A PLEA FOR THE
POSSESSING OURSELVES OF ALL GODS REVELATION
APPENDIX IV
"I HAVE more understanding than all my teachers," says the
psalmist enthusiastically, "for Thy testimonies are my meditatation." The
Christian can surely not think him too emphatic. That is the voice of the
disciple; but it is the voice of the Master that has said: "Search the
Scriptures: for in them ye think ye have eternal life; and they are they that
testify of Me."
In their own line, therefore, every believer
recognizes that they are absolutely unique. Not all the books that have ever
been produced in all the ages of human history outside of them are equal even
to the small dust of the balance when weighed against these.
It is
well to remember in such days as ours, that it was of the Old Testament, and
almost certainly of only part of the Old Testament that the writer spoke. As it
was of the Old Testament also that the apostle spoke when he reminded Timothy
that from a child he had "known the holy Scriptures; which are able," he adds,
"to make thee wise unto salvation, through faith that is in Christ Jesus." How
small a part of what we have to day was the wisdom for which the psalmist
disclaimed in comparison all that the, world beside could show!
But
this is not now what I intend to take up or speak about. I am not writing for
those that would contest it. In their own line, it is admitted, let us say,
that the Scriptures are unique. I would yet propose the question,- and it will
be by no means so readily or unanimously answered, even by the Christian,- what
is then "their own line?" How far does this unique value of theirs extend?
Supposing we desire to use the Bible fairly, and (as given of God,) for all for
which He gave it, how could we define this? is it not desirable to do so? at
least to have some practical idea of how to use it, if not an absolute
definition?
If God had meant by Scripture only to teach us the way to
heaven, or, along with this, how to live a good life here (and this is pretty
much the definition that would be adopted by many) the first thing that would
naturally occur to any one thinking seriously about it, would be that the Bible
is a very large book and a very strange book, on this view of the matter.
It is a very large book: for it surely does not take so many words to
tell us the way to heaven: and any one knowing the gospel knows (and thank God
that it is so) that a very few texts will suffice to show this with the most
absolute clearness. As to the living a good life here, the simplest way to show
us this would be in something like the ten commandments, with applications to
suit the varied circumstances of life; or, if that were too legal, a catalogue
raisonné of Christian principles.
Scripture on the face of it is
not at all like this. Though there are blessed statements of the gospel, as we
very well know, and many a page of Christian exhortation, yet these are not put
together as we might imagine they would be, and they are mixed with much else
and various matter very different from all this. Things are not so definitely
stated that there should be no possible mistake about them, as witness the
conflict of Christian men over their meaning. What a help to a common
understanding would be at least a divine summary of faith and practice, such as
the various churches have adopted and which for this purpose they find so
useful. But then these articles of faith separate: they are but the expression
after all of the judgment of a section of Christendom; suppose there had been
given us by divine inspiration as plain a creed as any of these, would it not
have united instead of scattering us? if the Westminster Confession had been
written by apostles instead of theologians of the seventeenth century, would we
not have all subscribed it? and would not Arminianism have been effectively
excluded from the minds of all honest-minded and believing men?
But
such help as this it has not pleased God to give us; and we have to hunt up
even texts upon any given subject - not always sure even that we have got the
right ones - from every part of Scripture! Does not God care for the poor? Does
He not know the dullness of our minds at best, the multifarious occupations
that we have to be engaged in, the trouble and anxiety caused by our many
differences, the darkness in which true - hearted saints grope often after His
will, the tendency we have on account of all this, to follow the men who will
do our thinking for us, and in whom in some way or other we have concluded to
put confidence?
Yes, surely: all this and more God knows; and, knowing
it, has written Scripture as He has, a book so large, so various, so needing to
be searched, studied; so certain to exercise most the most careful, earnest,
conscientious, God-fearing. His thought then for us, whatever it may be, is not
to save us from thought,- not to let us off from the necessity of labour for
what we get from it. It was not to a class of theological students, but to men
so poor that they could follow Him for the loaves with which He fed them, that
He said: "Labour not for the meat that perisheth, but for that meat which
endureth unto everlasting life, which the Son of man shall give unto you."
(John vi. 27.) Notice, therefore, that this applies not merely to the more
hidden things of the Old Testament, but to the plain speech of the New as well,
that it calls for labour - for more earnest and untiring labour than our daily
food does; and that not from a special class of selected, capable workmen, but
from all who need and desire such spiritual food.
Evidently the Lord
distinguishes the thing that is to be laboured after in the way He does in
order to challenge our interest by the exceeding importance of it. "Meat that
endureth to everlasting life" is a very significant title indeed, and one that
we shall do well if we seek to realize what we can of the depth of its meaning.
