BIBLE, VALUE OF
The Bible is as necessary to our safe passage through this lifetime as oxygen is to sustain life.79
Karen’s mother was startled to find her five-year-old going through a new Bible storybook and circling the word God wherever it appeared on the page. Stifling her first reaction to reprimand the child for defacing a book, she quietly asked, “Why are you doing that?” Karen’s matter-of-fact answer was: “So that I will know where to find God when I want him.”
Wouldn’t it be nice to have her confidence that all we had to do was open a storybook and find God waiting for us? The truth is, we do have such a Book—the Bible.80
A. C. Gabaeline rates J. N. Darby as one of the great teachers of the Word of God. Dr. Darby for many years lived among the rustic country people of Ireland—preaching the gospel to these farm families and living at their modest level.
One day an infidel who was very well-known in those times challenged Darby, saying, “You claim that all Scripture is profitable. What possible earthly value could a verse like 1 Timothy 4:13 have—‘The cloke that I left at Troas with Carpus, when thou comest, bring with thee, and the books, but especially the parchments’?” To which Darby replied, “Do you know that when I left my ecclesiastical position to come here to live among these very simple persons, it was that very verse that kept me from selling my own theological library? Make no mistake about it,” said Darby, “all Scripture is inspired of God and all of it is profitable!”81
“I believe the Bible is the best gift that God has ever given to man. All the good from the Savior of the world is communicated to us through this Book. I have been driven many times to my knees by the overwhelming conviction that I had nowhere else to go” (Attributed to Abraham Lincoln).82
The following lines are attributed to Martin Luther:
The Bible is alive, it speaks to me.
It has feet, it runs after me.
It has hands, it lays hold of me.83
“When home is ruled according to God’s Word, angels might be asked to stay with us, and they would not find themselves out of their element” (attributed to C. H. Spurgeon).84
John Wesley once wrote: “I am a creature of a day, passing through life as an arrow through the air. I am a spirit, coming from God, and returning to God; just hovering over the great gulf; a few months hence I am no more seen; I drop into an unchangeable eternity! I want to know one thing—the way to heaven … God Himself has condescended to teach the way. He hath written it down in a book. O give me that Book! At any price, give me the book of God!”85
Andrew Young, former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, urged the graduating class of the University of Maryland’s Eastern Shore campus to “get a Bible” and read a chapter a day. “It won’t hurt you at all,” he said in his commencement address, “and it will give you more illumination and purpose in life. It’s better to invest fifteen dollars in a Bible now than twenty-five dollars an hour for a psychiatrist later.”86