We now present Dr. Bob Jones Sr., internationally known evangelist and founder of Bob Jones University, who during his earthly ministry was one of God's great warriors for the faith. Dr. Jones' message is one in a series entitled, Word of Truth. Thank you very much. My friends, I find myself constantly thinking about the problems that we Christian people are facing in this day. Now, I don't believe in being a hobbyist, but I believe that the note that ought to be hit ought to be hit. I believe the emphasis that ought to be given ought to be given. I believe a duty that ought to be performed should be performed. Now, Paul wrote Timothy to preach the Word. That's all a preacher's supposed to preach, the Word of God. He has no other subject except that. All right, that's the word. Now you can apply the word to local conditions or to general conditions and all that. And look into the Bible and explain what's happening. For instance, when certain things happen, the Lord says, now you know that the coming of the Lord is near at hand. He said, if you see a fig tree budding, you know springtime's coming. Now sometimes we may misunderstand things in the word of God. And we may think that something would indicate that we're right at the end of the age, but we could turn right around after that and find a warning about presuming on certain things. You know, one day with the Lord's a thousand years, a thousand years one day, God doesn't measure time like we measure it. But you've got to look into the Bible to understand any condition. The Bible's the only book that's ever been written that tells you who God is, what kind of God He is. And to tell you He's a God of justice, and a God of mercy, and a God of love, and that He will not wink at sin, you've got to go to the Bible to get that. You know nothing about Jesus Christ except what you learn in the Bible. We might have a strange sort of a tradition handed down about Jesus. It would be a meaningless tradition. But here are the men in the Bible that knew him, and wrote about him, and told about him. Paul went on to tell about how many people saw Jesus, and he said, I saw him, if you raised me dead in a different way than the rest of them. All right, you have to go back into the Word. You wouldn't understand sin without the Bible. You wouldn't understand what wisdom means without the Bible. Now, we have gone away from the Bible, and we've substituted the opinion of man instead of the Word of God. Somebody comes along and says, well, that's not the Word, that's what he said. He meant well, but he's mistaken, you know. Or they say God's Word is in the Bible, and we'll decide what is and what isn't His Word. And they approach it that way. Now, when you go to thinking about it, We have a book here, the book of books, and this book claims to be from God. Now that's what it claims to be. If this Bible is not from God, then the Bible has a lie to begin with. The Bible makes it plain that all scripture is given by inspiration of God. Well now, I know enough about the mental processes of people to know that no man ever wrote the Bible. No man, I mean, is the author of the Bible. He wrote it, he was moved by the Holy Spirit. Do you think if you were writing a biography of a friend of yours, and there was something of a little shade in his life, would you go on and write very bluntly about it and tell it? Oh no, you'd fix it, wouldn't you? Well, God didn't. God said Dave was a man after his own heart. But God comes along and puts in the Word of God, in the Bible, the sin of Dave. The very fact that the sins of men have been recorded there in the Bible. Men that witness to God, and yet their sins are on record. Why, that's the proof to me that man's not the author of the Bible. If I were writing about a good friend of mine, I wouldn't exactly lie, but I wouldn't play up something wrong in the life of a friend to whom I was devoted. You wouldn't either. How anybody can question the Bible being the Word of God is more than I can understand. And yet that's the issue today. The issue today is not Jesus Christ. The issue today is the Word of God. Because Jesus Christ is set forth in that Word, and I can't know anything about Him except what the Bible says. The Bible says when He was born, the names of the choir sang. I wouldn't know if that wasn't in the Bible. The Bible says that He was in the temple when He was 12 years of age, talking about His father's business. I wouldn't know if that wasn't in the Bible, what kind of a boy Jesus was. The Bible tells me that he went down to the river Jordan to be baptized by John the Baptist. And he said, be Caesar and meet me now. The Bible tells me that he preaches sermon on the mount. Well, that sums up that. It said Jesus preached it. If Jesus preached it and Jesus is what he claims to be, I won't listen to that word, see. Now the trouble with us today, we've walked out on the Word of God. Now that's a trouble all over this country. The old time man in America may not have always been right, and he may have sinned and done that which he should not do, but the old time in America, when you got him converted, he said, this is God's book. And he took up God's book right there. Now, if there's a God in this universe, and I don't say it with any question, I know there's a God, I won't know what kind of God He is. Well, all right, I have a right to know. If I'm to worship Him, if He's to have first place in my life, I can't worship a God I don't know anything about. I look up at the stars at night and say, the heavens declare the glory of God. And I say, isn't it wonderful? My, what a God He must have been. But I wouldn't know about Him. I go to the Bible and read about it. The Bible tells me what kind of God he is. It says that he's a God of justice. He won't put up with sin. His eyes are holy. He can't look upon sin with least degree of allowance. But he says he loves me too. And he said he sent his son down to the earth to die on the cross for me because he loved me. He incarnated himself and came here and let men spit in his face. The God of the universe, manifest in the flesh, died on the cross, bore my sin in his body, was raised again for my justification. Well now, don't tell me that anybody would have just thought of that that way. A man wouldn't have thought that way. It's not the way man thinks. Let me show you something. For instance, when I read in the Bible that I can't save myself, Why, every man thinks he's got to look out for number one and save himself, but do the best they can, the Bible says you can't save yourself. Average man today, in his own mind, he may not put it this way, but he thinks it this way. He just sort of figures