I have seen it interpreted as signifying "food that will give you entrance into
everlasting life,"- by which you will become possessors of it: and that is true
enough as a thought, and afterwards affirmed also: "he that eateth of this
bread shall live for ever." It is a true thought in itself, and a thing justly
worthy of all the emphasis that can be put upon it. And yet, if that were all,
for the Christian, who has already the possession of eternal life, the urgency
of the exhortation would necessarily pass out of it. He is not to be persuaded
that he needs labour to get what he has already got, or to keep what it is as
certain he can never lose.
Here too, it may be pleaded that the Lord
is actually speaking to men who were not believers; but it is plain all the way
through the chapter that there were disciples also among them, while in the
open synagogue He is not hindered from speaking of such things and in such a
way as to test disciples themselves. Here in seeking to attract men to Himself
He might, as with the woman of Samaria, speak of things the depth of which they
would not yet be able to penetrate, and yet of what they would understand to be
a blessing set before them; and those who sought it would not be stumbled to
find at last greater than at first they had realized.
After all, the
truth itself is not so difficult to conceive, and the Lords words to the
Samaritan are strictly parallel. To her He speaks of "living water springing up
unto eternal life," and under this figure of the Spirits presence,
permanent and operative ever, not to bring one into life, but throughout it. So
here with the bread of life, the living bread, it too abides unto eternal life,
in opposition to the "meat that perisheth." Not only the life is eternal, but
all that ministers to it partakes of the same eternity. Christ abides, and
abides as the unfailing support of a life which though eternal is dependent
too, and which never ceases to realize its dependence.
An image of
this, and to which the Lord also, in His epistles to the churches, refers us,
was that "hidden manna," which was preserved in the golden pot and carried into
the land, the type of our glorious heritage, that the children of Israel might
see the food with which Jehovah had fed them in the wilderness. (En. xvi. 32.)
Thus the food of the wilderness abode, but abode simply as a memorial, to be
seen. To the overcomer at Pergamos on the other hand, the promise is: "I will
give him of the hidden manna" (Rev. ii. 17): he shall partake of it, not simply
see it. Christ as enjoyed in the wilderness shall be enjoyed afresh in the
glorious land to which we are going: more perfectly, surely, for all shall be
perfect there, and yet, let us mark it well, the very wilderness-food itself.
For the manna is Christ in His humiliation, and in heaven He is no longer in
humiliation, yet it is the hidden manna of which the saint in heaven still
partakes.
A serious consideration presses upon one here, that, if this
be the food partaken of,- and since one cannot call up again the
wilderness-condition, save in memory,- he who has not had the wilderness
experience cannot have the repetition of it in heaven: he cannot recall what he
has never known. Thus, too, there must be some correspondence between the
measure of apprehension of Christ here and the measure of such apprehension of
Christ there. Take an angels knowledge: it could not in this respect be
the knowledge of the redeemed from among men. There is no sin in the angel, and
it is not sin that limits his view; nay, his very freedom from it - his never
having had the experience of it - would be a necessary limitation. And so would
it be with the babe, only coming into the world to be taken out of it. The
perfecting of its faculties in another scene would not give it experiences of a
state in which it had never been.
Perfecting of experiences that we
have had is, of course, another thing. This there will surely be: for we shall
look back with eyes purged from the films of earth, and with memories that will
themselves be perfected. But the knowledge will still be measured - finite, not
infinite; and with limitations, whatever may be the enlargement of its scope.
If Christ then be the "meat that endureth unto everlasting life," and
the manna so laid up must be manna gathered here, how important must this
gathering of the manna be! Surely there can be no "meat that perisheth" to be
compared with it; and one can no longer wonder at being called to seek it with
proportionate earnestness.
Now it is Scripture that is to give us this
knowledge of Christ, though of course there is in Christ more than can be
justly spoken of as manna. This will not make Scripture of less importance to
us surely. Christ it is that is the knowledge of the "new man," and Christ is
"all" that knowledge. (Col. iii. 11.) God has "predestinated us to be conformed
to the image of His Son, that He may be the First-born among many brethren."
(Rom. viii. 29.) The "edifying of the body of Christ" also is "till we all come
unto the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a
perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ." (Eph.
iv. 13.) We are now growing up to this; and for this it is that the word of God
is given to us, not simply that we may be saved, or even live here a life of
piety and good works, but to form in us the mind of Christ, that "we may grow
up unto Him in all things." (ver. 15.) No wonder Scripture is as large,
therefore, as it is: communion with God, though we talk quietly enough about
it, yet if it be realized in the depth and fullness of its meaning, how immense
a thing it is! Communion with God, realized in this way would be nothing less
than sharing all His thoughts as He has revealed them to us; thoughts which
have Christ as centre and circumference; for "all things were created by Him
and for Him." (Col. i. 16.)
