Calvary Baptist Church

Calvary Baptist Church, Grenada, MS

Holding to the truths embraced by Baptist for centuries.

There is no history like that of the Bible. Men have written histories without number. They have recorded events great and small, but they attempt only to narrate them as man sees them, and none are perfectly accurate throughout. Even in modern times man is unable to write a satisfactory history of the Civil War. The Bible records events as God sees them and has never yet been found incorrect in a single record.

Would you study ancient history: read the Bible. The monuments and records of man may go back 4,000 years, but the Bible carries us back 6,000 years and more. The monuments tell us what man was in his early civilization, but the Bible tells us what and where he was when created. History may tell us something of man after he began to live in cities and to have national governments; the Bible tells us of the first man, and of his generations to the day of Jesus. Men have tried to find flaws in the narrative. They said the flood never covered the earth. But the geologist finds evidence of a great inundation, and picks up the shells of sea fish on the tops of mountains. They said Babylon and the tower of Babel never existed ; but the ruins are uncovered today and men may look upon them; a great library is being unearthed there and the Bible is vindicated. They said the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah is a myth; but the investigator finds the charred ruins of cities there, with brimstone lying in abundance. They said Joseph lived only in fiction; but in upper Egypt they find today the remains of great irrigation works bearing his name. These suggest the seven years of plenty. Records have been discovered showing that in 1700 B. C. the Nile failed to overflow its banks for seven successive years. This suggests the years of famine. They said Pharaoh never lived; but his mummified body has been found, and even today you may look upon the very face of Israel's oppressor. They said it is a myth about Joshua's commanding the sun to stand still, but among most nations have been found records and traditions of an unusually long day. Thus it may be shown in every instance where skeptics have attacked the Bible record that the Old Book stands vindicated; so that it stands alone as the most accurate and most wonderful history to be found. Dr. E. Fitch Burr says:

"Our archaeological researches, among the strata of the earth, amid the ruins of buried cities, among the deeper ruins and roots of languages and traditions, have brought to light and demonstration the literal accuracy of many statements in the earlier Scripture where such accuracy was least to be expected. Some of these statements are as follows: The human race began in one pair; it began near the Euphrates; the beginning was at a recent date; the primitive men were not savages; the original language was one; the original religion was monotheism; the lapse into polytheism and its congenial wickedness was very early; the early superiority of Egypt in arts and learning, its literature in the time of Moses, its laborious and oppressed serfs; the powerful Hittites in Syria, the forays into it of eastern princes, the sixty giant cities of Bashan—these and many more such things affirmed in the Scripture have been either abundantly verified or made probable by the progress of discovery. These verifications have been so many and signal, and in such unexpected quarters, as to wholly discredit and defy the higher criticism. A very signal instance of this defiance is the abundant literature found recently in various excavated places and dating from long before the time of Moses; for the higher critics have affirmed that Moses could not have written the Pentateuch because the art of writing was unknown in his day. They could swear to that—only they were not in the habit of swearing."

If men like eloquence, let them read the speeches of Moses, of Job and his friends, of Peter, or of Paul, A noted United States judge once said: "I have heard many eloquent defenses made in court, but the most masterly is Paul's defense before Agrippa."

If you love fascinating stories, you will find them in the Bible. If you would read a story portraying woman's love and devotion, read the Book of Ruth. If you would know something of woman's self-sacrifice, devotion to duty, and love for her people, read the story of Esther.

Man has turned his telescope up to the skies for three hundred years. Really he has gazed upon the stars since God created vision. He has wondered what they are and what they mean, but wondered all in vain until recently. If he had turned his telescope upon God's word, long ago might he have learned that God gave the hint of gravitation which holds the stars in their places, when Job asked, 3000 years ago: "Canst thou bind the sweet influences of the Pleaides, or loose. the bands of Orion?" He would also have found a suggestion of that other modern discovery, that a star of the Pleaides is the center around which the sun and all the fixed stars seem to revolve.

