The necessary limitation of the number of these lectures caused the giving up of the first intention to open the course with a treatment of the historical method of Bible study. Every lecture is based upon the use of that method. ...the Scriptures cannot be understood, nor their power appreciated, without some knowledge of the historical situations out of which they grew. [From the preface.]
VI
SOME SPIRITUAL VALUES OF HIS MINISTRY
Every Form of Ministry Has Its Own Spiritual Value
Each of the manifold forms of the Christian ministry yields its own specific spiritual values. Whether we give ourselves to missions, philanthropy, evangelism, consolation, the individual person, or scholarship, there always comes back to our own souls the benediction of the special kind of work we do. What are some of the values that the teaching pastor will inevitably discover? These will relate to himself, to the literature he teaches, to those whom he seeks to instruct, and to God.
The teaching pastor will reap spiritual blessings that will become inalienable in his personal life.
VIA 1. Mental, Social, Ethical, and Devotional Values
In the second lecture we alluded to some of these: Compulsory, systematic Bible study; fellowship with others in the pursuit of spiritual reality; wide culture of mind inevitable to the conscientious student and teacher; ethical enthusiasm in all activities of his being; and genuine devotional appreciation of the Scriptures. Only experience could realize the richness of these blessings. To these we must now add a few others.
VIA 2. Repose of Entire Rational Nature
The repose of his rational nature in sane study of the Bible and in teaching its results will follow. Personality is a unit. We cannot separate mental processes from our feelings. What God has joined together in the oneness of personality no man can put asunder. It is an unspeakable comfort to take the whole of ourselves into any task or service. Peace of mind demands that there shall be no inward discord, that all powers of our being work in harmony. That is essential for growth of personality and for its highest service. Unfortunately today some men are called “pietists” and others “rationalists.” One class is supposed to emphasize emotions, conventional religious aspirations, and vocabularies. The other is accused of overemphasis upon intellectual processes. Thinking men should not resign themselves to either of these classes. No man will defend the statement that God gave human beings brains that they might be idle in religion, or that they might be insulted in the name of the God who gave them. The soul finds its ease when without dismemberment or substraction it gives its entire self.1 Such complete dedication the teaching pastor gives, and reaps rest of spirit. “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy mind”2 is part of the First Commandment. The consequent emotions are developed, the will forms its purpose accordingly, and there come joy and enthusiasm. Years ago an editor of a daily paper who was also trying to teach a Bible class on Sundays told the writer a sad personal history. After preparation at college and theological seminary he declined his first call to a pastorate because he could not put his entire self into the work. His rational nature would not permit him to preach some things required. He became a traveling salesman. One night after years of selling things his strong religious nature reasserted itself. He yielded to the suggestion of compromise, and tried to walk two paths. On Sundays he would teach such traditional views as he could without too violent offense to his intellectual nature, withholding opinions that went beyond the bounds set by his church relations. Soon the unity of truth demanded his loyalty. He had to face the question of the ethical honesty of giving a fraction of himself to a fraction of truth. That is the worst form of spiritual segmentalism. After a lengthy correspondence with the writer he surrendered to the first commandment of our Lord3 and then found not only peace in his soul, but vastly increased efficiency in his Sunday work, and finally gave up journalism, entered the ministry, and constantly rejoices in his work as a teaching pastor. When we love Christ, the Bible, and men with all our hearts and minds and soul and strength, there comes a calmness and harmony of spirit that is an unspeakable asset to a minister’s work. There are only two ways of peaceful rest, that of Jonah with a dead conscience,4 and that of Jesus in perfect oneness with God.5 Both slept in storms, but how utterly different were the conditions of soul that made rest possible. In religion compromise and contentment are foes. Only when the minister in his study and teaching as well as in his life fearlessly follows the light that God sends, can he expect to have the peace that passes understanding.
1Rom. 7: 15-24.
2Mark 12: 30.
3Mark 12: 30.
4Jonah 1: 5.
5Mark 4: 38.
