DATE: – SUNDAY 9TH AUGUST, 2020
TOPIC: – THE POWER OF THE WORD OF GOD (Part 7)
BIBLE PASSAGE: – Psalm 119: 129 – 144
MEMORY VERSE: – “Thy testimonies are wonderful: therefore doth my soul keep them” (Psalm 119:129).
INTRODUCTION: – History tells of the seven wonders of the Ancient World which include the Great Pyramid at Giza, Egypt that Hanging Gardens of Babylon; the statue of zues of Olympra Grace: the Temple of Arterrius at Ephesus; the Mausoleum at Helicarnassus; the Colosissus of Rhodes and the Light house of Alexandria. Egypt. But all these are obsolete and have faded away such that many children of the twenty first century do not see them as wonders. But the Bible has been and remain the only wonder of the world all through ages. It’s wonders can never fade because “forever the Word of God is settled in heaven” (Ps.119:89).
LESSON OUTLINES
The Wonder Of The Bible
The wonder of the Bible grows on us as our experience is enlarged for the more deeply wesearch it, the more we feel that the Bible is not merely a book, or a colletion of books but it is the Book. It stands alone: unapproachable in grandeur, as high above all other books as heaven is above the earth, as the son of God is above the son of men.
1) The Wonder Of Its Information
One of the first things about this Book that evokes our wonder is the very fact of its existence. Anyone who has studied the history and origin of the divine Word must be struck with wonderment at the mysterious method of its information. That it ever was a book, and today the Book of the world, is really a literally miracle. For there never was any order given to any man to plan the Bible, not was there any concerted plan on the part of the men wrote, to write the Bible.
The way in which the Bible gradually grew is one of the mysteries of time. Little by little, part by part, century after century; it came out in fragments and unrelated portions written by various men without any intention (so far as we can tell) of anything like concerted arrangement. One man wrote one part in Arabia, another wrote another part in Syria, a third part wrote in Palestine, another in Greece and Italy. Some writers wrote hundreds of years after or before the others, and the first part was written many hundred years before the man who wrote the last part was born.
Now, take any other book; you know fairly well how it rose. In nine cases out of ten a man determined to write a book though it crat, collected the materials, wrote or dictated it, had it copied or printed, and it was completed within four or six or more months or years. The average book, we may suppose, takes from one to ten years to produce, though books like Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of Roman Empire or Tenny Son’s Poems longer to complete. But generally speaking, a book has been produced by one man within his own generation.
But there is a Book that took at least a thousand, five hundred years to write, spanning sixty generations of this old world’s history.
It enlarges our conceptions of God; it gives us new ideas of His infinite patience as we think of the wonder of His calm, quiet waiting as He watches the strain, the haste and restlessness of man across the feverish years, while slowly and silently the great Book grew. Here a little and there a little it came on; here is some history, and there prophecy; here a poem and there a biolography, and at last in process of time; as silently as the house of the Lord of old (1Kg.67), it came forth before a needy World in its finished completeness.
When Moses died there were only five small portions; when David sat upon the throne there were a few parchments more; one by one, prince, priest and prophet laid on the growing pile their greater and smaller contributions, until in process of time the whole of the Old Testament Bible was written in its entirety.
Then, by the overruling design of the Almighty Spirit, without any corrected collaboration or unity of plan; fragment by fragment, here a biography, there a letter, the New Testament grew.
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION
Yes! The Book is a marvel; it transcends all books; it is the miracle of literature in its formation. It is altogether unexplainable unless God is its Author.
QUESTIONS
- What makes the Bible a literary miracle?
- How many of the whole Bible was available when Moses died?