The Coming of the Lord by A. T. Pierson

Excerpt

Part 1: The Doctrinal Center of the Bible

This principle is all-important in studying Bible truth. It has been an immense help to many whose life has been clouded by a sceptical frame of mind, and I commend it to my readers. The first thing to do is, on rational grounds, to find out that the Bible is the Word of God. Take, for instance, the seal of prophecy; the three hundred and more predictions about the Messiah in the Old Testament. When you have determined on rational evidence that you have the Word of God in your possession, you are prepared to find in it things that transcend your reason. Why not? If I can understand everything about my watch—why it is made of the material it is, why the jewels are in the places they are, why various metals are in it, why the different proportions between the wheels—give me the time and material, and I will make a watch; but, as long as there is something in this watch that transcends my power to understand, it shows that the man who made the watch knows more than I do. When you have taken out of this Bible everything that you cannot understand, you have taken all the divine element out of it. There is mystery in God’s Word, of course, because it is the workmanship of the mysterious Jehovah. The range, the scope of it is terrible. It is like the wheels that Ezekiel saw in his vision, that reached from earth to heaven; that were full of eyes before and behind; that were complicated, wheel within wheel; and yet that moved in one direction, because they fulfilled the purpose of God; but no man can fathom such divine mechanism. The more I find of mystery in this Word, the more I am compelled to bow before it as the Word of God. But observe, the mystery never once touches duty. There are some secret things that belong to the Lord our God, but there are many things revealed that belong to us and to our children, even all the words of this Law.

When with the reason you decide that this is the Word of God, on rational evidence, then you are to make the venture of faith. If there be something about the character or nature of God, something about the awards of the future that you do not understand; something about the elective purposes of God, and their consistency with the freedom of man, that seems irreconcilable; something about the immutability of God that you cannot harmonize with the doctrine of prayer that claims to move the divine arm that moves the world—if you cannot understand these apparent paradoxes, lay it to the weakness of your vision or to the obscurity of the medium through which you are looking, instead of attributing it to contradiction in God Himself.

(The Coming of the Lord, by A. T. Pierson. Biblesoft formatted Electronic Database. Copyright © 2019 by Biblesoft, Inc. All rights reserved.)