“The (King James Bible) has influenced our literature more deeply than any other book.”---British scholar Arthur Quiller-Couch

A professor of computer science at Yale wrote an op-ed column for the Los Angeles Times last year in which he argued, “Without knowing the Bible, you can’t begin to understand English literature or American history.”

“Shakespeare and the Bible in English are the twin foundations of English literature,” writes David Gelernter. “Many believe that the Bible (especially the King James Translation of 1611) is the more important twin by far…Further, the Bible and Bible-centered Protestantism are central to U.S. History—to your history if you are American, whether you are protestant or not. The founders had varied beliefs, writes the philosopher-historian Michael Novak in ‘On Two Wings,’ but they found common ground ‘by appealing to the God of the Hebrews and the religious heritage of the Torah, a ‘Biblical metaphysics.’ ”

As Gelernter points out, the Bible was central through much of our country’s history and Abraham Lincoln, for one, gave speeches steeped in the Bible.

In a New York Times book review last fall on Doris Kearns Goodwin’s new biography on Lincoln, “Team of Rivals,” journalist Michiko Kakutani writes, “Once again we are given a portrait of Lincoln as a self-educated prodigy, blessed with an instinctive literary gift nourished by his readings of Shakespeare and the King James Bible; Lincoln as a melancholic, who seemed ‘to absorb the horrors of the war into himself’; Lincoln as an entrancing storyteller, who used his impish sense of humor and love of anecdotes to charm colleagues, defuse controversies and persuade opponents.”

There was a letter to the editor appearing recently in the Times from a high school English teacher in Norwalk, Conn., David A. Rosenberg, who wrote, “I…am convinced that studying the Bible is essential for understanding some of the ideas that not only characterize literature but also influence how we think about ourselves.”

In a recent sermon, my pastor, Richard Jordan (Shorewood Bible Church, Rolling Meadows, Ill.), was talking about the fundamental data only the Apostle Paul provided on how to understand Jesus Christ and His love when he stressed how important it is to notice the Bible’s data, in general, isn’t presented in a lecture or treatise form.

“Sometimes people ask me, ‘Well, why didn’t God just write it out where it’s easy to figure?’ ” says Jordan.”They say, ‘You know, you have to look for a verse here, and a verse there, and another verse over there, to get it all out. Why doesn't it just spell it out?! I can look at any book on doctrine and it'll spell it out in a paragraph. Why doesn't the bible do that?’ ”

The obvious reason, Jordan says, is, “If the Bible was designed so it could be written on a wall in a lecture treatise form, you’d get rather bored about it after you'd read it a time or two, and you’d think you’d mastered it and go on.”

“But the real reason,” Jordan continues, “is that Scripture, and all the information you take in from it, it all passes through the heart. It's given to you in a living, life situation. You see in the Scripture, doctrine is never meant to just sit on a bookshelf. Grace is not a theology to be exegeted; it's a life designed to live. And the truth of God's Word, the data in God's Word, is given to you in living situations so that you can glean it out and see it—see it's designed to be in living situations in your life. Jesus said, ‘The words I speak unto you, they are Spirit and they are life,’ so it's given in that kind of a context.”

The fascination with the Bible, in part, comes from seeing the incomprehensible intricacy of its words, patterns, types and symbols that run through the Book, from Genesis to Revelations, and “play out” in every individual book.

Endless information about Jesus Christ, for example, is contained all through the Old Testament in types, patterns and symbols. Each one of the psalms is, in one way or another, about Jesus Christ.

“All of a sudden you see a correspondence,” explains Jordan. “The Bible doesn’t set itself out and say, ‘Okay, here’s the way it’s going to be—Christology 101.’ It’s designed to be something that’s lived. It comes through your life. So that’s the way you discover the truth in the bible. You find a truth here, you make an extrapolation there. But it has to become sort of your life, and when it does, your thinking process. You think on it, you meditate on it, and it begins to work itself out through you. For me, it’s exciting. It makes studying the scripture exciting, and it makes beginning to understand these things the doorway to a lot of wonderful other kinds of things.”

