Recently, as I sat at breakfast in the Starkville Cafe, my friend Michael asked me, “What do you think is the most important idea in the Bible?”
The Bible is chock-full of important ideas. It’s the only book that adequately explains the origin and destiny of the human race. Only the Bible gives an unflattering autopsy of sin and the amazing remedy for broken hearts in the cross of Christ. Only God’s Word shows us the certain way to heaven by simple faith in Him.
But what was my answer? The most important idea in the Bible is that God wants us to be His friends. His formula could not be simpler: “Draw near to God, and He will draw near to you.” (James 4:8)
To establish this relationship, God sent His Son who, in the boldest of moves, entered the human race, downsizing, so to speak, so we could look God in the eye. That way we could see what He would do at funerals and weddings, how He would treat society’s outcasts and people who despised Him. As you know, it’s quite a story.
This greatest love story ever told is recorded in the Bible. If it’s not true, it’s the biggest hoax in history. If it IS true, it’s all that really matters.
Robert Dick Wilson, Ph.D., was, among other things, Professor of Semitic Philology at Princeton Theological Seminary. During his youth, the so-called Higher Critics were attacking the Bible as unfit for intellectuals to take seriously. He thought their arguments might be superficial, but knew the only way to answer them was to master the ancient texts and put them to the test.
Professor Wilson proposed to spend fifteen years in language study, fifteen years in Biblical textual examination, and then, God willing, fifteen years of publishing his findings so others might share in his discoveries.
“I would read a grammar through,” he wrote, “look up the examples, making notes as I went along, and I wouldn’t pass by anything until I could explain it. I never learned long lists of words, but I would read a page through, recall the words I didn’t know, and then look them up. I read anything that I thought would be interesting to me….
“I got so interested in the story that I was unconscious of the labor—as a man is interested in his roses, and doesn’t think of the thorns. So I learned Greek, Latin, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Biblical Aramaic, Syriac, Arabic, and so on.”
He couldn’t at that time learn Babylonian in America, so he went to Heidelberg, Germany. To Babylonian he added Ethiopic, Phoenician, all the Aramaic dialects, Egyptian, Coptic, Persian, and Armenian, eventually mastering forty-five languages and dialects.
His conclusion after a lifetime of studying the Bible in the original languages? “Whenever there is sufficient documentary evidence to make an investigation, the statements of the Bible, in the original texts, have stood the test.”
When he was an old man, greatly honored for his lifetime of prodigious scholarship, someone asked him, “In all your studies of the Bible, what is the greatest thing you ever discovered?”
Wilson replied in the lines of a children’s chorus: “Jesus loves me, this I know; For the Bible tells me so.”
Amen to that!
Religion Page article by Jabe Nicholson first published in the Commercial Dispatch on Sunday, Feb 13, 2022.