The following is from Sword Of The Lord Newspaper, April 7, 2023, a much needed sermon for too much of America.
Dust On The Bible, by John Summerfield Wimbish
“The Bible is a collection of fantastic legends, without any scientific support, full of dark hints, historical mistakes and contradictions,” states the blasphemous definition which may be found in the Dictionary of Foreign Words, put out by the State Publishing House in Moscow, Russia.
To the citizenry of America, such a biased and uncouth assertion is repulsive indeed. However, there are thousands in this fair land who share such an atheistic view and thousands more who, by their actions, align themselves with such gross unbelief.
Several years ago, after conducting a series of meetings in Virginia, I was driving through the mountains of Tennessee on my return home. Switching on the car radio, I heard for the first time an old mountain ballad “Dust on the Bible.”
While the music and lyrics were very poor, the message of the song was profound; for even there in the “Bible Belt,” thick dust had accumulated on the Holy Book.
There is a portion of Scripture in the Old Testament which seems especially appropriate for this message. In II Chronicles 34:14–16 we read:
“And when they brought out the money that was brought into the house of the LORD, Hilkiah the priest found a book of the law of the LORD given by Moses.
“And Hilkiah answered and said to Shaphan the scribe, I have found the book of the law in the house of the LORD. And Hilkiah delivered the book to Shaphan.
“And Shaphan carried the book to the king, and brought the king word back again, saying, All that was com- mitted to thy servants, they do it.”
Sad was the spiritual state of Israel in the days of this sacred narrative. The dark night of apostasy had enveloped the nation. Now and then a godly king would ascend the throne and the cheery beams from the star of reformation would shine forth to dispel much of the darkness. But then would come once more the ebon pall of idolatry to bring despair to the Israelites.
Marvelous blessing came when Asa, Jehoshaphat, Joash, Hezekiah and Josiah came into power. Our Scripture has its setting during the remarkable reign of King Josiah, who held the scepter of power for thirty-one years. In the eighteenth year of his rule, the Book of God, so long forgotten, was discovered by Hilkiah the priest in the dusty recesses of the temple.
It was during the reign of Manasseh, Josiah’s irreligious grandfather, that the Sacred Writings were lost. Evidently they became buried deep in the rubbish which had accumulated in the neglected temple.
Manasseh had forgotten the devoted spiritual life of his father, Hezekiah; and he led the people away from God and His commandments.
Alexander Maclaren has well said, “If we do not make God’s Law our guide, we shall wish to put it out of sight that it may not be our accuser.”
And as dust had gathered on the Holy Book in Josiah’s time, even so has it covered the Bibles of our nation today.
- The Dust of Indifference
Although this matchless Volume still has the record of being the bestseller in the world, although it has acquired unprecedented circulation throughout America, I thoroughly believe it to be one of the most neglected books in our nation. We have allowed the dust of indifference to settle upon the covers of God’s Sacred Book.
In John 5:39, we hear Jesus speaking to the multitudes and saying, “Search the scriptures; for in them ye think ye have eternal life: and they are they which testify of me.”
In Acts 17:11, the beloved physician, Luke, tells of the Bereans who surmounted the Thessalonians in spirituality because “they received the word with all readiness of mind, and searched the scriptures daily.”
And in II Timothy 2:15, Paul in- structs his son in the faith, “Study to shew thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth.”
Our early president, John Quincy Adams, gave this bit of wise advice:
I speak as a man of the world to men of the world; and I say to you, Search the Scriptures. The Bible is the Book of all others, to be read at all ages and in all conditions of human life; its daily reading should never be omitted unless through overwhelming necessity.
The apostle of art, John Ruskin, said: “Make it the first morning business of life to understand some part of the Bible clearly and make it your daily business to obey it in all that you do understand.”
Heinrich Heine, the German poet and writer, declared:
What a Book! Vast and wide as the world, rooted in the abysses of creation and towering up be- hind the blue secrets of Heaven. Sunrise and sunset, promise and fulfillment, birth and death, the whole drama of humanity all in this Book.
Yes, tragic is the negligence of our nation. America, like Judah, reached its supremacy under the protective guidance of the Commandments of the Lord, but now America concerns itself with the nonessentials.
“Careful and troubled” about matters of little moment, America has grown indifferent to the Word of the Most High God. We stagger recklessly on down the road of destiny, unmindful of our fate.
In 1782, Benjamin Franklin was appointed American Plenipotentiary at Paris. Some of the French wits of that period ridiculed him for his devotion to the Bible. Wise Ben Franklin determined to test their knowledge of the Volume they professed to scorn.