VIA 3. Nourishment of Spirit While Feeding Others
The teaching pastor will nourish his own spirit while he feeds the lives of others. Frederick W. Robertson describes some ministers who are like fountains in parks. The refreshing water flows to slake the thirst of others, but the pipes absorb none of it. Not so could be the teaching pastor. Possibly only through bitter experiences, such as some of us have had, in transition from loose methods of Bible study into the only sane method, can self-nourishment and teaching become synchronous. The modern locomotive does not stop at water tanks but gets the water from troughs between the rails. “They shall feed in the ways”6 along the exalted highways is the conception of an Old Testament prophet. Wherever a minister will saturate himself with the Biblical life he is studying, he will find food for himself. His sermons will be autobiographical. His words will come with his life-blood upon them. There will be an accent of reality which the best-conceived or written essay cannot imitate. He will deal with life and not discuss topics. He will utter reality, not pious conventionality. The definition of a sermon by Phillips Brooks, “Truth through personality,”7 will be an actual experience. Expression will be the necessity of possession. He will be speaking things he has seen and heard.8 No solitude of retreats, no galvanism by intense effort, no frenzy like that of Baal priests9 can ever produce what will inevitably come if we live with those who have found spiritual reality.
6Isa. 49: 9-11.
7Yale “Lectures on preaching,” by Phillips Brooks, 1877.
81John 1: 1-3.
91Kings 18: 28, 29.
VIA 4. The Spiritual Blessedness of Teaching
He will know the peculiar blessedness of the teaching ministry. There is no higher joy than that of leading a person into intelligent discipleship to Jesus Christ. There is a peculiar blessedness in knowing that some ignorance has given way to light, that error has been corrected by illumination that does not lead astray, and that superstition has retired before clear knowledge of the will of God. Was not this the joy of the great Teacher, as he dealt with the Twelve? Ponder his deep stirring of soul in thanksgiving for his success as the mediator who had revealed the things of God to the openminded.10 Think of his joy the night before his death. He had manifested the nature of the heavenly Father to the Twelve.11 No wonder he spoke of his joy. Art has never painted the face of a happy Christ. Yet he taught his little school that his joy might remain in them and their joy might be full.12 It was the joy of perfect self-realization, of perfect social adjustment, and of uninterrupted communion with the Father, a happiness over which circumstances had no control, and which is as good for any other world as for this. It is the peculiar joy of the teacher who tries to reveal God and spiritual reality to those to whom he ministers.
10Luke 10: 21. 11John 17: 6. 12John 15: 11; 16: 24; 17: 13.
VI B. Appreciation of the Bible
Think of his appreciation of the Biblical record of revelation. God uses every avenue to show himself to men. The material universe, the course of human history, the image of God in man—all are vehicles of revelation. Certain characteristics of revelation recorded in the Bible become valuably apparent to the teaching pastor.
VIB 1. Revelation Through History
Its historical character is precious. It has come through life, not through magic. An angel flying through the skies trumpeting truth, or unusual manifestations of the unseen God might seem to some more authentic and influential than the simple story of how men came to know God through life. Jesus discounted faith in such signs13 and declared that those who sought them belonged to a generation neither good nor pure.14 He also declared that revelation was discernible in current events, that all life was a sign, and that what men needed was not signs but eyes to understand the signs in the life of which they were a part.15 That our Father chose the ordinary human life as the means of revealing himself is of the utmost value. The Bible is no Koran, no accumulation of detached, imaginary messages dictated by the Almighty without reference to the circumstances under which the revelation was given. The typewriter or phonograph theory of inspiration can hardly be accepted by intelligent students of the Scriptures. Human minds were not holy victrola discs indented with the intonations of the Infinite. Revelations came through historic conditions, personal experiences, situations current at given times. God was interested in life and wished to teach men how to live. The Holy Spirit brooded over all processes of life. The spiritually-minded discerned the divine element in a given situation and had courage to declare what they beheld. The statement of our Lord that the pure in heart see God16 is also applicable to Old Testament history. The prophet had spiritual aspirations and receptivity. With singleness of eye he desired to see the moral significance of a condition or event.17 The veil was lifted and he could say, “Thus saith the Lord.” Our Father was interested in men, their political situations, their moral aspirations, their backslidings. One reads the Old Testament prophets to little purpose if he does not see that many utterances grow out of their conviction of the profound concern of Jehovah in international politics. For these men the dreams of Babylon, Assyria, Egypt, and the Hittites for world power were not merely secular affairs. The little hyphen land of Palestine that seemed to these great powers to be only a pathway on which to get at one another, was a gorge through which the pent-up floods of aspiration for world dominion swept with terrific power, and yet a calm, placid lake surrounded by the protecting mountains of Jehovah’s care. Some one has said that “history is His story.” Precisely because the revelation recorded in the Scriptures is historical we are driven back to the history in order to understand the revelation. The unveiling comes through life, and literature as the record of life. In that history men were certainly factors, seeking to work out their own plans. Sometimes these factors claimed that their purposes were inspired by the deities of the territories in which they lived. Nevertheless, the Factor unrecognized by the common people, undreamed of by the world’s leaders, was clearly perceived by those whose hearts were open to the revelation that came through the history. It is of tremendous meaning that this method was chosen by the God of all the earth for the unveiling of himself. Does it not sanctify all so-called secular occurrences of human history? Did not God wish us to learn the great lesson that he does not work outside of ordinary normal processes, but uses them all as the vehicles of revelation?