Here then is what we are called to enter
into: here is a field to be worked which will call for all our faculties in all
their energy to be engaged with. God does not tell us that it is easy work: how
could it be? delightful work it is, and that increases all the energy that it
demands. But it requires that we yield ourselves unreservedly to it,
subordinating everything else to Gods great purpose with regard to us.
Christ must come to fill the whole range of our vision; but, so filling, to
enlarge and rectify and illumine it with divine glory.
Here the nature
of man finds what it craves, and expands in all parts and in equal proportions.
Mind, heart and conscience develop together. Scripture, while it makes men of
might, produces no monsters: no men of intellect without heart; no conscience
urging one to self-devised torment; and yet no self-complacent egotism either:
"I live, not I," says one who is without question a competent witness to us;
"but Christ liveth in me." (Gal. ii. 20.)
This is not simply doctrine,
nor even faith in a doctrine. A glorious truth underlies it, but this is more;
it is the apprehension of the truth, and the experience which flows from it. He
who spoke this had accepted what Christ had done for him, the death in which he
himself for faith had died, and which enabled him to turn away from himself,
the man down here, to the One with whom he was now identified before God, and
with whom he had in the joy of his heart accepted identification.
His
old life had ended therefore: he was now a man in Christ; though realizing that
there was still upon earth a "self" in which he could not glory, save in the
infirmity which made him conscious of the need,- a need continually met as
realized,- "that the power of Christ should rest upon" him. (2 Cor. xii. 5, 9.)
This for the pursuit of Christs interests on earth to whom he belonged,
while, beholding Him above, he was "changed into His image" (chap. iii. 18.)
I believe that a most false and limited idea of the design of
Scripture is shutting masses of Christian people out of the very desire to
possess themselves of what our gracious God has given them in it. It is a book
larger by far than they have any use for. To find salvation and to live a good
life on earth, these are the ends they have before them, and which they suppose
to be all that God has in His mind for them. But for these ends, I say again,
Scripture is too large; I may say boldly, it is very much too large. Did they
think that they had any particular responsibility about it, they would perhaps
even be distressed to know what to do with it all. As it is they read it more
or less, perhaps conscientiously all through, but with a languid interest in
much of it at best, and with a wonder which they scarcely like to admit, why it
should have been written.
Of searching it for themselves, save certain
parts, they know very little. They get light here and there upon it through
others, and read books, if they are not too deep. They have really no thought
that what God means by it all is to form in them the mind of Christ - to give
them fellowship with Himself - to train them for co-heirship with His Son; and
that all this means not a little need of teaching, not a little exercise, as
well as the disciplinary dealings of His hand by the way ;- "exercised to
discern both good and evil,- "suffering that they may reign with Him."
To accomplish this the word of God is not too large; though that of course,
does not imply but that it will always be beyond us. It is plain that He means
us to be busy with it,- would not let us off thinking,- would not leave any
vacuity with us for the thorn and thistle-seed always floating in the air, to
plant themselves in and spring up. To His people of old He spoke earnestly
about this: "And these commandments that I command thee today shall be in thy
heart; and thou shalt teach them diligently to thy children, and shalt talk of
them when thou sittest in thy house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when
thou liest down, and when thou risest up. And thou shalt bind them as a sign
upon thy hands, and they shall be as frontlets between thine eyes; and thou
shalt write them upon the posts of thy house and upon thy gates" (Deut. vi.
6-9). All this implies a constant keeping the words of God before themselves
and others, constant confession of them and meditation upon them. And how
thoroughly a saint of old could respond to this, the delight he could have in
it, and the fruit he could find, the 119th Psalm alone is sufficient to assure.
Is it to be supposed that God would have us less fully occupied or give us less
joy or profit from the occupation?
The whole heart also, if it be this
we bring to it, needs the whole Word. How could it do less than this, if only
because God has given it? Has He misjudged our need, or put upon us useless
labour? Certainly He does not mean to have it drudgery for us, nor does He give
us mere chaff to thresh out for the granary. If there be what may seem strange
to be from Him, would He not have us inquire the more because of its
strangeness? If we seem sometimes to be laying up useless store, we should
find, if we keep it long enough, occasion for it. We have (if we are
Christians) the Spirit of God as our Teacher; and He, let us remember,
"searcheth the deep things of God." (1 Cor. ii. 10). If the heart is only
enough engaged, and the throne of grace is yet accessible, we need not despair
of learning because things are "deep."
