chapter five THE MESSAGE OF THE BIBLE
chapter five
THE MESSAGE OF THE BIBLE
What are the two basic truths we need to know about God?
It is a fundamental Christian conviction that God has spoken, and spoken in a concrete historical and geographical setting. We have taken several chapters to survey the geography and the history; it is time now to listen to the message. Some of this has already been included in the story of the Bible, as the teaching of the prophets has been fitted into the life of Israel, and the teaching of Christ and his apostles into the New Testament story. We saw also in the first chapter that the message of the Bible concerns salvation through Christ. But this needs to be elaborated.
Since the Bible is a whole library of books, composed by many authors over more than a thousand years, it seems to some quite incredible that we can claim for it a single theme, let alone condense it into a single chapter. Besides, they say, do not the Old and New Testaments contradict each other? Does not the Old Testament portray Yahweh as a fearful God of wrath and judgment, who is entirely incompatible with the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ? How can we reconcile the thunders of Sinai with the meekness and gentleness of Christ?
I hope that the true answer to these questions will become plain as in this chapter I try to demonstrate further the astonishing unity of the Bible. Meanwhile, it will be enough to express the Bible’s own claim that it contains neither a ragbag of miscellaneous contradictions, nor a gradual evolution of human ideas about God, as men grew up and discarded their childish notions, but a progressive revelation of truth by God.
Progression there undoubtedly is. For example, the great stress of the Old Testament is on the unity of God, in contrast to the degraded polytheism of the heathen nations. Although there are foreshadowings of it in the Old Testament, the doctrine of the Trinity is clearly stated only in the New Testament. Again, there is progression from the recorded teaching of Jesus to the fuller understanding of his person and work which we find in the Epistles and the prologue to the Fourth Gospel. But this is exactly what Jesus himself led us to expect by what he said to the apostles in the Upper Room:
I have much more to say to you, more than you can now bear. But when he, the Spirit of truth, comes, he will guide you into all truth. He will not speak on his own; he will speak only what he hears, and he will tell you what is yet to come. He will bring glory to me by taking from what is mine and making it known to you. All that belongs to the Father is mine. That is why I said the Spirit will take from what is mine and make it known to you. (John 16:12–15)
Progression is not the same as contradiction, however. An artist begins by making a sketch, and then applies his tools to the canvas bit by bit until the whole picture (apparent to his mind from the start, though not to the beholder’s) finally emerges. Again, parents teach their children step by step, “rule on rule, rule on rule; a little here, a little there” (Isa. 28:10). But if they are wise, they do not teach anything in the early stages which needs later to be contradicted. Their later teaching supplements what has gone before and builds on it; it does not come into collision with it. So God has gradually filled out his revelation, constantly expanding it but never repudiating it, until at last it was complete in Christ the Word made flesh (than whom a higher revelation is inconceivable) and in the witness of the apostles to Christ.
The Letter to the Hebrews opens with a very valuable statement of this truth:
In the past God spoke to our forefathers through the prophets at many times and in various ways, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son. (Heb. 1:1–2)
Here the author concedes that there are several differences between the Old and New Testament revelations. The revelation was given at different times (“in the past” and “in these last days”), to different people (“to our forefathers” and “to us”) and especially in different modes (“through the prophets at many times and in various ways” and “by his Son”). But though the occasion, the recipients and the manner of revelation were different, its author was the same. It is God who has spoken to us in and through his Son.
In the light of this we should not hesitate to claim God himself as the ultimate Author of both Testaments or to designate the whole of Scripture “the Word of God.” I shall have more to say in the next chapter about this.
What, then, has God spoken? The Bible is essentially a revelation of God. It is, in fact, a divine self-disclosure. In the Bible we hear God speaking about God. To say this is not inconsistent with the thesis developed in the first chapter that the Bible is concerned with salvation and bears witness to Christ. For what God says about himself is, above all else, that he has conceived and fulfilled a plan to save fallen men through Christ.