Entering their company one evening, he told them that he had been reading an ancient poem and its stately beauty had greatly impressed him. At the request of those skeptics, he took from his pocket a manuscript and proceeded to read it.
It was received with exclamations of extravagant admiration. “Superb!” they cried. “Where did he discover it? Who was the author? How could copies be obtained?” Whereupon the American statesman informed them to their chagrin that it was the third chapter of the prophecy of Habakkuk.
What treasures men lose when they are indifferent to the gold mine of God’s Book!
Isaiah looked out over his beloved land and saw idolatry and vice with deathlike grip holding the people in bondage; the adversaries of Jehovah with their poised legions ready to strike in fierce onslaught; the temples of the Lord desecrated and His altars broken down. Then the prophet of redemption cried: “Seek ye out the book of the LORD, and read” (34:16).
Our need individually, our need collectively, is that we “seek…out the book of the LORD, and read.” If we would be guided out of the perplexing maze of international problems, we must peruse the pages of this Book, hear the voice of the Lord and act accordingly.
But we need to remember that the Bible today is also coated with
- The Dust of Irreverence
See the picture: Jeremiah the prophet, with tears and pathos, is urging the people to repentance. Josiah the potentate, with every legal means at his disposal, is clearing the high places of his country from heathen disfigurements. And in that momentous year of 624 B.C., something happened which permanently affected the spiritual history of Israel—“Hilkiah the priest found a book of the law of the LORD given by Moses.”
In great excitement, he handed the manuscripts to Shaphan, the royal secretary, who lost not a moment in letting the youthful king know about the discovery. And in II Kings 22:10 we find these words: “And Shaphan read it before the king.”
We can well imagine the tremendous sensation this discovery produced upon the godly king. He had had religion enough, but here in his possession was God’s inspired Word. Down through the dark years of apostasy, the faithful remnant of the godly had preserved the truth as best they could; but there was a vast difference between the traditions of men and the truth of the Sacred Book.
How this young man reverenced the divine Law! But there are many among us who have no reverence whatsoever for this Holy Book. Multitudes of our young men and women seem to have a positive distaste for the Bible and for everything for which it stands.
Trained by skeptic scholars, they leave the cloistered halls of learning manifesting time and time again an intellectual recoil from anything supernatural. These young people do not respect the Book because many of their atheistic professors, parading under the garb of scholarship, have prejudiced their minds with a poisonous philosophy.
Sad is the havoc wrought by these modern Philistines. With their infidelic blades they hack at the roots of their students’ faith; and the young trees stand silhouetted, gaunt and barren, lifeless and fruitless against the somber sky of materialism.
Any university or college or seminary which employs polite and refined infidels who falsely charge the Bible with inaccuracies, inconsistencies and immoralities is not worthy of the money invested in it by well-meaning but unsuspecting citizens!
Let us pray that the breath of Heaven will scatter the dust of irreverence from our Bibles.
But there is another contamination.
III. The Dust of Incredulity
In our scriptural narrative, we find a striking instance of the in- destructibleness of God’s Word.
Manasseh wore the crown of Judah for fifty-five years; and in his wicked paganism, he rebuilt the idols his father, Hezekiah, had destroyed. Baal, Ashtoreth and the sun were worshiped with abandon by his followers. The tyrant even burned some of his own children on a pagan altar and, if tradition is right, had Isaiah the prophet sawn asunder.
But during the long years of his godless reign, which sealed the doom of Judah and that of his wicked son Amon, whom he named for a god of Egypt, in the seclusion of the rubbish-littered temple, God protected His Book.
The Bible is deathless! The permanence of the Written Word, the Providence that has watched over it, the romantic history of its preservation down through the ages speak of its authenticity and of its supernaturalness.
Bible translators have been burned at the stake.
Bible printers have been persecuted to death.
Bible readers have been chained in prison.
Bible colporteurs have been tortured until crippled.
Bible preachers have been cruelly exterminated.
Yet this Book stands today like a beneficent angel to exercise its sanctifying influence on society.
In every age men have sought to belittle, to besmirch, to contradict and to destroy it. Infidels, agnostics, atheists and freethinkers, in all of the fury of their prejudice, have cried out in unison, “Away with it!” but the Holy Word of God has emerged unsullied and unscathed.
If you will approach the Bible with an unbiased mind and read it, you will understand why it will last forever; you will know that it comes from God and consequently it is under divine protection.
God’s Word says: “Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away” (Matt. 24:35).
God’s Word says: “So shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth: it shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it” (Isa. 55:11).