I have found too that one of
the most fruitful causes of not understanding or misunderstanding a portion of
Scripture is just the lack, as the man of science would say, of a perfect
induction. That to say, something - perhaps obvious enough - has escaped me. It
was there, but I was too careless, too much in a hurry,- perhaps too doubtful
of being able to find any meaning - actually to find it. The key too may be
some distance off, and in a part I have not read or remembered. Hence the
necessity of storing the mind with Scripture. It is all valuable - too valuable
yet perhaps, for me to appreciate, just as a savage might have no use for a
sewing-machine. Let us be assured that in Scripture there is nothing barren or
unprofitable anywhere.
The whole Word, then; and all to be honestly
thought upon and sought into. But even so, we have not got all the riches God
designs for us. There is the great book of Nature, wide open, and inviting us
by its appeal to all our senses. Here again, if we have minds that work, we
shall find what will give them full activity. "Too much," perhaps, you may say;
"there is no end to it." No, truly: no end to all Gods wonders, nor to
the riches He has spread around us.
But here, also, is a field which
has been much worked of late in mans interests, and he is very proud of
what he has done in it. It has for the most part to do with a world which has
been put under the dominion of man, as meant for his use, and he has only
lately begun to find how rich is his inheritance.
But God has taken
care, also, that this world with which man has so much to do should be full of
witness to His power who is above him, as well as the love that has strewn this
munificence around him: a witness he can never lose, never escape. It shines
upon him from the lights of the spangled sky above him; it breathes in the
whisper of the gentle breeze around, which before night may have increased to a
hurricane; the various voices of the day and night preach it in melody and in
dissonance: and everywhere man has acknowledged this witness to be divine, and
worshipped.
Scripture has brought nigh God and perfected this witness.
In the mirror of Nature every spiritual truth has its reflection; and these
images appear throughout Scripture and become the familiar language in which
its doctrines are conveyed. In the New Testament the Creator Himself is
declared to be the Word - thus the Revealer - of God, and creation therefore by
implication to be a revelation. Gods witness is twofold; and on the face
of heaven and earth Scripture again is written out in incorruptible signs that
may be appealed to. Not in vain, surely, has God done this: He can still "call
to the heavens and to the earth that He may judge His people" (Ps. 1. 4.); and
rebuke the unbelief which uplifts itself against Him in the very face of such
tokens.
Now, if Christ be indeed the One by whom and for whom all
things were created, it is only the one to whom Christ has become what we see
He was with the apostle, who can be at the centre of any branch of knowledge.
All roads must lead to Him. The spiritual must everywhere underlie the natural,
give meaning to it, make it really what it is meant to be, clothe it with the
power that should belong to it. No science but must run into theology. All the
analogies of nature become but witnesses of this inner reality, without the
knowledge of which the savant and scientist becomes indeed but a pitiful
agnostic; all his utterances but broken fragments of sentences,- the
stammerings of infirmity and impotence itself.
And if this be true,
what must be the value of Scripture, what must be its comprehensiveness? what
field of knowledge will you shut off from it, what shall we think, for
instance, of the so readily accepted dictum, that Scripture was not intended to
teach science, and which is meant - not to assert of it that it is infinitely
beyond a mere primer or text-book of science, but - to rule it out as
incompetent in this sphere, as without help or authority as regards the
visible, and to relegate it to the sphere of the invisible alone.
The
effect is that as to the immensity of nature round us we may think what
thoughts we please, unhindered by anything in Scripture. Guesses we may have,
and theories, and "working hypotheses" ad libitum, which even palpable
self-contradictions shall not destroy,* and they must not be even limited by
any intrusion of the divine. Thus practically we get a world- yea, a universe
as far as man has explored it- Christless, if not godless; to which Scripture,
with its old-time child-notions of miracles and a God nigh at hand, is in plain
opposition.
* See as to Ether and the Wave-Theory of Light, Prof. J. P.
Cookes "Credentials of Science the Warrant of Faith," pp. 223, seq.
Take the common theory of evolution in proof of this. It has been
lately said of it that "Whatever differences of opinion as to this theory may
still exist, few naturalists can feel reluctant to acquiesce in Wallaces
statement that Darwin did his work so well that descent with modification
is now universally accepted as the order of nature in the organic world.
"
Prof. Calderwood: "Evolution and Mans Place in
Nature," p, 1.
Now, if this be so, open your Bibles at the second
chapter of Genesis, and ask yourself how on the principle of "descent with
modification" Eve could have have been by any possibility evolved out of Adam!