13John 2: 23, 24; cf. Matt. 4 : 5-7.
14Matt. 12: 39.
15Luke 12: 54-57.
16Matt. 5: 8.
17Matt. 6 : 22, 23.
VIB 2. The Religious Value of Human Experiences
We thus learn the religious value of human experiences. God spoke unto the fathers in many fragments, and multiform ways,18 as varied as the lives that understood them and the experiences they had. The Old Testament is not above saying that the Holy Spirit helped a man to hammer out some of the brass ornaments of the tabernacle.19 God brooded over life all the way from primitive metallurgy and architecture to the life of our Lord. One is bewildered if he tries to catalog the experiences of men through which God came to them.20 Nor can we forget stories like those of Abraham, an idolater in his native land,21 dissatisfied with the worship of his moon god and going out in fidelity to the God his own heart called for. Through what experiences Jehovah revealed himself to this “father of the faithful,” this “friend of God.”22 Nor must we forget Jacob, that heel-catcher, supplanter, who started out to win life’s victories through the clever exercise of his pawnbroking spirit, and how in the very midst of his emigration between two suns he was forced to his knees and taught that he could not enter Canaan through mere shrewdness, but as a prince of prayer23 and as a suppliant. What these stories of the Old Testament, and the New as well, teach is that every event in life has its divine significance, that God does not disdain to use ordinary occurrences as well as extraordinary for the unveiling of himself. Because the revelation was historical it had to come through events which taken together make up history. In the experiences of nations as well as of persons God made his nature known to the world.
18Heb. 1: 1.
19Exod 31: 1-5.
20See “Voices of the Spirit,” by George Matheson.
21Josh. 24: 14, 15.
22James 2: 23.
23Gen. 32: 24-28.
VIB 3. Divine Use of Current Vehicles
God used current vehicles in revelation. Hebrew poetry in the Old Testament and that of the Babylonians differ not in form but in content. No new literary vehicle was made. Parallelism prevailed throughout Semitic nations. There was no creation of a celestial alphabet, nor of a heavenly grammar, nor of a supernatural vocabulary, none of which could have been understood. Divine ideas did not require extraordinary vehicles. Nor was there miraculous anticipation of types of civilization that developed centuries after an occurrence. God used what men had. He always does the best he can with the material at his disposal, whether it is literature or life. The kinship between the early narratives of Genesis and current Semitic literature ought not to surprise us.24 The revelations of God were contemporary, and in terms that could be understood by those who received them. They used current conceptions of the physical universe. The Almighty did not reveal beforehand nor anticipate our knowledge of modern science. He could not have been understood had he done so. Surely it should comfort us that God is glad to use whatever we possess as the channel of his revelation. It has always been true of revelation that men had the heavenly treasure in earthen vessels.25 Every vessel, literary, domestic, commercial, can be sanctified by the Spirit who would use it to convey truth.
24See “The Early Narratives of Genesis” by Herbert Edward Ryle.
252Cor. 4: 7.
