Daily Devotionals

Music For the Soul

Devotional: September 17th

THE SILENCE OF SCRIPTURE

Many other signs therefore did Jesus in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book: but these are written that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that believing ye might have life in His Name. - John 20:30-31

The silence of Scripture is quite as eloquent as its speech. Think for instance, of how many things in the Bible are taken for granted that you would not expect to be taken for granted in a book of religious instruction. It takes for granted the Being of a God. It takes for granted our relations to Him. It takes for granted our moral nature. In its later portions, at all events, it takes for granted the future life. Look at how the Bible, as a whole, passes by, without one word of explanation or alleviation, a great many of the difficulties which gather round some of its teaching. For instance, we find no attempt to explain the Divine nature of our Lord, or the existence of the three Persons in the Godhead. It has not a word to say in explanation of the mystery of prayer, or of the difficulty of reconciling the omnipotent will of God on the one hand with my own free will on the other. It has not a word to explain, though many a word to proclaim and enforce, the fact of Christ’s death as the atonement for the sins of the whole world. Observe, too, how scanty the information on points on which the heart craves for more light. Plow closely, for instance, the veil is kept over the future life! How many questions which are not prompted by mere curiosity our sorrow and our love ask in vain!

Nor is the incompleteness of Scripture as a historical book less marked. Nations and men appear on its pages abruptly, rending the curtain of oblivion, and striding to the front of the stage for a moment, and then they disappear, swallowed up of night. It has no care to tell the stories of any of its heroes, except for so long as they were the organs of that Divine breath, which, breathed through the weakest reed, makes music. The self-revelation of God, not the acts and fortunes of even His noblest servants, is the theme of the Book. It is full of gaps about matters that any sciolist or philosopher or theologian would have filled up for it. There it stands, a Book unique in the world’s history, unique in what it says, and no less unique in what it does not say.

Why was it that in the Church, after the completion of the Scriptural canon, there sprang up a whole host of apocryphal gospels, full of childish stories of events which they felt had been passed over with strange silence in the teachings of the four evangelists? Put the four gospels down by the side of the two thick octavo volumes which it is the regulation thing to write nowadays about any man that has a name at all, and you will feel their incompleteness as biographies. They are but a pen-and-ink drawing of the sun! And yet, although they be so tiny that you might sit down and read them all in an evening over the fire, is it not strange that they have stamped on the whole world an image so deep and so sharp, of such a character as the world never saw besides? They are fragments, but they have left a symmetrical and a unique impression on the consciousness of the whole world.