The Expositor's Bible: The Book of ProverbsHorton, Robert F. (Robert Forman)
Religion
The Expositor's Bible: The Book of Proverbs
Horton, Robert F. (Robert Forman)
Bible. Proverbs -- Commentaries
We Christians believe that we have a revelation, and we find that it
suffices. It gives us precisely those assurances about God and about
the soul without which we falter, grow bewildered, and begin to
despond. We have a vision and a law. Our Bible is the record of the
ever-widening, ever-clearing vision of God. The power and authority of
the vision seem to be the more convincing, just because we are
permitted to see the process of its development. Here we are able to
stand with the seer and see, not the long æonian stages of creation
which science has been painfully tracking out in these later days, but
the supreme fact, which science professes herself unable to see, that
God was the Author of it all. Here we are able to see the first
imperfect conception of God which came in vision and in thought to the
patriarch or sheikh in the earliest dawn of civilisation. Here we can
observe the conceptions clearing, through Moses, through the
Psalmists, through the Prophets, until at last we have a vision of God
in the person of His Son, who is the brightness of the Father's
glory, the express image of His countenance. We see that He, the
unseen Creator, is Love.
Our Bible, too, is the record of a law,--a law of human conduct, the
will of God as applied to earthly life. At first the law is confined
to a few primitive practices and outward observances; then it grows in
perplexity and multiplication of details; and only after a long course
of discipline, of effort and apparent failure, of teaching and
deliberate disobedience, is the law laid bare to its very roots, and
presented in the simplified and self-evidencing form of the Sermon on
the Mount and the apostolic precepts.
It is not necessary to start with any particular theory about the
Bible, any more than it is necessary to know the substance of the sun
before we can warm ourselves in his beams. It is not necessary to look
for scientific accuracy in the histories and treatises through which
the vision and the law are communicated to us. We know that the
vessels are earthen, and the presupposition all through is that the
light was only growing from the glimmer of the dawn up to the perfect
day. But we know, we are persuaded, that here, to seeing eyes and
humble hearts, is the revelation of God and of His will.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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