hat day will I raise up the tabernacle that is fallen," as
given in Acts 15:16, "After these things I will return, and I will
build again the tabernacle of David which is fallen"; the modification
of the language seems designed, in order to make clear its significance
in its present setting. Many other examples might be given of {177} a
reshaping of his own words by the divine Author of Scripture. On the
other hand, the constant recurrence of the same words and phrases in
books of the Bible most widely separated in the time and circumstances
of their composition, strongly suggests identity of authorship amid the
variety of penmanship. The individuality of the writers was no doubt
preserved, only that their individuality was subordinated to the
sovereign individuality of the Holy Spirit. It is with the written
word as with the incarnate Word. Because Christ is divine, he is more
truly human than any whom the world has ever seen; and because the
Bible is supernatural, it is natural as no other book which was ever
written; its divinity lifts it above those faults of style which are
the fruits of self-consciousness and ambition. Whether we read the Old
Testament story of Abraham's servant seeking a bride for Isaac, or the
New Testament narrative of the walk of the risen Christ with his
disciples to Emmaus, the inimitable simplicity of the diction would
make us think that we were listening to the dialect of the angels who
never sinned in thought, and therefore cannot sin in style, did we not
know rather that it is the phraseology of the Holy Spirit.[6]

{178}

An eminent German theologian has written a sentence so profoundly
significant that we here reproduce it in Italics: "_We can in fact
speak with good reason of a language of the Holy Ghost. For it lies in
the Bible plainly before our eyes, how the Divine Spirit, who is the
agent of revelation, has fashioned for himself a quite peculiar
religious dialect out of the speech of that people which forms its
theatre._"[7] So true do we hold this saying to be, that it seems to
us quite impossible that the exact meaning of many of the terms of the
New Testament Greek should be found in a Lexicon of classic Greek.
Though the verbal form is the same in both, the inbreathed spirit may
have imparted such new significance to old words, that to employ a
secular dictionary for translating the sacred oracles, were almost like
calling an unregenerate man to interpret the mysteri