Bible Thoughts and Themes: Volume 3

The Acts and the Epistles

Our Bible is of God; yet it is also of man. It is both divine and human. It comes to us from God’s Spirit; it comes also from man’s spirit. It is written in the language of earth, yet its words are the words of Him “who speaketh from heaven.” Natural, yet supernatural; simple, yet profound; undogmatical, yet authoritative; very like a common book, yet very unlike also; dealing often with seeming incredibilities and contradictions, yet never assuming any need for apology, or explanation, or retractation; a book for humanity at large, yet minutely special in its fitnesses for every case of every soul; carrying throughout its pages, from first to last, one unchanging estimate of sin as an infinite evil, yet always bringing out God’s gracious mind toward the sinner, even in his condemnation of the guilt; such is the great Book with which man has to do, which man has to study, out of which man has to gather wisdom for eternity, one of the many volumes of that divine library which is one day to be thrown open to us, when that which is perfect is come, and that which is in part shall be done away.

It is just a common physician, a Gentile too, who writes this book of the “Acts of the Apostles”; and he writes it as a part of human history,—the history of his period. He indulges in no lofty language when relating the wonders on which he so briefly touches. All is calm. The historian does justice to his history, yet he does not embellish. He tells his story well, but in few words; he neither colours nor elaborates. He makes his readers feel how thoroughly they can trust his narrative. It is man speaking to his fellow-men; yet it is heaven speaking to earth.

The names are human names, whether of persons or places; mostly Gentile, yet with these are associated divine words and scenes; everywhere we see human faces and hear human voices, yet also everywhere do we see the face and hear the voice of the Son of God. It is not the orator, or the philosopher, or the metaphysician we meet with in these chapters, it is “the ambassador for Christ”; his are the footsteps that we hear in every city, whether Corinth, or Athens, or Ephesus, or Antioch, or Rome.

All is unspeakably earnest. There is no jesting nor trifling anywhere. The reader may weep, but cannot smile. God is too near, and the cross too vivid, and the great throne too bright.

How so much of the divine and so much of the human can be woven together we do not try to say. The reader, if he be taught of God, will soon make discoveries for himself.

The book is very unlike what we should have expected. It is the preface to, or rather the first chapter of, church history, yet it bears not the slightest resemblance to any other church history which has yet been produced.

It contains everywhere the facts which constitute the gospel; and it proclaims also that gospel itself,—the glad tidings of God’s free love to the chief of sinners.