The story is told of an atheist who sent a young man an envelope of infidelic literature, advising him to read it in preference to the Bible. The young man wrote the atheist this note:
Dear Sir:
If you have anything better than the Sermon on the Mount, the Parable of the Prodigal Son and that of the Good Samaritan, or if you have any code of morals better than the Ten Commandments, or anything more consoling and beautiful than the Twenty-Third Psalm, or on the whole anything that will throw more light on the future and reveal to me a Father more merciful and kind than the New Testament, send it along.
- The Dust of Iniquity
I would remind you that the dust of iniquity settles on the covers of this Holy Book today.
After Shaphan received the book of the law of the Lord from Hilkiah the priest, he took it immediately to King Josiah and read to him from the book. And the Scripture tells us: “And it came to pass, when the king had heard the words of the law, that he rent his clothes” (II Chron. 34:19).
Josiah was overwhelmed at hearing the very words of the divine Law. He rent his clothes in profound grief because he and his fathers had “not kept the word of LORD, to do after all that is written in this book” (vs. 21).
Josiah summoned the elders of Judah and Jerusalem, as representatives of the people, to witness the solemn act to be done in their name; and he held a great assembly at the temple in Jerusalem to pre- sent the newly-found Book of the Law.
On the appointed day, the wide space of the temple enclosure was crowded with a vast multitude, headed by the prophets, priests, Levites and great men of the tribes. A platform had been erected for the young king in the temple court; and the elders milled around it, waiting for their ruler to speak.
Opening the precious writing, he read aloud to them through- out—read all the details of the ancient covenant made with the nation by Jehovah, read the promises if it were kept, read the curses if it were broken.
Then followed a striking scene. Lifting his voice, Josiah solemnly declared his resolution to live in obedience to all the requirements of the Divine Word.
Standing on his platform, says the Book of Kings, he made the covenant before Jehovah to walk after Jehovah and to keep His commandments and His testimonies and His statutes with all his heart; and with all his soul to perform the words of the covenant which are written in this Book.
Do you remember the Scripture:
“The word of God is 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)?
I submit to you that our nation’s hope lies not in a new plan of economics, a new social theory, a new political alliance, a new code of laws, but in the Bible—the divine truth which made America great and which alone can keep it great!
God promises peace and plenty to a nation of people which will stay close to Him and follow Him and abide by His commandments, but He has something to say if we choose the other way. God’s Word says:
“And I will set my face against you, and ye shall be slain before your enemies: they that hate you shall reign over you; and ye shall flee when none pursueth you.”
“And I will break the pride of your power; and I will make your heaven as iron, and your earth as brass.”— Lev. 26:17, 19.
“Because I have called, and ye re- fused; I have stretched out my hand, and no man regarded;
“But ye have set at nought all my counsel, and would none of my reproof:
“I also will laugh at your calamity; I will mock when your fear cometh;
“When your fear cometh as desolation, and your destruction cometh as a whirlwind; when distress and anguish cometh upon you.
“Then shall they call upon me, but I will not answer; they shall seek me early, but they shall not find me.”— Prov. 1:24–28.
These are terrible words, but they are inescapable in their meaning. When an individual or a nation breaks the laws of God—the laws of the universe—then there is no escaping the consequences. Only divine intervention and mercy can stop the workings of immutable law.
- The Dust of Inconsistency
Lastly, we would think upon the dust of inconsistency that is heaped upon the Bibles of America today.
When Josiah the king received the Sacred Word from his secretary, Shaphan, he did not listen to it read and continue as previously, bound by the fetters of tradition, engulfed in the false practices of his forebears. He immediately did an about-face and, in the words of Joshua, said: “As for me and my house, we will serve the LORD” (24:15). And Shaphan told King Josiah: “All that was committed to thy servants, they do it” (II Chron. 34:16).
The Bible says:
“Blessed are they that hear the word of God, and keep it.”—Luke 11:28.
“Be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only.”—Jas. 1:22.
“To him that knoweth to do good, and doeth it not, to him it is sin.”— 4:17.
“Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor standeth in the way of sinners, nor sitteth in the seat of the scornful.
“But his delight is in the law of the LORD.”—Ps. 1:1, 2.
And once again we hear the word of our blessed Saviour: “Why call ye me, Lord, Lord, and do not the things which I say?” (Luke 6:46).
We, as Christians, profess to believe this Book to be a message from Almighty God. It is high time we begin putting into practice that which we proclaim to believe! ||
Thank you for reading this far. I believe your faithfulness in considering this message will be to your eternal credit, and more so if you spread the Word.
