I. It may throw a fresh light on the study of the Bible if you look at it with this thought of the contrast and contest between religion and revelation. The Old Testament is not chiefly a record of the Divine origin and establishment and sanctions of a religion. To represent it as this is to lose sight of its most instructive aspect. The Jewish nation, when first they appear in the dawn of history, already were possessed of strong religious traditions and instincts, inherited from their less-enlightened far-off ancestors, and modified by the people with whom they had been brought in contact. The Old Testament must be studied as the record of a contest between the unenlightened religious instincts of the Jews and what for the present we may call the revelation of God made through the hearts and voices of men. Here lies the unending value of the Book, and the record terminates when the contest terminated when religion was stereotyped and revelation was hushed. The natural growth of thought and revelation was strangled by the grasp of "religion."
II. Then after four centuries Christ came. And what did He come to do? To found a new religion? Surely not. He came to renew and continue the long-lost revelation. He came not to destroy, but to fulfil. He came as one of the prophets, though far greater than any prophet. And He came as the great revealer of God.
The revelation of God in Christ was preached to nations that had gone through very different discipline, and the seed fell on very different soils. But one experience that it met with was universal it found everywhere the religious instinct developed. And therefore everywhere the old contest was renewed between revelation and religion; the records of ecclesiastical history are the records of the contest between the higher light and the lower instinct in the Christian centuries, just as the Old Testament is the record of a similar contest in the pre-Christian centuries. Religion is multiform, transient, external; revelation is one, progressive and spiritual. The Christian religion is allerveränderlichste, the most mutable of all things, as has well been said by Rothe, and almost the same thing has been said by Newman. The Christian revelation is the most indestructible of things: it is light, it is life, it is growth, it is πνε ῦμα, it is spirit.
J. M. Wilson, Contributions to Religious Thought,p. 82.
References: Acts 17:19. Preacher's Monthly,vol. xxv., p. 216; P. Brooks, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xxvii., p. 14; G. Brooks, Five Hundred Outlines,p. 310; Church of England Pulpit,vol. xviii., p. 133.