The Bible many times speaks of the stars being innumerable, but how little did that mean to man until the telescope revealed them. Indeed the old astronomers had counted them and catalogued their number—one thousand and twenty-six—but before a powerful telescope even a small patch of the "Milky Way" becomes an innumerable host.

How many times does the Bible speak of the plurality of worlds? "He made the worlds" (Heb. 1-2). "The worlds were framed" (Heb. 11-3), but only after many centuries of patient investigation did man discover the truth that there are other worlds besides this.

The ancients looked upon the stars as holes in the walls of the heavens, and but a little distance above the mountains. But God said: "The heavens for height is unsearchable" (Prov. 25-5).

Oh, that man had studied God's textbook on astronomy first! How much sooner would the wonderful truths of the heavens have been understood!

For a long time it was the favorite custom of skeptics to say that the Bible and geology do not agree, which in the main, until recently, has been true. They have assumed, therefore, that the Bible is untrue. They have very dogmatically and falsely assumed that "Science" is infallible, and that since the Bible does not always agree with their science it is false. Science is knowledge classified. In this sense, there is no true natural science, for only a small part of the phenomena of nature is fully understood, much less classified. Old classifications are constantly being overturned. So rapidly is this done that no textbook in science can be up-to-date one year. A few weeks ago I received a text book in physics. It had been off the press but a few days. It is now only a few months old, but already a discovery has been made which overturns a fundamental principle of physics, and the book needs revising.

Some years ago Professor Simpson, the great scientist in Edinburgh University, ordered the librarian to remove to the cellar every scientific book over ten years old. A short time ago an eminent Frenchman collected 200 discarded theories in geology that had been held in France contrary to the Bible in one hundred years. They had all been overthrown, but the Bible still stood.

All our natural science is based upon theories. A theory is a guess; therefore all natural science is at best only a guess. Yet some people are silly enough to believe that the Bible must be untrue unless it harmonizes with every "scientific" guess man may make. The Bible is God's textbook on science; then instead of trying to harmonize the Bible with science, harmonize science with the Bible. This would be infinitely wiser, since in the past not one single theory of science contradictory to the Bible has stood the test, and every one that has stood the test of the fullest and longest investigation has agreed with the Bible. One eminent scientist recently boldly asserted that there is not one single fact of science or history upon which the scholarship of the world has fully agreed, but that agrees with the Bible. Sir John Herschel, in the front rank of scientists, said: "All human discoveries seem to be made for the purpose of more and more confirming the record of the sacred Scriptures. The assertion that science disproves the Bible does not tally with the experience of honest men."

To further illustrate we will mention a few examples: Some said Moses was wrong when he recounted the order of creation in the first chapter of Genesis. Ingersoll wrote a book on the mistakes of Moses, but later geological research has confirmed Moses' account, and the book turns now to be "The Mistakes of Ingersoll." Who taught Moses the startling truths of the world's origin 3000 years before men of science discovered it in the rocks?

Science has found that the earth has not always existed. They have traced it back to vapor and gas. But what order of intelligence and power created the vapors and the gases? The Bible answered long ago, for Moses says: "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth."

Scientists have fully demonstrated that the earth was once in a chaotic state, void of laws, without shape, waste and empty. But ages before science demonstrated it, God through his servant said: "The earth was without form and void."

It is fully agreed by geologists that the earth was once covered with water, and that the first land appeared about Hudson Bay. This we may easily understand, but who taught Moses 3400 years ago to say: "Darkness was upon the face of the deep," and "the dry land appeared"?

Man, until recently, believed that the mountains were created with the earth, but God taught the Psalmist to say: "Before the mountains were brought forth, 01 ever thou hadst formed the dry land and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, thou art God' (Ps. 90:2).

Who taught Moses that vegetation was first upon the earth; that the first forms of life were in the seas; when all scientists were against him until the past century? Who taught him that species are creations and hot developments of lower species, when even in the nineteenth century such men as Darwin and Huxley still stood out against him, and he must wait for the dawn of the twentieth century to hear all the great scientists agree that "there is nothing in nature to prove that one species ever develops into another"?