Matthew 7:29

Matthew 7:29

This was the impression made by our Lord on those who heard Him teach and preach. He spoke as if He had a right to be heard, as if He had a message to deliver, as if His declaration of the truth were enough.

I. Just what distinguishes our Lord's teaching from the teaching of uninspired teachers distinguishes the Bible from all other books. It speaks with authority. Other books may teach the truth; other books may give precepts of holiness, may give examples of excellence; other books may set before us the loftiest, the purest ideas may demonstrate the truth of their teaching by unanswerable arguments. But the characteristic of the Bible is not merely the truth which it teaches, the examples which it holds before the eyes, the ideals of life which it compels us to revere; but, beyond all these, the love of supreme authority with which it speaks. It is not merely that the Bible claims this authority; it compels the conscience to allow the claim. It speaks with authority, and it speaks with power.

II. Whence came this authority and this power? What do we mean by our conscious, and still more by our unconscious, acknowledgment of it? We mean that it is overshadowed by the presence of God. Just as the religious man is distinguished from the man of high moral character, and from the man of excellent natural graces, by the ever-present sense of a relation to God running through all his life, just so the Bible is unlike all other books, because it always seems to take us at once into God's presence. Not by any means that it professes to be, or seems as if it were, dictated by God Himself. No, plainly enough, it is written in human language: the thoughts are human thoughts; it is stirred by human feelings; it is addressed to human understandings. It is as thoroughly human as our Lord was man. But there is brooding over it, there is dwelling in it, a Divine authority which makes it quite unlike anything else which the world has seen. It lays hold of the conscience as nothing else has ever done, nothing else can do. It speaks with an authority which other teachers cannot claim.

Bishop Temple, Rugby Sermons,2nd series, p. 33.

References: Matthew 7:29. Expositor,1st series, vol. vii., p. 132; T. T. Lynch, Three Months' Ministry,p. 217.