As a struggling, unemployed journalist writing about the Bible, I always find it heartening the tremendous emphasis God, a writer Himself, places on the craft of writing and getting His message out in written form.

One of my favorite Bible verses, in fact, is John 21:25: “And there are also many other things which Jesus did, the which, if they should be written every one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written. Amen.”

A great old hymn I’m often reminded of, entitled The Love of God, and written by Frederick Lehman, starts out, “The love of God is greater far than tongue or pen can ever tell.”

The last of its three verses goes, “Could we with ink the ocean fill, And were the skies of parchment made, Were ev-’ry stalk on earth a quill, And ev-’ry man a scribe by trade; To write the love of God above Would drain the ocean dry; Nor could the scroll contain the whole, Tho’ stretched from sky to sky.”

When you truly internalize the fact God is the author of the Bible, and intended for every single word to be just what it is and where it is, it’s unfathomable to think He would be behind a bunch of varying versions of His Book that have differing words, contexts and meanings. I mean, can you see William Strunk or E.B. White being that way with their Elements of Style?!

This past weekend I picked up from Shorewood’s church bookstore Alexander Hislop’s 1858 classic The Two Babylons, which my preacher, Richard Jordan, if I remember correctly, once referred to as “the greatest book ever written outside of the Bible.”

It is truly unreal how jam-packed it is with amazing facts, revelations, insights, analogies, etc., regarding history’s pagan-satanic underpinnings and origins from Nimrod on. It’s such a complex read I feel it’s going to take me a full year to get through its 323 pages!

Here’s just a taste of Hislop’s extraordinary ability evident from his first introductory paragraphs:

There is this great difference between the works of men and the works of God, that the same minute and searching investigation, which displays the defects and imperfections of the one, brings out also the beauty of the others.

If the most finely polished needle on which the art of man has been expended be subjected to a microscope, many inequalities, much roughness and clumsiness, will be seen.

But if the microscope be brought to bear on the flowers of the field, no such result appears. Instead of their beauty diminishing, new beauties and still more delicate, that have escaped the naked eye, are forthwith discovered; beauties that make us appreciate, in a way which otherwise we could have had little conception of, the full force of the Lord’s saying, ‘Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: and yet I say unto you, That even Solomon, in all his glory, was not arrayed like one of these.’

The same law appears also in comparing the Word of God and the most finished productions of men. There are spots and blemishes in the most admired productions of human genius. But the more the Scriptures are searched, the more minutely they are studied, the more their perfection appears; new beauties are brought into light every day; and the discoveries of science, the researches of the learned, and the labours of infidels, all alike to conspire to illustrate the wonderful harmony of all the parts, and the Divine beauty that clothes the whole.