God’s Standard of Measurement
Imagine if a person decided to take a sheet of paper and tear it in half; and then attempted to measure one of the torn sheets. With a tape measure, it measures at 4 ½ inches. With an office ruler, it measures at 4 9/16 inches. Checking it with an Engineer’s scale, it measures around 4.58 inches. Careful measurement with a steel scale under laboratory conditions reveals it to be 4.577 inches. But there is a more accurate standard. In Washington, at the Bureau of Standards, there is a platinum bar that is used as the standard meter for all measurements in the United States. It is approximately 39.37 inches long. This bar is kept in a high vacuum at a constant temperature. An argument about the measurement of any object must be settled, ultimately, by comparison with the standard meter in Washington. If the standard platinum yard says the sheet is measured at 4.5774 inches, that is it. If your bar differs from the one in Washington, it is in error. If your bar is exactly the same as that in Washington, you can say that your bar is without error. But it would be wrong to say that the measure in Washington is without error, for that mean that you are constituting yourself the judge—measuring the Washington meter by some other standard that is above it. We must come to the conclusion simply that the Washington meter is the ultimate standard, and that it cannot be judged.
God has given us His Word. It stands as the only infallible and indisputable rule of faith, precept and practice. Our lives are tested by its truth. All of our thoughts and philosophies are tested by the Word of God. If we find a human thought that is opposed to what is set forth in the Bible, we are called to renounce that human notion and deem it as in error. If we find that the human thought is in agreement with what is set forth in the Bible, we say that the human thought is truth. Every little particle of human thought must be judged by the entire revelation of God’s truth. But the Bible stands alone as the final court of appeal.
Isaiah 40:8 speaks powerfully toward this end: “The grass will wither, and the flowers will fade, but the Word of God will stand forever.”
Kraig Lowell Pullam 