12
Selected Messages Book 1
sea they themselves are in. This is a fit representation of the men who
set themselves to correct the errors of the Bible. No man can improve
the Bible by suggesting what the Lord meant to say or ought to have
said.
Some look to us gravely and say, “Don’t you think there might
have been some mistake in the copyist or in the translators?” This is
all probable, and the mind that is so narrow that it will hesitate and
stumble over this possibility or probability would be just as ready to
stumble over the mysteries of the Inspired Word, because their feeble
minds cannot see through the purposes of God. Yes, they would just as
easily stumble over plain facts that the common mind will accept, and
discern the Divine, and to which God’s utterance is plain and beautiful,
full of marrow and fatness. All the mistakes will not cause trouble to
one soul, or cause any feet to stumble, that would not manufacture
difficulties from the plainest revealed truth.
God committed the preparation of His divinely inspired Word
to finite man. This Word, arranged into books, the Old and New
Testaments, is the guidebook to the inhabitants of a fallen world,
bequeathed to them that, by studying and obeying the directions, not
one soul would lose its way to heaven.
[17]
Those who think to make the supposed difficulties of Scripture
plain, in measuring by their finite rule that which is inspired and that
which is not inspired, had better cover their faces, as Elijah when the
still small voice spoke to him; for they are in the presence of God
and holy angels, who for ages have communicated to men light and
knowledge, telling them what to do and what not to do, unfolding
before them scenes of thrilling interest, waymark by waymark in
symbols and signs and illustrations.
And He [God] has not, while presenting the perils clustering about
the last days, qualified any finite man to unravel hidden mysteries or
inspired one man or any class of men to pronounce judgment as to
that which is inspired or is not. When men, in their finite judgment,
find it necessary to go into an examination of scriptures to define that
which is inspired and that which is not, they have stepped before Jesus
to show Him a better way than He has led us.
I take the Bible just as it is, as the Inspired Word. I believe its
utterances in an entire Bible. Men arise who think they find something
to criticize in God’s Word. They lay it bare before others as evidence