VIB 4. The Permanent Values of the Bible
We learn the permanent values of the Bible. How hard it is for some to distinguish between the transient and the permanent. The world is much like each human heart. Before each of us passes a procession of countless vehicles which dump their contents into our lives and then pass on. School-books from which we learn alphabets, arithmetic, geography, geometry, and literature; playmates, incidents of youthful life, have passed out into the eternity that has gone. What they have brought abides. Knowledge, largeness of soul, sympathy, increased social instincts, hungers and thirst for larger manhood, conceptions of God, the values of social life, and a thousand other things remain in the treasury of the spirit. In our experiences we never identify the vehicle with its content. This is largely true with reference to much of the Bible. The things which are seen are for a season; the things that are unseen are eternal.26 This is so about the relation of vehicle and thought, and our conception of the value of the permanent things of the Bible. We shall soon see that we do not regard many things in the Scriptures as of everlasting value. The law of the kingdom of God—of every kingdom with which God has to do—is first the blade, then the ear, then the full corn in the ear.27 With all of us there are things, elemental, germinal, and initial, then crude stages in which life, ideals, and religion are growing, then the ripened stage which explains all that has gone before. No one should be surprised to find in the story of the origins recorded in the Bible much that seems unlike what we today cherish and love, such as crude morals, imperfect ideas of God and of life that will not stand the test of the revelation made in Jesus Christ. This stares us in the face when we study the Scriptures. Out of it all we come to see the permanent values of life and of truth, and these authenticate themselves to us by their own inherent, axiomatic power. Mankind in thinking and living has always followed the advice of Paul to the Philippians,28 “Whereunto we have attained, in the same let us walk.” Truth is often like beautiful water-lilies that float upon the surface of the pond with their roots in the black mire below the flower which explains all previous processes and history. There are the beginnings and the developments. Not the least of the permanent values of the Bible are precisely those we are now describing. They are the revelations of the processes through which God reveals himself, of the developments of ideals into which he would lift us, of the growth of fellowship and communion with himself which in all ages will be commensurate with our knowledge of him and our spiritual attainment.
262Cor. 4: 18. 27Mark 4: 28. 28Phil. 3: 16.
VI C. Values Seen in Human Life
There are also spiritual values which the teaching pastor will discover with reference to his pupils.
VIC 1. The Place of the Bible in Religious Life
The place of the Bible in their religious lives will be second only to that occupied by God and Jesus Christ. There may be preachers many and books without number, but the Bible will always stand as the religious classic. With more intelligence concerning it, its place will be higher than ever. Hitherto it has furnished vocabulary, beautiful quotations and illustrations, material for devout meditation, and incentive to sacrificial service, but most of all it has given Jesus Christ29 to us. The Bible will never be outgrown. No one who has really studied it sanely will ever speak slightingly of it. The charge that scientific study of the Bible is mutilation and comparison of the work of scholars with the penknife of Jekoiakim30 reveal only the ignorance of those who speak thus. The Bible is becoming more and more influential. In novels, and dramas, and general literature men are driven to read it if they would appreciate our literary heritage. More than all, the life this literature reveals is more thoroughly appreciated as it is understood. Next to the Life that is the light of men will be its power.
29John 5: 39. 30Jer. 36: 23.
VIC 2. The Social Value of Biblical Ideals
The social value of Biblical ideals becomes more and more apparent. Great principles which bear upon human relations are sought for. Instead of seeking to find specific teachings about unanticipated forms of sin, or maladjustments in commercial, political, or industrial life which did not exist in Biblical times, or using the Bible as a reference-book, men are going to the Scriptures for ideals of right relations to God and to one another, and are trying to apply these to existing conditions. Socialism without religion, the brute force of war, intellectual cultivation without spiritual nurture, have been found wanting. Statesmen who are Christians, and some who are not, are declaring that the only help for the world today is in religion, and in the application of its principles to human relations. The solvent of our muddy problems is found only in the ideals of the kingdom of God. That is the ideal that runs through the Scriptures and unifies the pamphlets that compose the sacred volume. That God shall rule in human life in all its relations has been the one purpose revealed in the plan of the Almighty. No one perceives this so well as he who sweeps through the history covered by this literature. At every stage God tries to moralize life, in the individual soul, in the relations between persons and between nations. The significance of the Bible for international life has hardly been considered. Yet the book rings throughout with heavenly voices concerning human fraternity, justice, the contribution of the strong to the weak, and the great tolerance of God for the immature. The sociological value of the Scriptures is yet to be exploited for practical purposes. The greatest earthly art is the art of living together, and toward this art the contribution of the Scriptures will be the highest.
