Companion to the BibleBarrows, E. P. (Elijah Porter)
Religion
Companion to the Bible
Barrows, E. P. (Elijah Porter)
Bible -- Study and teaching
wilful resistance of God's claim to their supreme love and obedience. In
a word, it describes men in their relation to God as well as to their
fellow-men; and every man who reads the description, hears within his
soul the still small voice of conscience saying, "Thou art the man."
Whence this all-comprehensive knowledge of man contained in the Bible?
The answer is: He who made man has described man in his own word with
infallible accuracy; "because he knew all men, and needed not that any
should testify of man; for he knew what was in man."
6. We come now to the argument from _personal experience_. To receive
Christ in sincerity and truth, is to know that his salvation is from
God. Many thousands have thus a full and joyous conviction of the truth
of Christianity. They were oppressed with a deep consciousness of guilt,
which no tears of sorrow or supposed good works could remove. But they
read in the Holy Scriptures that Jesus is "the Lamb of God which taketh
away the sin of the world." They put their trust in his atoning
sacrifice, and thus obtained peace of conscience, and joyous access in
prayer to God as their Father in heaven. They were earthly in their
affections, and able therefore to render to God's holy and spiritual law
only an obedience of the letter, which they knew would not be
acceptable. But through faith in Christ they have been lifted up to a
holy and blessed communion with God, and thus enabled to render to God's
law an obedience of love "in the spirit and not in the letter." They
were oppressed with a painful sense of the empty and unsatisfying nature
of every thing earthly; but they have found in Christ and his glorious
service an all-sufficient portion. In a word, they are assured that the
gospel is from God, because it meets all their wants as sinners. They
have the same evidence that God made the gospel for the immortal soul,
as that he made bread for the stomach, air for the lungs, and light for
the eyes. The sincere believer has in himself the witness that the
gospel is from heaven, for he is daily experiencing its healing,
strengthening, and purifying power. To tell him that the Bible is a
cunningly devised fable, is like telling a man who daily feeds on "the
finest of the wheat," and is nourished and strengthened by it, that the
field of golden grain which waves before his door is only wormwood and
gall; or that the pure water from the bosom of the earth which daily
quenches his thirst is a deadly poison; or that the blessed air of
heaven which fans his lungs is a pestilential vapor. Not until error
becomes the nutriment of the soul and truth its destruction, can this
argument from personal experience be set aside or gainsaid.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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