What gets in the way for people is the inescapable reality that the Bible’s main theme—from Genesis 1 to Revelations 22—is authority; the issue of a throne over the universe and who’s going to be the final absolute authority, and who’s going to submit to the real authority.

Here’s a great passage on all this from a Bible study Jordan recently gave on Luke 20:1-2, about the negative reaction Jesus Christ received from Israel’s chief priests and scribes when He was teaching in the temple:

“In verse 20:2, the chief priests say to Christ, ‘Tell us, by what authority doest thou these things? or who is he that gave thee this authority?’ Now that’s always the question, isn’t it? ‘Who’s the boss? Who told you you could do that? By whose authority?’

“And it isn’t just the question of authority, it’s, ‘Tell us.’ It’s, ‘Hey, wait a minute, we’re the authority! You’re in the temple now; you’re not out there on the square. This is our domain! You’re in our temple! We’re the designated authority here, buster. Who told you you could come in here and teach that crazy whacked out stuff you’re teaching? Who do you think you are anyway? Who told you, I mean, by what authority?! Who gave you your orders? And who told you anyway?’

“It’s the question of religious authority. And they’re going to do what religious people always do. The conflict of the ages, from the beginning of Genesis—‘in the beginning God created the heaven and the earth, and the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep’—has to do with rebellion. Now, you don’t read about in Genesis, you just read the verse that tells you that it happened. You read about it later in the Scriptures.

“You don’t read about it in Genesis because the point made there isn’t the rebellion, it’s the restoration from the rebellion, and the conflict has been the conflict over a throne over this universe.

“If you don’t understand that, by the way, you don’t understand why God created man. If you’re going to understand the purpose of man, and the purpose that God has for man in the earth, you’ve got to understand the spiritual backdrop against which it happened, and I’m afraid some of our fundamentalist and evangelical friends, who are so intent on defeating the culture that we live in--and you’re never going to defeat it—don’t understand.

“They’re trying to defeat evolution by science, rather than by Scripture--that is, by going into the science realm, and coming up with what they call ‘Creation Science.’ You’ve been hearing this discussion about Intelligent Design and those kinds of things, and trying to demonstrate in the scientific realm that the doctrines that they hold are demonstrable there and so forth. And what they do, it’s just like (they’re saying) the world just ‘appeared.’ And by being so intent on the one issue, they miss, unfortunately, the reasoning, the spiritual things that were behind the physical.

“Everything physical has a spiritual origin to it. It has a spiritual purpose and design behind the intellectual thought and design. If you believe in Intelligent Design—which, I mean, you’d think you’d have to be a blind guy backing up a dark alley backwards not to believe in it, because saying it’s all just an accident, and coming up with a purposeless, meaningless creation, defies common sense and is a kind of nitwittery—then you need to look in the Scripture and see what the design is about.

“In other words, God did have a plan, and that plan is there for a purpose. And to understand the purpose for which God created man, the purpose revolves around the resolution of a conflict between truth and error that has to do with the satanic plan of being ‘like the most high God’—literally taking the authority of the government of the universe away from God.

“The conflict from Genesis 1 all the way to Revelation 22 is the conflict of the authority of a throne over the universe. That’s why in your life, and in my life, the issue is always the issue of authority—final authority.

“That’s why people can’t stand the Bible. The King James Bible is called the ‘Authorized Version.’ I mean, in its very name, the word ‘authority’ sits there. And when you say it’s the final authority, you don’t run from one translation, to another translation, to another translation, to another translation, and then over to texts that you can’t even read.

“God has provided something in your language that can be an authority; you can sit it on the table and say, ‘Every time I disagree with it, it’s right and I’m wrong.’ Now if you don’t believe the King James Bible is that, you better find one that you believe is. Otherwise you’re going to say, ‘Every time I disagree with it, I’m right and it’s wrong,’ and that’s backwards, friend.

“You better find an objective standard outside of yourself that’s always going to be right, so you have something to measure it by except your little noodle.