VIC 3. The Democracy of Religious Truth
In the religion of Jehovah there is nothing esoteric. All souls are equally dear to the heavenly Father.31 All men are entitled to know all truth. No privileged class can lock up in its custody any revelation of the Father concerning himself or human life. In Judaism and in Christianity there are no places for religious secret societies or esoteric truth. Whatever is whispered in the ear shall be revealed upon the housetop.32 No other volume insists upon the democracy of knowledge so emphatically. Wherever it has been translated into a vernacular, and freedom of study permitted, men have been emancipated. Formerly the lips of the priest kept knowledge.33 Now all men are priests unto God. The few are no longer the custodians of religious reality. Every man must share with others his experiences of that reality. The missionary character of the Scriptures lies in this fact. There is to be no aristocracy of Biblical scholars. Truth discovered must be published. The Bethlehem shepherds went all the way and saw what had occurred, and then proceeded to tell others.34 That course should characterize all who understand the Biblical spirit and ideals. Selfishness in the possession of religious knowledge is impossible. Altruism in everything that God gives is part of the condition upon which the Almighty bestows. A Bible-knowing people will be missionary, evangelistic, educational, and philanthropic.
31Matt. 10: 27.
32Ezekiel 18, a pivotal utterance in the history of theology.
33Mal. 2: 7.
34Luke 2: 17,18.
VIC 4. The Increase of Reverence Through Knowledge
There will come increasing love and reverence for the Scriptures with increasing knowledge. We used to hear the remark, “I know the Bible is from God because there are so many things in it I cannot understand.” As if incomprehensibility could ever characterize a God who is struggling to reveal himself to his creatures, and to have them share his life. Precisely the opposite is now said, “We know the Bible is from God only so far as we understand it.” It authenticates itself to our moral natures as the sun to the eye, the perfume to the nostril, or the air to the lung. Superstition is awe based upon ignorance. Reverence is awe based upon knowledge. No longer is the material book of paper, ink, and leather a fetish. We go deeper than what can be seen and handled. Bibliolatry is passing. Men explore, and when in the presence of divine things they worship. Jacob said, “The Lord was in this place, and I knew it not.”35 We search for him in every place and revere him wherever we find him. There is no danger of destroying the faith of those who know. Credulity may be set aside and superstition displaced, but the abiding confidence that men of old spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost36 can come into our hearts only as we understand what these men said. One of the gifts of the Holy Spirit is the critical faculty37 which does not believe every spirit, but tries the spirits whether they be of God.38 When we exercise this gift of judgment, upon the discovery of the voice of God men become more reverent. Multitudes within the last generation have been emancipated from mistaken conceptions of the Bible and have found new love for it and new life through it. It has not yet been made the book of the people. In this vast ignorance of what it really is and teaches lies unlimited scope for the ministry of the teaching pastor. Unlimited joy can come to him and to those who are taught, when the Bible is no longer a sealed book to the majority of Christians, but when its significance has been made as wide-spread as Christian discipleship.
35Gen. 28: 16.
362Pet. 1: 21.
371Cor. 12: 10; 14: 29.
381John 4: 1.
VIC 5. How the Bible Was Meant to Guide Life
We can also understand how the Bible is “the rule of faith and practise.” Scriptural guidance, coveted by countless devout hearts, will never be achieved while the book is regarded as a collection of disjointed maxims for modern life, or so long as human conduct is controlled by irreverent and mechanical uses of it. The Bible is no law-book, but a record of growing religious life. God trusts us. This is the meaning of the divinest gift of God to the world—the forgiveness of sins in Jesus Christ. Pardon is a legal word concerning the remission of penalty. Forgiveness is a social word relating to the restoration of personal relations. Because God forgives he trusts. He trusts us with new days when we have abused those that are past; with new friends when we have been disloyal to old ones; with new opportunities when we have abused those that have gone. He trusts us when others do not trust us; even when we do not trust ourselves. He trusts us that we may love him with our minds by our right thinking, and with our wills that we may be self-determining in our conduct. In all this he trusts us with those principles of true living revealed in the life of which the Bible is the record. Forgiven men exercise the responsibilities of the divine trust in them because of the Father’s forgiveness through Jesus Christ. In some far-off day, yet too distant for even a glimpse of it, men will accept to the full this trusting forgiveness of the Father and will see the Bible more than ever as the guide of life, and in the principles it reveals more than ever the strength and the fulness of humanity’s joy. Not by minute regulations of life does the Bible become the lamp to our feet, but by disclosing the divine principles of righteous living and loving service that God trusts us to discover and to apply in the details of our personal lives and social relations. It is the law in the heart that controls.39 Only such study as we are advocating will yield these stars for the nights of our perplexities.