that there's a God in the universe, and he sort of keeps books, and if I do something bad, it goes to one column. Do something good, it goes to another column. If I die, God adds up, and if the good's bigger than the bad, it'll go to heaven. If the bad's bigger than the good, it'll go to hell. Well, that isn't in the Bible. The Bible makes it plain that the vilest sinner who ever lived can come to God and be saved. And no man can save himself. Doesn't matter who he is. All have sinned, it says, and come shall the glory of God. Well, if I've sinned, I've got to get forgiveness. I've got to get saved. Why, you know, how people question the Bible, I don't understand. Now, there may be a question sometime about the shade of meaning in translation. Because a word in English might not mean exactly today what it meant when I was a little boy. I mean it might have a little shade now, somebody may have made the word, given a little shade to it. And of course in the translations I'm not talking about that. But I'm talking about the Bible, the original language, the word of God. Oh, isn't it a wonderful thing? Listen, isn't it a wonderful thing that God Almighty puts a red lantern at the entrance of every road that leads astray? There isn't any road that leads away from God, but God puts a little warning, this is a dangerous road, don't go this way. And God warns us, ways of sin is death. God makes it plain that men reap what they sow. And God bends over the battlements of heaven in the Bible and puts out a little warning here, and another yonder, and another yonder. And God gives men warning before he sends destruction. You take back in the old days, people said, I don't see my God send a flood to drown everybody. But he told them what he was going to do, and he sent a preacher to warn them. You know, that's wonderful, wasn't it? And Noah went out there preaching all those years, and the people treated God so, paid no attention to his preacher. And said, oh, that's an old fanatic. Says there's a flood coming, who ever heard of such a thing? Somebody said, that's scientifically impossible. That couldn't be, but Noah just kept preaching. And then the flood came. Now God Almighty warns you, the wicked shall be turned into hell with the nations that forget God. God warns you. God says you reap what you sow. And the history of the race proves it. Every nation reaps what it sows. We're going to reap what we sow in America. Our forefathers believed the Bible. They believed it was the Word of God. They accepted it. They preached it. They didn't always live right. But you know, as long as a man has a place that he can go and look up and find out how to live, there's hope for him. When he gets where he doesn't have any authority about how to live, no authority and it's divine, you better watch out for him. Now the issue today, as I've told you before, and I won't emphasize over and over again, The issue of this day that we are facing in America and around the world is the authority of the Bible. Is the Bible God's book? That's the question for this day. Somebody said, why, no, Jesus is the issue. No, you are wrong. Jesus, as he set forth in the Bible, is the issue. See? Why, most anybody could get up and say something that Jesus said and say that's a fine statement and so forth and so on. But who said it? Who was he? Who's talking? Does he know what he says? If a man tells me something, I won't know if he knows what he's talking about. Does he understand what he's saying? Is he sincere? Has he got my interest at heart? I don't want to know about it. All right, now here's somebody that came down, drove crooks out of the temple, denounced the religious bosses of his day, called them a generation of vipers, everything you can think of. All of those things are there in the Bible. The religion of the day rejected it. The democracy of the day rejected it. The individual rejected it. The government turned its back on it. Now who was he? Well, according to the Bible, he's the son of God. According to the Bible, he's the Jehovah of the Old Testament. According to the Bible, he was God manifesting the flesh. According to the Bible, he came down and laid his life down on a cross and then took it up again. According to the Bible, he walked around among men after he was raised from the dead and went back to heaven. Did you imagine that anybody would have ever thought to fix that story up about Jesus going back to heaven? Up through the cloud and high stretched out hands to bless him and all that picture. Do you think anybody ever thought of that? Why, it would have been too ridiculous for anybody to have thought of that. Why, you wouldn't have said about anybody else. That's so. Man couldn't have imagined all that stuff. It was real. Now, Jesus Christ, as he sets forth in the word of God, can become real to you. But now, if you don't believe the Bible, he can't become real. You've got to believe what God says about it. This is my beloved son, hear ye him. Well, what did he say? Well, it's what he says that I need to know is in the Bible. All right, if I don't listen to the Bible, I don't listen to him. And the man that comes along today and undermines your faith in the Bible, with all this religious liberalism in this country, That man is doing you harm not only for time but for eternity. And I tell you that I was struck when we better get back to the Word of God. If you don't do it, we're gone. Thy Word is forever settled in Heaven. You don't have to be confused. You're a sinner, aren't you? Yes. You need somebody that can brought out your sins and save you, don't you? All right. Well, that's all in the Bible. Tells you how to trust Him, how you can be saved. If you haven't done it, God help you do it. Our Heavenly Father, we thank Thee for Thy Word. Help us to love it, and to be true to it, and to teach it to our children in our homes. And set up family orders, and read this Word of God, and have prayer in our homes, and save our homes from wreck and ruin of the divorce courts that are sweeping over this country. And help young people to get back, O Lord God, to where they were in the old days when parents taught them the Bible. Hear us in this prayer, for Jesus' sake. Amen. You've been listening to the Word of Truth with Dr. Bob Jones Sr., a man who went to his heavenly home after more than 70 years of influencing thousands with his compassion for souls and the Word of God. If you can't remember telephone numbers, grab a pencil and jot this one down. It's 1-800-BJ-AND-ME. When you call, tell us why you want to attend Bob Jones University. and will send you your own personal opportunity profile. Did you get the number? It's 1-800-BJANDME.