TESTIMONY OF CHRIST. 55 I find our Lord and Master Himself handling the Old Testament Scriptures with the manner of One who not only owns their general significance but personally cherishes, I dare to say reveres, their authority, even in details of expression; and I find Him doing this not only in the early stages of His course but even more in the latter, in the last. And I see Him doing it nowhere more fully and unreservedly than when He has overcome death, and Luke xxiv. come back from the Unseen in the power of endless life. And when, exalted into heaven, He "sends" the blessed Paraclete, His own promised Representative, the Spirit of Truth, I find that one main result of the glorious emission was the incessant use by the Apostles of the writings of the Prophets, in precisely the spirit, no less and no more, of their Master before them. And I observe one remarkable phenomenon of the whole case. I find that the Lord and the Apostles make comparatively little, if I may reverently say so, of the sacred writers of the Old Testament and comparatively everything of the sacred writings. They dwell not so much on who said it as on what is written. No grades of authority appear in their estimate. What stands within the scrolls of what we familiarly call the Old Testament, and what He called the Law, the Prophets, and the Psalms, is in the eyes of Jesus Christ His Father's Word, whatever else it is. As such it is His weapon in the Temptation, His credential on the Mount of the Sermon, His mysterious solace in the Garden, His death-word on the Cross, His theme upon the Emmaus Road on the Easter afternoon and in the Upper Chamber where He stood that evening in His immortality. Oh blessed road and blessed chamber! Let us often take our Bibles out with us on the one, up with us to the other. We shall be the less likely then to think that to "look on the Bible as on another book" is to look upon it "wisely," even from the point of view of the strictest induction of truth from facts. But now all this mysterious Divinity of the Bible, this properly miraculous character of it, this nature of it so entirely refusing to be accounted for by natural process and human THE SPIRIT IS THE TRUE AUTHOR. 57 consciousness, is assigned by itself not to God in general only, but to the HOLY SPIRIT in particular. This is our immediate concern in this enquiry. The statement of the fact is almost all the treatment I give to it; but what a fact it is to state! He who was the divine Agent in the blessed Incarnation, He who made and sustained the Manhood of the Second Adam, adjusting it with infinite skill to the blessed Filial Godhead, it is He who was the divine Agent in this glorious parallel process, the construction of Scripture. He, the all-blessed Spirit, in that double union of His with Christ of which we spoke above, so managed the long antecedent march of prophecy, both its substance and its phraseology, that Moses, whatever was the Prophet's "consciousness" in writing, wrote John v. 46, 47. of Christ, and "David in the Spirit" Matt. xxii. 43. called Him his Master, and Isaiah John xii. 39-41. saw His glory and spake of Him; yes, so that the risen Redeemer Himself found "in all the Scriptures the things concerning Himself." So did He design, mani- Luke xxiv. 27. pulate, and accomplish, that "every Scripture hath in it the Spirit of So did He fashion "the "the Sword of the Spirit." God." 1 2 Tim. iii. 16. He speak by the Prophets that when an apostolic Writer quotes the words of Ileb. x. 15-17. Jeremiah he ignores, as it were, the Prophet's personality, intense, tender, and profoundly interesting and instructive as that particular personality was. Majoribus intentus est; he is aiming deeper. He is citing the words as capable of carrying authoritative, decisive weight on eternal principles and facts. And he sees nothing for that purpose but their ultimate Authorship: "Whereof THE HOLY GHOST also is a Witness unto us; for after that He had said before, This is the covenant that I will make with them after those days, saith the Lord I will put My laws into their hearts, and in their minds will I write them, [then said He,] And their sins and their iniquities will Jer. xxxi. 33, 34. I remember no more." The words are, in a sense, in a true sense, Jeremiah's. 1 The rendering, "Every Scripture inspired of God is also profitable," is not demanded by the Greek. Compare the Greek of 1 Tim. iv. 4. PRESENT IMPORTANCE OF THIS TRUTH 59 But for the Writer to the Hebrews they are simply the words of the Holy Ghost. And so they must be to us, let me add, if we would lean the whole weight of our human need on them in life and in the hour of death. Evacuate Scripture of its divine authority, and you so far paralyse its power for divine consolation. I thus state something of the outline of the revealed facts of this great and inestimably precious work of the Holy Spirit. I well know. that it is but a fragment; it is but a suggestion; it is, in some of its parts, little more than a confession of faith, and a confession of a kind not always very easy to make at the present time. But such as it is I make it to my reader as in the presence of our Lord and Master. At this period in the history of the Church, if I mistake not, it is important in the highest degree to hold fast, and to hold in the foreground of our convictions and our consciousness, the supernatural, the miraculous, the divinely authoritative, aspect of the Holy Scriptures, as the work throughout of none other than the Holy Spirit of God, the blessed Lord of truth and light. That conviction leaves me, as I have said, |