39Jer. 31: 33.
The teaching pastor will achieve the highest results in the knowledge of God. The historical method of Bible study will lead to the discovery of what God did in history and of what he is doing today. It will prevent us from imagining deity and what the deity of our imagination should have done. This a-priori method of theology gives freedom to each wild fancy to conceive a deity and permits as many deities as there are minds who try thus to imagine him. On the other hand, the careful student who seeks from the literature to reproduce the history and to appraise the results of study for the purposes of theology, will have a clear conception of how God has revealed himself. He will avoid the grotesque results of the a-priori method. “Thou thoughtest that I was altogether such an one as thyself,”40 is an expression put into the lips of Jehovah by a Hebrew poet. There is ample justification for this saying in the variations of theology, each colored by personalities that have tried to make gods in their own image. Among the things which the teaching pastor will discover and share with his pupils are the following:
40Ps. 50: 21.
VID 1. God’s Revelation of Himself Progressive
God has progressively revealed himself. His method has been evolutionary. He spoke as men were able to hear, and unveiled himself as men were able to see. The extent of the revelation was measured by the receptive capacity of men. Revelation enlarged life. The growing development of men also produced widenings of spirit and keenness of perception, and to these widened souls God made larger revelations. The growing life and increased light kept pace with each other. The time has passed when men think that all parts of the Bible have the same spiritual value, that permanent revelations are found equally in early Hebrew history and in the fulness of time,41 that truth spoken in fragmentary and multiform ways has the same value as the revelation of God made in a Son.42 In the crescent evolution of humanity, God came ever increasingly. There are crude morals in the Old Testament that could not for a moment stand the test of Christian standards. No modern churches would allow some notable Old Testament characters to retain membership in them. Yet these same characters were far above their contemporaries in other nations and even in their own. We have given up the idea that one nation could monopolize the revelation of God. The early thought that Israel could monopolize Jehovah vanished in the thought of eighth-century prophets. Think of Isaiah declaring that the time was coming when Israel should be one-third of God’s people, with Egypt that had oppressed them for so many centuries another third, and Assyria that had deported so many of the tribes the other third.43 Think of the book of Jonah as a protest against the spirit that would exclude Assyria from the grace of Jehovah.44 We also lose the thought that foreign religions made no appeal to Jehovah. What meaning there was in the statement that Jehovah would not throw away the bruised reeds with which men tried to walk the journey of life, nor puff out the dimly burning, smoky flame from the lamps they used to light their way until he should send forth human judgment, the rational nature, unto its victory over what the Jew regarded as broken staffs and dim lights! We have abandoned the notion that Jehovah ruled humanity by whims and arbitrary caprices. It is a far journey from killing a man who works on the Sabbath day45 to the statement that the Sabbath was made for man;46 from the dim days when men dreamed that God commanded them to massacre an entire population47 to the love of God that came not to destroy lives but to save them.48 There is a vast moral distance between a beatitude upon the man who beats out the brains of infants against the rocks, and the arms of Christ that snuggled the little ones to his breast and the voice of the Christ who says that of such is the kingdom of heaven.49 There is a long step in morals between the supposed command to borrow jewelry from the Egyptians with no thought of returning it50 and the noble speech of Zaccheus who would return fourfold to any victim of his extortion.51 Today in this light of the progressive unveiling of the nature of God we are free from both the intellectual and the moral difficulties which beset the lover of the Scriptures before the historical method of Bible study came to the perplexed student. Men could conceive of their deities only in terms of religions all around them, modified by such differences as God himself had made known. Large numbers did not believe in monotheism. Their creed embraced a belief in Chemosh as much as in Jehovah.52 It was a matter of territory. Even David thought that if he were driven from Palestine he should be forced to serve strange gods in another land.53 We no longer conceive of God as fighting for us because he is obliged to be loyal to his people, whether right or wrong. Our question is whether we are battling on the side of God who cares more for justice and righteousness than he does for the preservation of lineal descendants from the loins of Abraham. In the eighth century before Christ ideas of God changed rapidly. Those prophets have recorded the revelations of God that came through their own lives and times. We no longer emphasize the Old Testament law as being binding upon us. The prophets had moral courage to battle against the priests who insisted upon an external, mechanical routine such as constituted the essence of religion in surrounding nations. No one can read the first chapter of Isaiah, or the sixth chapter of Micah, or the Fifty-first Psalm, and many other portions of the Scripture without seeing how the prophetic ideals brushed aside external performances and insisted upon internal righteousness and love. Amos represents Jehovah as saying,54 “Did ye bring unto me sacrifices and offerings in the wilderness forty years, O house of Israel?” Jeremiah’s utterances55 are more positive: “Thus saith Jehovah of hosts, the God of Israel: Add your burnt offerings unto your sacrifices and eat ye flesh. For I spake not unto your fathers, nor commanded them in the day that I brought them out of the land of Egypt concerning burnt offerings or sacrifices; but this thing I commanded them, saying, Hearken unto my voice, and I will be your God and ye shall be my people; and walk ye in all the way that I command you, that it may be well with you.” All these things and many more the honest teaching pastor will discover and communicate to his people. There is a vast difference between the theology of Jesus and the various theologies outlined in the different periods of Old Testament history.
