Is the Bible outdated?

We needed the New Testament to give us the full revelation of the grace of God, but the Old Testament is of great value as giving us a large unfolding of the working of God's government. Observing His ways in the past, we are enlightened and warned as to what may be expected in the present; and we discover how amazingly apposite are these ancient histories. The Bible is indeed an up-to-date book.

The Bible, on the contrary, is the book for to-day. It is God's own book, His perfect revelation. It is His own very voice speaking to each one of us. It is a book for every age, for every clime, for every class, for every condition, high and low, rich and poor, learned and ignorant, old and young. It speaks in a language so simple that a child can understand it, and yet so profound that the most gigantic intellect cannot exhaust it. Moreover, it speaks right home to the heart; it touches the deepest springs of our moral being; it goes down to the hidden roots of thought and feeling in the soul; it judges us thoroughly. In a word, it is, as the inspired apostle tells us, "quick, and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart." (Heb. 4: 12.)

The Bible, on the contrary, is the Book for today. It is God's own Book, His perfect revelation. It is His Own very voice speaking to each one of us. It is a Book for every age, for every clime, for every class, for every condition, high and low, rich and poor, learned and ignorant, old and young. It speaks in a language so simple that a child can understand it; and yet so profound that the most gigantic intellect cannot exhaust it. Moreover, it speaks right home to the heart; it touches the deepest springs of our moral being; it goes down to the hidden roots of thought and feeling in the soul; it judges as thoroughly. In a word, it is, as the inspired apostle tells us, "Quick and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart." (Heb. 4:12.)

And, truly, if ever there was a time when this self-same lesson needed to be read out in the ears of the professing church, this is the time. On all hands, the divine sufficiency of Holy Scripture is called in question. In some cases this is openly and deliberately done; in others it is, with less frankness, hinted, insinuated, implied, and inferred. The Christian mariner is told, directly, or indirectly, that the divine chart is insufficient for all the intricate details of his voyage — that such changes have taken place in the ocean of life, since that chart was made, that, in many cases, it is entirely deficient for the purposes of modern navigation. He is told that the currents, tides, coasts, strands, and shores of that ocean are quite different, now, from what they were from centuries ago, and that, as a necessary consequence, he must have recourse to the aids which modern navigation supplies, in order to make up for the deficiencies in the old chart, which is, as a matter of course, admitted to have been perfect at the time it was made.

I commend this solidity in the scriptures to my younger friends. You must not let this go. You may be taught differently in your schools, and in the office your companions may tempt you to disown the infallibility of God's word. They will say that it is of no consequence whether you read the word of God every day or not. It does not matter whether you believe the whole of the Bible or not. Times have changed, they say, since it was written, and it is now out of date. Your answer is that the foundation of God stands fast. What we have now is as true as when it was written, like the tables of stone, with the finger of God. The scripture is written upon an imperishable material, a foundation which can never be destroyed. So let us hold fast the word of God, and not be carried away by the profane and vain babblings of Christendom.

But has any change come over the word of God, or over the grand truths which that word unfolds to our souls? Has any change come over the thoughts of God in reference to what His church is, or what the world is, or as to the proper relation of the one to the other? Does He not know who are "saints" and who are "unbelievers"? Has it ceased to be "a fault" for "brother to go to law with brother, and that before the unbelievers"? In a word, has holy scripture lost its power, its point, its divine application? Is it no longer our guide, our authority, our one perfect rule and unerring standard? Has the marked change that has come over the church's moral condition deprived the word of God of all power of application to us — "to all that in every place call on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ"? Has our Father's most precious Revelation become, in any one particular, a dead letter — a piece of obsolete writing — a document pertaining to days long gone by? Has our altered condition robbed the word of God of a single one of its moral glories?

Are we to say that the authority of Scripture is "of the past alone," that it is "a fossil stored carefully in a museum," as Grubb ("Authority and the Light Within," pp. 28, 37)? Or rather, as the writer to the Epistle to the Hebrews (Heb. 4:12, with which cf. verses 4 and 7), that Scripture is "living," as God Himself? Do we not "hear" inspired Apostles, and so God, in their writings; 1 John 4:6, Rom. 7:1? Scripture is not merely compared to a "two-edged sword," but is said to transcend that: it deals with Past, Present, and Future alike, so that its penmen did not serve only their own generation (Acts 13:36).

The Bible maintains its character. It continues to be ‘living’, which underscores its relevance and reminds us that it has not lost any of its power. We can also have confidence in taking heed to the Bible because it is ‘abiding’ (see also 1:25). Not one part of it will ever become irrelevant or inapplicable or have no further use: ‘Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away’ (Matt. 24:35).

It is granted that this not only might, but assuredly would have been the case unless God had distinctly overruled the action taken. The history of the professing Church is a very sad one, and there was much that was very wrong done at the Councils where the Canon of Scripture was discussed, nevertheless we are convinced that the same God who gave the Scriptures, has taken care that they should be preserved to us in their entirety. We have proved them in a thousand ways, and found them all sufficient. Not an error arises, however novel it may seem, but there is the Scripture ready to expose and refute it, not a difficulty nor a trial arises, but it is fully provided for in the Word, and though written so long ago that it would only be a curious book of antiquity if it had been a human production, yet it is perfectly fresh and powerful and applies perfectly to all the circumstances of the day as well as it did to those of 1800 years ago.

There is a great need for this. For these are days of great spiritual sloppiness, of world-bordering, of accommodating oneself to the spirit of the age. We are told on every hand that the times have changed, and the Bible and Christians must accommodate themselves to the changed times. It were well if the changed times were accommodated to the Bible. We need the Word of God to govern us as much as ever.