parts is pervaded by one spirit, one doctrine, one design, and by an air of sublime authority which is its peculiar characteristic. Such a book is a literary miracle. It is impossible to account for its existence upon ordinary principles."