41Gal. 4: 4.
42Heb. 1: 1.
43Isa. 19: 23-25.
44Jonah 4: 11.
45Exod. 35: 1-3.
46Mark 2: 27.
471Sam. 15: 2, 3.
48Luke 9: 56.
49Ps. 137: 9; Mark 10: 13-16.
50Exod. 3: 22.
51Luke 19: 8.
52Judg. 11: 24.
531Sam. 26: 19; cf. Ps. 137: 4.
54Amos 5: 25.
55Jer. 7: 21-23.
VID 2. The Steady Development Toward Theism
This development is steadily toward a theistic conception of God, toward an idea of him distinctly religious that appeals to and calls out the uttermost devotion. The progress is not toward elaboration of rites and ceremonies. Ezekiel’s program never came to pass.56 Many such programs and predictions that grew out of ardent hopes failed of realization. They never will be realized, not only because world conditions have changed, but also because these predictions and visions were not along the pathway toward the theistic conception of God fully revealed to us only in Jesus Christ. We need not stop to discuss the matter of “unfulfilled prophecy.” The bare fact that God wanted to reveal himself, not to make programs for one century or a thousand centuries, is enough to disclose that his purpose was the unveiling of his nature, that he might enlist men in fellowship with him in sharing his life of freedom, righteousness, and love. The current is steady. We need not stop to investigate the little eddies that swirl along the banks. At last we come to him who was Immanuel, and realize that just as the flower explains the seed, the stem, and the leaf, just as the fruit explains the root, the trunk, and the twig, just as the wheat explains the blade and the ear, so Jesus Christ explained all the past. It should inspire one with profound gratitude that he can see the unfolding of a God not only president over but resident in all life, both transcendent and immanent. At last we have come to realize the Character that was struggling against the limitations of human life and circumstance in unceasing effort to dissolve all fogs that hid him and stand out in clear vision in the Christ whom we adore. One does not have to undervalue any statements of Israel’s prophets or psalmists who rose to see the righteousness and love of Jehovah, but wonders at these mountain peaks of personality and the glimpses they had of the shining above the clouds that shadowed those who lived in the plains beneath. We yet use much of their language in our prayers and in our hymns, but consciously or unconsciously we are putting into their words the higher life, the sweeter devotion, and the more wonderful revelation that has been given to us through Jesus Christ our Lord.
56Ezekiel, chapter, 40 ff.