“Imagine your little scrambled egg brain being the authority. Holy moly! Why, you know you can’t even be the authority on how to get home straight tonight. Now you’re going to be the absolute final moral authority for the universe?! Whew, you don’t want to be that! You want to find something you can trust in.

“A lot of people, they never think they make a mistake. They never question themselves. By the grace of God, I’m glad to have a personality that isn’t bent that way. Because, man, if you never question yourself, you’re never going to find the places you’re wrong, and if you do question yourself, and you have an objective authority outside of yourself that’s always right, you can have real confidence in life and what you do, because your confidence isn’t in you. When you see your feet of clay, well, then you knew you had feet of clay anyway and that wasn’t where you were to have your confidence.

“So this issue of authority is always going to be that way, whether it’s authority in the Kingdom program, about a kingdom in the earth, or whether it’s the authority of who’s going to run your life.

“Your life comes along, and you’re doing one thing, and the Word of God says, ‘Well, here’s God’s will,’ and your will and God’s will butt up against each other. Now who’s going to be the authority?”

As Jordan frequently reminds, the middle letter of the word ‘sin’ is ‘I,’ and that’s the human problem—‘I am going to be the authority, and not God.’ That’s the issue all through God’s Word.

Editor’s Note: In keeping with this discussion of Scripture and having a final authority, here’s a piece I wrote more than three years ago, for my former website freespoken.com, on Abraham Lincoln’s biblical belief:

I was watching Christopher Reeves on PBS’ Charlie Rose Show recently when the subject of spirituality and faith in God came up.

I grabbed my tape recorder to capture Reeves saying: “To me this quote from Abraham Lincoln sums it all up. He simply wrote, “When I do good, I feel good and when I do bad, I feel bad and that’s my religion.” You know what, the reason that makes sense to me, I think, is when we quiet down the chatter and really just get calm and listen to that little voice inside us I think we kind of know what’s right. We know when we’re on the right track; we know when we’re not. If we can view this as time to slow down and figure out whether we’re doing good or bad for ourselves and for others. And then the next step is to think more about doing for others than ourselves. And if on average you spend a little more time thinking about others than yourself then I think you’re doing what god wants you to do.”

As soon as he gave the quote from Lincoln, I remembered I had the same one in a 1957 hardback called, “Lincoln’s Devotional,” found when sorting through my dad’s mountains of old books after he died.

The book, complete with a 15-page introduction written by Carl Sandburg, offered an exact replicate of the pages from a vest pocket-sized daily devotional Lincoln used to carry.

Called “The Believer’s Daily Treasure,” the 1852 devotional published by The Religious Tract Society in London consisted of Scripture texts and verses arranged for every day in the year and coordinated to fit monthly headings such as “The True Believer” ( January), “Duties of the Believer—To the World” (June) and “Final Blessings of the Believer” (December). Photographs provided in the book showed the actual gold-embossed, cloth-bound tiny devotional and Lincoln’s penned inscription, “A. Lincoln,” on the inside cover.

“Lincoln signed his name with typical abbreviation,” noted Sandburg in his introduction, “and from this we can surmise that either the volume itself or the person who presented it to him was held in deep regard, for throughout his life Lincoln was sparing in the number of books in which he wrote his name. His signature, it would seem, was inscribed more as an expression of strong interest or affection than as a precaution against a book’s becoming lost, strayed or stolen.”

Through many examples, Sandburg points out Lincoln was a lifelong reader of the Bible “since his earliest reading days as a boy,” and that he often quoted from it in private conversations and public addresses.

“Among universal possessions of the American people are certain speeches and letters of Lincoln that are colored and in part drenched with biblical references and learning,” writes Sandburg. “Why did Lincoln say ‘Four score and seven’ instead of the plain figure ‘eighty-seven’ at the opening of his Gettysburg address? Probably, it has been suggested, because in the Old Testament it reads most often ‘two score’ instead of ‘forty,’ and ‘four score’ instead of ‘eighty.’ ”

Lincoln, who is quoted as saying the Bible “is the best gift God has given to man,” was not much of a churchgoer, and when asked once by Henry Deming, a congressman from Connecticut, why he subscribed to the Bible but did not belong to a church, Lincoln, according to Deming, replied, “When any church will inscribe over its altars, as its sole qualification for membership, the Savior’s condensed statement for the substance of both law and gospel, ‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and thy neighbor as thyself,’ that church will I join with all my heart and soul.”

