DATE: – SUNDAY 16TH AUGUST, 2020
TOPIC: – THE POWER OF THE WORD OF GOD (Part 8)
BIBLE PASSAGE: – Psalm 119: 161 – 176
MEMORY VERSE: – “Thy Word is true from the beginning; and every one of thy righteous judgments endureth forever” (Psalm 119160)
INTRODUCTION: – The greatest wonder of the world in history is the Bible. No wonder has surpassed the Bible except the Word Himself in His incarnation. The truth is the Bible reveal Jesus Christ, the very Word of God. No more powerful motives can be urged upon Bible reader than this; he who finds Jesus finds life, heaven, all things. What wonder can be more wonderful than this!
LESSON OUTLINES
1) The Wonder Of Its unification
We normally talk of the Bible as a book. We seldom think of it as a library consisting of sixty six separate Books written by between thirty-four different authors in three to four different languages (i.e. Hebrew, Greek, Latin and Aramaic), upon totally different topics, and under extra different circumstance but all pointing to the same theme:- JESUS CHRIST!
One author wrote history, another wrote biography; one wrote on theology, another wrote poetry, another prophecy; some wrote on philosophy and jurisprudence, on geneology and ethriology, and some, narratives of adventure.
And the straight thing in all is that through their subjects are so diverse and difficult-most difficult and abstruse to the natural mind – though there was no possibility of anything like concerted action, or transfer of literary responsibility (for it was impossible for the man who wrote the first pages to have the slightest knowledge what others would write about 1,500 years after he was born, yet this miscellaneous collection of heterogeneous writings is not only unified by man in one book, but so unified by God, the Author that we never think of it today as anything else than one BOOK! And one Book it is indeed – that miracle of all literary unity!
2) The Wonder Of Its Age
Again it is a wonder that, that Book is here today. It is a wonder that we have a Bible at all when we think its age. When we compare the bible as a Book with any other book, in this respect it is a perfect wonder.
We all know that one of the great tasks of literature is time. Books that were the rage a few years ago are forgotten today. They were born, they were boomed and they died. The cold hand of oblivion is laid upon them. Their force is spent. Their power is gone. Where, after all, is the book five hundred years old and read by the masses today? You can put it down for a certainty that the older a book is the smaller it its chance of surviving or being read by people of diverse nationalities.
But the marvelous thing about the Bible is that it is the only Book in the world that has, in this way and to this marvelous degree, not only overlapped the barriers of time; but has also been able to overlap the barriers of nationality. The Bible, written by men who died between two or three thousand years ago, is not only living today, but is the most widely circulated and read in the world.
3) The Wonder Of Its Interest
Another marevellous thing about this Book is that it is the only book in the world read by all classes and all sorts of people. It is a wonderful thing that one book so differs from all others – that it is read by the wisest men, read to the little child and read by the old man as he trembles on the brink of the world.
Verily, it is without a parallel in literature. Our boys and girls read and study it in myraids of homes and Sunday Schools; and great scholars like Newton and Herschel and Faraday and Brewster and great statesmen like Gladstone and Lincoln have taken this Book as the joy and the guide of their life.
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION
Though the oldest of all books, yet the Bible still remain new and fresh in all generations transforming lives. What a wonderful Book awe have in the Bible!
QUESTIONS
- Why was the Bible thought today as one Book?
- Which is the oldest book in the World today?