VID 3. The Reality of God
We also come to a firmer conviction of the reality of God. Men will not live long in the ministry before they realize that two things most needed today are the sense of the reality of God and a proper understanding of the Bible. These two are related. For many God yet dwells in thick darkness.57 Like Job they hunt everywhere for him and cannot find him.58 They do not take the right path. A patient, honest study of the Scriptures will beget in men a consciousness that the divine factor is just as real as human factors in the life of the world. When men have seen the progress we have been describing and the passionate struggle of the Infinite One to make himself known to men that his creatures may have fellowship with him, and then come to see Jesus Christ, they will recognize that the sense of the reality of God has been growing all through the history recorded in the book. A great theologian not long since declared that the most luminous discovery of theology during the half century before he made the statement was that God was like Jesus Christ.59 The Christlikeness of God is the thought that within the last generation has been increasingly borne in upon the thinking of men. They have come to believe the words of Jesus.60 God has become more real because the historical Christ has become clearer to our minds through the patient study of the last quarter of a century. Our Father is no hazy existence who once lived in the dim distance of time, who possibly exists somewhere in the infinite regions of space. The fact that he works through life, that the revelations of himself are historical, that through the experiences of men and the currents of human history he has disclosed himself, makes him more real to us. Lunching one day with the late Dr. Lyman Abbott, the writer asked him, “What is the most real thing in your consciousness?” He hesitated about answering the question because he did not like to use the language of cant or pietism. At last in the simplicity of his honest nature he said: “The most real thing in my consciousness is God. I realize him most not always when I am preaching, but during the hours of my daily work.” At that time he was engaged in writing a book that caused a certain well-known minister to brand him as an infidel. No man can give himself to the honest study of the Scriptures and to the glorious privilege of sharing the results of that study with others without increasingly knowing the reality of God.
57Ps. 18: 11; 97: 2; 1 Kings 8: 12. 58John 9: 11; 23: 8, 9. 59William Newton Clarke in address at the semi-centennial of Newton Theological Institution. 60John 14: 9.
VID 4. God Works Now as Hitherto
God is working today as he always did. Divine processes have never ended, nor will they end until human capacity becomes equal to that of God. God is revealing himself today. He is still creating. Our scientific men see the processes. Our knowledge like that of the great apostle is only in part61 and we see by means of dim reflections of a mirror, in enigmas, but we shall know even as we are known. One inch of the circumference of a circle that extends billions of miles is all we need in order to know the path of that circle, to locate its center, to measure the area included in the circumference. A thimbleful of ocean water will tell us its nature. The spectroscopes reveal the composition of the stars. Precisely what the arc of the circle is to the whole, or the sample of the ocean is to its leagues of water, or the lines of the spectroscope are to Betelguese, exactly that is the study of God revealed in human life recorded in the Scriptures. We pray to a Father who is now at work, and not to one who used to work. “My Father worketh hitherto and I work,” said62 Jesus. God is working in us even while we are working out our own right relation to him, to the physical universe, and to our fellow men.63 Not in spite of ourselves, not wholly external to us is the activity of the heavenly Father. We are workers together with him.64 Daily each calling becomes more divine. Every man, wherever the providence of God puts him in an occupation useful and helpful to his fellows, is a minister of God ordained to that particular ministry by virtue of the endowment God has given him. If the sane study of the Bible teaches anything, it shows us that all men in all generations can take with them into their lives the consciousness of a God still at work. The principles and objectives that control his work are those revealed to us by the study of the Scriptures. What an inspiration there is in all these truths not only for teaching pastors, but also for all our church schools, in our colleges; for the men of commerce who can be thus emancipated from sordid and selfish desires usually associated with business life; for the professional men who may regard their knowledge of health and disease a trust for the use of their fellow men, or their acquaintance with human experience in matters of justice and equity as a gift for the establishment of orderly relations. There is no menial service. There is no life that is a vessel of dishonor if that life has the conception that the same God is working today as in the past and is in all things and over all things.
611Cor. 13: 12. 62John 5: 17. 63Phil. 2: 12, 13. 641cor. 3: 9.
These lectures have dealt specifically with the relation of a pastor to his Bible and his privilege of sharing all he can get from it with those whom God entrusts to his care. Now as in other days life is found by the knowledge of God65 that comes through the Scriptures, the physical universe, current history, and ourselves. When men did not have access to the Scriptures, they hungered for them. Have we reached the day when this priceless literature floods the earth and has become so commonplace that men no longer care to know the story of the coming of God into human life? If for a single generation all ministers, without regard to denominational connection, could spend their lives in leading those they serve into a knowledge of the Scriptures, the next generation would witness a world the like of which has never been seen.
65John 17: 3.
Preface lectures: ONE TWO THREE FOUR FIVE SIX
[Note: Lecture VI carefully compared to book on Saturday, 6-20-1998. All discovered errors and omissions corrected (this is not a claim of perfection!). The use of colors and links (if any), of course, are my additions, and the purposes may relate to considerations beyond the scope of the lecture. ...wcb2]
William C. Bitting II
wbitting@yahoo.com First posted 5/19/98. Revised 10/20/00 (prior 6/20/98)