The Pastor's Page - 7/10/09
The Word of God and the Word of Men
One of the rejections against accepting the Bible’s claims that is used most frequently is the one which says that the Bible was written by men and therefore should not be accepted or insisted upon as being true. The moral instructions of the Bible, or more strongly, its demands, should be rejected because it is, they say, the work of mere mortals and not a product of God’s divine intervention in the affairs of men.
Yet this view collapses when we take into account that there have been numerous documents written by men throughout the course of human history which offer moral evaluations and calls for action. Bible skeptics have often cited the similarities of the Code of Hammurabi and the Book of Exodus as proof that the Bible is not divine in any sense. Note the comparisons below.
251 Code of Hammurabi:
"If a man’s ox was a gorer and his city council made it known to him that it was a gorer, but he did not pad its horns [or] tie up his ox, and that ox gored a member of the aristocracy, he shall give one half mina of silver."
Exodus 21:29 (Revised Standard Version):
"But if the ox has been accustomed to gore in the past, and its owner has been warned but has not kept it in, and it kills a man or a woman, the ox shall be stoned, and its owner also shall be put to death."
Admittedly the similarities are striking. Rather than proving that the Bible should be rejected because it is the writing of men however, this view reveals the bias against the Bible. All the moral laws we have in any country are produced by men. The Magna Carta, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, the Gettysburg Address, the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution were all written by men. Further the Islamic Koran, and the Buddhist and Hindu writings were the product of men. Has mankind rejected the moral counsel that these documents assert simply because they were written by men? Obviously not.
Every law that is binding upon moral conduct is someone’s view of morality and has been written by mere mortals. To reject the claims of the Bible for this reason shows not a higher moral sensibility but a bias. A bias caused by the darkness of sin which shrinks back from the Bible perhaps because of a deep awareness of the truth of its claims to be the Word of God.
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