According to Sandburg, Lincoln once instructed his close friend Joshua Speed about the Bible, “Take all this book upon reason that you can, and the balance on faith, and you will live and die a better man.”

It was to his law partner, William H. Herndon, that Lincoln made the comment Christopher Reeves quotes. Herndon, according to Sandburg’s introduction, quoted Lincoln as once telling him “his religion was like that of an old man he once heard at a church meeting: ‘When I do good,’ the man had said, ‘I feel good; when I do bad, I feel bad’; and that’s my religion.’ ”

Given the wealth of evidence Lincoln followed the Bible (yet another passage in Sandburg’s introduction says Lincoln, responding to an election charge that he was a “scoffer of Christianity,” wrote, in part, “I have never denied the truth of the Scriptures”), I would say what he meant by the good/bad statement is that he was very conscious of when he was sinning, or doing bad, and that made him feel bad because he knew better and he didn’t want to sin.

As the Apostle Paul says in Romans 7:19-20: “For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do. Now if I do that I would not, it is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me.”

Rather than try and listen to a little voice inside him to “kind of know what’s right,” Lincoln, since childhood, had the Bible as his compass, telling him exactly what was right and wrong in God’s eyes, not his own.

As it says in II Timothy 3:15-17, “And that from a child though hast known the holy scriptures, which are able to make thee wise unto salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus. All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness: That the man of God may be perfect, throughly furnished unto all good works.”

When Reeves says it is up to us to “figure out whether we’re doing good or bad for ourselves and for others” he is suggesting we rely on our own sense of righteousness, not the righteousness of God as laid out in the Bible. As a matter of fact, Reeves even summarizes in his talk with Rose, “God asks us just to do our best, trusting our innate ability to discern the truth.”

Obviously, this is a very appealing message because it allows people to craft their own system on how God should treat them based on their own actions, rather than relying on God’s system based on faith in Jesus Christ who died to pay for our sins.

Ephesians 2:8-9 tells us, “For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: Not of works, lest any man should boast.”

Titus 3:3-7 states, “For we ourselves also were sometimes foolish, disobedient, deceived, serving divers lusts and pleasures, living in malice and envy, hateful, and hating one another. But after that the kindness and love of God our Saviour toward man appeared, Not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to his mercy he saved us, by the washing of regeneration, and renewing of the Holy Ghost; Which he shed on us abundantly through Jesus Christ our Saviour; That being justified by his grace, we should be made heirs according to the hope of eternal life.”

The point is we’ll never be perfect or do enough good works to attain God’s favor by measure of our self-devised merit system.

In Romans 10: 2-4, Paul talks about people in his day who thought they could do it on their own: “For I bear them record that they have a zeal of God, but not according to knowledge. For they being ignorant of God's righteousness, and going about to establish their own righteousness, have not submitted themselves unto the righteousness of God. For Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to every one that believeth.”

Paul even points out in Galatians 2:21 that “Christ is dead in vain” if righteousness comes just by doing good things we think will please God.

He even refers to his former religiosity as “dung.”

Here’s the passage from Philemon 3:5-9: “If any other man thinketh that he hath whereof he might trust in the flesh, I more: Circumcised the eighth day, of the stock of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, an Hebrew of the Hebrews; as touching the law, a Pharisee; Concerning zeal, persecuting the church; touching the righteousness which is in the law, blameless. But what things were gain to me, those I counted loss for Christ. Yea doubtless, and I count all things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord: for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and do count them but dung, that I may win Christ, And be found in him, not having mine own righteousness, which is of the law, but that which is through the faith of Christ, the righteousness which is of God by faith.”