That is evidently not in the order of nature: it is the exact opposite of it;
it is miracle and nothing else. Apply to it the slow successive changes
demanded by Darwinism, and the absurdity is heightened at every step; but the
absurdity is there at the beginning in the male producing the female for the
continuance of the race. It is not even the poetry some have claimed for it. It
is simply absurdity, or miracle and divine truth.
Let us take our
stand then with Scripture, or give it up: compromise is impossible. If the
account of creation is not true, Scripture opens with falsehood in its face. It
asserts knowledge of what only revelation could make known; or else gives
conjecture, and then how much else of the same sort follows it, who shall say?
In fact the history has been amply safeguarded. I venture to say that
the proofs of divine inspiration in it can challenge the world to refute them;
and thank God, the evidence is of a sort as accessible to the non- scientific
as to the scientific mind. If it can be shown that according to the Genesis
account the story of the restoration of the earth out of its "waste and
desolate" condition is but the symbolic picture of the restoration of the same
earth morally to God, as history and prophecy combine to picture it;- a picture
also of the restoration of an individual soul to God, but in terms which we
have to go to the New Testament to make clear to us;- if we can show a
numerical symbolism running through the whole, uniting the physical,
dispensational and individual aspects of the history together, and uniting
itself to a symbolic numerical structure running through other parts of
Scripture;- then assuredly we have a threefold cord which shall not be broken,
binding it into a wondrous whole which can only be from God. This has been
already done in measure,* but deserves to be done in a much more thorough and
painstaking way. The whole is a many- linked proof of the underlying of the
natural by the spiritual of which I have already spoken, and of which every
parable in Scripture speaks, to which every one of those analogies of which we
all so confidently and as it were instinctively avail ourselves, bears witness.
* See "Genesis in the Light of the New Testament;" "Numerical Bible," vol.
i. notes; and the last "Appendix."
This analogy, if it be real, can be
used also in another and a reverse way from that in which we usually employ it:
a fact which deserves the most attentive consideration. If the spiritual and
the natural run thus in parallel lines, why should we not trace the natural by
means of the spiritual, as well as the spiritual by means of the natural? Take,
for instance, once more, the first chapter of Genesis. If it be indeed a
picture of either the soul or the world being restored to God, then we cannot
possibly miss what is here so plain, that this restoration implies a fall
having taken place, which the waste and desolate condition of the earth,
darkness upon the face of the deep, so strikingly symbolizes. May we not see in
it, then, physically, a lapsed condition of the earth, the effect of some
cataclysmic overthrow, instead of the condition in which it was originally
created, as many believe? This can be proved, I am sure, otherwise; but that
therefore proves that such a conclusion would, in this case, lead us aright.
Would it not in every case in which the grounds of the conclusion were as plain
as this?
But if so, again how valuable must Scripture be for the
knowledge of Nature! It should be in every way the firm ground of the
naturalist, and induction be here as reliable as that directly from nature; the
microscope also being as great a revealer in one case as in the other. Ah, how
little patient, believing work has been done in this direction with regard to
Scripture: a neg1ect which has shut us out so much from the light it could have
given, just in the very matters hidden from the mere man of science. The
beginnings of things and their points of connection with the unseen, are things
largely thus hidden: how good would it be to have all the light that Scripture
can give thrown into those dark inmost recesses of the constitution of things.
What a thing it would be to have a faithful company of devout explorers giving
themselves to explore nature with the light of Scripture, and Scripture also,
one may reverently say, in the light of nature. For both are Gods books
and both alike truthful, and Christ the theme of and the key to both.
"The earth is the Lords and the fullness thereof." In every
corner of it He is to be found; upon every part of it His Name stands written.
Oh for the students that shall make His glorious sanctuary their college, and
see in nature that which only the anointed eye can see, and hear the worship of
the things we call inanimate, but through which the Life of life is pulsating
everywhere.
If we desire this, we must bring the word and the work of
God together in a way that yet, it seems to me, we nowhere see. It seems almost
as if we had here believed that we had the incompatible service of two masters,
to one of which whosoever clings will despise the other. And so it will be
until we discern that the Master is in fact only One, not two at all. And when
Christ reigns over the whole of science- over all that is worthy to be called
knowledge,- then we shall have an education in which heart, mind, and moral
nature, shall find equal and true development; and in the heart and mind of
those so taught there shall be no distraction between secular and sacred, no
divided life from one half of which God is banished; but for these "there shall
be," as the prophet says, "One Lord over all the earth; in that day there shall
be One Lord, and His Name One."
Go to Appendix Five
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