By Jack H. West, 1954.
As further evidence, the terminology of the Bible itself shows us that neither is the Bible the whole word of God, nor are the heavens closed. Let us look at the record again. We find that God revealed everything from beginning to end, to prophet after prophet, to Adam, to Moses, Abraham, and others. They would stop them and say, in effect, “That is all you must write, now. The people must learn to digest milk before they can learn to digest meat. The balance of this will be revealed to man, some day, but the time is not yet. People must learn to walk before they can run.” And then in the Old Testament we are told, and it should be clear enough to individuals:
Whom shall he teach knowledge? and whom shall he make to understand doctrine? them that are weaned from the milk, and drawn from the breasts.
For precept must be upon precept, precept upon precept; line upon line, line upon line; here a little, and there a litte: (Isaiah 28:9-10).
Later Isaiah goes on to say that even with a foreign tongue will the Lord speak to his people,
And thou shalt be brought down, and shalt speak out of the ground, and thy speech shall be low out of the dust, and thy voice shall be, as of one that hath a familiar spirit, out of the ground, and thy speech shall whisper out of the dust. (Isaiah 29:4)
Of course God did not intend to close the heavens. The heavens have never been closed, except as man closes them within his own heart and says within himself, “I know I can’t receive anything from heaven.” Of course that person cannot receive anything from heaven. Even in modern-day revelation Jesus Christ made it very clear that he was stopped from giving certain blessings to certain individuals because there was doubt in their hearts. Yes, you can close the heavens so far as you are concerned, if you wish, but God has not closed them, nor has he ever intended that the Bible be the whole word of God. Parts of the Bible itself are missing.
Then the prosecution said, “If there is anything missing from the Bible, it couldn’t have been anything very important.” Some of them were maintaining that even the punctuation marks were divinely placed. They had not read the history of the King James translation, had they? They had not read that a great group of religious experts got together in the hope that they could correlate their thinking as to what the proper translation should be. And they found that there was only one thing they could really agree on and that was that they disagreed; and when they disagreed, they put the word or group of words in italics to show that there was disagreement among the experts as to how a certain word of phrase should be translated. I do not care what page you open to in the Old and New Testament, almost without exception you will find italics there. In other words, there was disagreement as to how things were to be interpreted and what should be left in and what should be taken out.
Now let us see how important some of the things left out of the Bible were.
The background of the following scripture is that God has asked Moses to call the Children of Israel together to read to them a certain book.
And he took the book of covenant, and read in the audience of the people: and they said, All that the LORD hath said will we do, and be obedient. (Exodus 24:7.)
Surely there must have been many commandments. Surely it must have been vital to call all of the children of Israel together to have this book read to them. Now do not search page by page carefully through the Bible looking for the “Book of Covenant”. It is not there! If the Bible is the whole word of God, where is this very important piece of scripture?
And is this all? If we wanted to, we could spend half an afternoon on this one point. Note, for example the reference in Numbers 21:14, “the book of the wars of the Lord.” Then go to First Chronicles 29:29. In one breath practically we are told of three books of scripture, and yet we find only one of them in the present-day Bible; two of them are missing.
Now the acts of David the king, fist and last, behold, they are written in the book of Samuel the seer, and in the book of Nathan the prophet, and in the book of Gad the seer, (I Chronicles 29:29.)
We read of two seers and one prophet. We have the book of Samuel the seer. We do not have the book of Nathan, the prophet. It is missing. The book of Gad, the seer, also is missing. If it is scripture, and it is mentioned in the Bible, and it does not appear in the Bible, how could the Bible then be the whole word of God? Even in the New Testament, in First Corinthians 5:9 in what we have assumed to be the very first letter of Paul to the Corinthians, we find him making reference to a previous letter. Was it important? You bet it was important! Paul was calling the Corinthians to task; he was getting just a little bit irked at them because they had not followed up on the commandments that he had passed on to them from our Heavenly Father in the previous epistle. Now, if we have the first one, where is this number “0” epistle of Paul to the Corinthian saints?
No, the Bible is not complete. The heavens are not closed and never were intended to be, except as a man would do so in his own heart. This would not seem strange to the world if they would look at the second great record. It testifies to us that certain things were to happen in this day and age – the latter-days – which would destroy part of the word of God.
…Thou hast beheld that the book proceeded forth from the mouth of a Jew (the Bible); and when it proceeded forth from the mouth of a Jew it contained the plainness of the gospel of the Lord, of whom the twelve apostles bear record;…
And after they go forth by the hand of the twelve apostles of the Lamb, from the Jews unto the Gentiles, thou seest the foundation of a great and abominable church, which is most abominable above all other churches; for behold, [now this is quite a charge] they have taken away from the gospel of the Lamb many parts which are plain and most precious; and also many covenants of the Lord they have taken away.
…–because of the many plain and precious things which have been taken out of the book, which were plain unto the understanding of the children of men, according to the plainness which is in the Lamb of God—because of these things which are taken away out of the gospel of the Lamb, an exceeding great many do stumble, yea, insomuch that Satan hath great power over them. (I Nephi 13:24,26,29.)
Yes, of course a second record was important. Why do we have over 700 [now, in 2013, nearly 40,000] Christian religions or factions of Christian religions? They all claim to believe the Bible. We find that exactly what the “Stick of Joseph” claimed would happen did happen, as a result of which “an exceeding great many to stumble.”
Thus we were able to answer the charge of the defense and prove to the satisfaction of the court that the Bible is not complete; there are parts missing; some further scripture would be important.
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