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Testament, the Saviour said 'Before Abraham was, I am' (John 8:58). Judged
from human standards, such language is ungrammatical. We should have to say
'Before Abraham was, I was', or following the Greek 'Before Abraham came into
being, I was'. The writer of these words could say 'Before the present queen
was born, I was living in London', but he could not say 'Before the present
queen was born, I am' for that does not make sense. When Christ, however,
uttered these words, His nature was beyond the limitations set for the
creature, and He indicates by the very breaking of the grammatical rule, that
He was in Himself beyond the limits of human creaturehood. Just as therefore
even within our own acknowledged limitations we say 'The sun rises' or 'the
sun sets', although we may believe that no such thing takes place, so we must
be prepared in the quest for truth to feel the shackles of our creaturehood
and recognize the bounds set to our inquiry.
Another limitation which we should be wise to remember is associated
with thought and speech. Tennyson, that master of language, was conscious of
this limitation, speaking as he does of a great friendship where:
'Thought leapt out to wed itself to thought,
E'er speech could wed itself to speech'.
Our ability to express our thought is limited by the language which we
speak. If we know but one language, English, French or German and the like,
our thought will be channelled and coloured by the vehicle we employ without
our intention. The moment we attempt to express our thoughts in words, we
become conscious that those thoughts have already become dim, their edge
blunted. Just as the artist as he stands at his easel realizes that the
further he progresses with pigment, the further he seems to get from his
original vision, so is it with pure thought and the expression in language.
Language is one of the greatest gifts of God to man, yet language veils
thought as well as expresses it. Moreover, every time I speak to another,
that other person, having a different upbringing from my own, a different
outlook, a different bent, will immediately colour the word I have chosen,
and if he in his turn attempts to pass the message on to others, they will
again twist and bend his words to their own standards, so that the original
thought which I attempted to express can never be known in the purity of its
original conception. What are we to do then? Either we must give up speech
as a vehicle of thought, or we must accept and remember its limitations, and
when we come to the Scriptures, which use human language as a vehicle for the
truth of God, we shall either conclude that (1) the Scriptures themselves can
never convey the truth of God to us, or, that (2) God has so chosen the words
of Holy Scripture, that they do convey, not absolute truth, for that is
impossible, but all the truth that He intends that man shall receive, in such
divinely chosen terms that the reader who believes the message shall be able
to say without reserve 'Thy Word is truth'. Accordingly we read in Psalm 12:
'The words of the Lord are pure words:
As silver tried in a furnace of earth,
Purified seven times' (6).
It is possible that the meaning of this passage is better expressed thus:
'The words of the Lord are pure
words:
As silver tried in a furnace
(Words) pertaining to the earth
(Yet) purified seven times'.