"When Jehudi had read three or four leaves, he cut it with his penknife."-Jeremiah 36:23.
We look in upon a room in Jerusalem. Two men are there. At the table sits Baruch the scribe, with a roll of parchment and an iron pen in his hand. The other man is walking the floor, as if strangely agitated. There is an unearthly appearance about his countenance, and his whole frame quakes as if pressed upon by something unseen and supernal. It is Jeremiah, in the spirit of prophecy. Being too much excited to write with his own hand the words that the Almighty pours upon his mind about the destruction of Jerusalem, he dictates to Baruch the scribe. It is a seething, scalding, burning denunciation of Jehoiakim, the king, and a prophecy of coming disasters.
Of course, Jehoiakim the king hears of the occurrence, and he sends Jehudi to obtain the parchment and read its contents. It is winter. Jehoiakim is sitting in his comfortable winter house by a fire that glows upon the hearth, and lights up the faces of the lords, and princes, and senators who have gathered to hear the strange document. Silence is ordered. The royal circle bend forward to listen. Every eye is fixed. Jehudi unrolls the book gleaming with the words of God, and as he reads the king frowns; his eye kindles; his cheek burns; his foot comes down with thundering indignation. He snatches the book from Jehudi's hand, feels for his knife, crumples up the book, and goes to work cutting it up with his penknife.
Thus God's book was permanently destroyed, and the king escaped. Was it destroyed? Did he escape? In a little while King Jehoiakim's dead body is hurled forth to blacken in the sun, and the only epitaph he ever had was that which Jeremiah wrote: "Buried with the burial of an ass;" while, to restore the book which was destroyed, Baruch again takes his seat at the table, and Jeremiah walks the floor and again dictates the terrible prophecy.
It would take more penknives than cutler ever sharpened to hew into permanent destruction the Word of God. He who shoots at this eternal rock will feel the bullet rebound into his own torn and lacerated bosom. When the Almighty goes forth armed with the thunderbolts of his power, I pity any Jehoiakim who attempts to fight him with a penknife.
That Oriental scene has vanished, but it has been often repeated. There are thousands of Jehoiakims yet alive who cut the Word of God with their penknives, and my object in this sermon is to designate a few of them.
The first man I shall mention as thus treating the Word of God is the one who receives a part of the Bible, but cuts out portions of it with his penknife and rejects them. Jehoiakim showed as much indignity toward the scroll when he cut one way as when he cut the other. You might as well behead Moses as to behead Jonah. Yes, sir, I shall take all of the Bible or none. Men laugh at us as if we were the most gullible people in the world for believing in the genuineness of the Scriptures; but there can be no doubt that the Bible, as we have it, is the same-no more, no less-as God wrote it. As to the books of the New Testament, the great writers of the different centuries give complete catalogues of their contents.
Polycarp, Ignatius, Clemens Romanus, in the first century, give a catalogue of the New Testament books; Tertullian, Justin Martyr, in the second century; Cyprian and Origen in the third century; Augustine, Jerome, and Eusebius in the fourth century. Their catalogues of the different books of the New Testament silence the suggestion that any new books could have been stealthily put in. How many books are on this stand? You say threetwo Bibles and a hymnbook. There are twenty men here taking a list of these books. Would it be possible for any man to come on to this platform and lay a new book on this stand and you not know it? Neither was it possible for any body to put an additional book into this New Testament when all the Christian world was watching.
