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One Way to Study the Bible.
A favorite way to study the Bible with me is, first, to take up one expression, and run through the different places where they are found.
Take the “I ams” of John: “I am the bread of life”; “I am the water of life”;
“I am the way, the truth and the life”; “I am the resurrection”; “I am all, and in all.” God gives to His children a blank, and on it they can write whatever they most want, and He will fill the bill. And then the promises.
A Scotchman found out thirty-one thousand distinct promises in the Word of God. There is not a despondent soul but God has a promise just to suit
him. — MOODY.
Humaneness of the Bible.
Who can undervalue a Bible which speaks in a tone like this? The proverb,
“Every man must take care of himself,” has no place in the Book of God.
We must take care of one another. “Who so hath this world’s goods, and seeth his brother have need and shutteth up his bowels of compassion from him, how dwelleth the love of God in him?” We hold our knowledge for the benefit of the ignorant; we are trustees of our strength that we may save the weak from oppression, it is a coward’s trick to close the eyes whilst wrong is being done, in order that he may not see it.
Christianity means nothing if it does not mean the unity of the human race, the common rights of humanity. — JOSEPH PARKER.
Morality of the Bible.
The morality of the Bible goes down to every root and fiber of life. In offering a salutation, in opening a door, in uttering a wish, in writing a letter, in using titles of deference, in every possible exercise of human thought and power, the moral element is present. Phebe was to be received by the Christians at Rome “as becometh saints.” A New Testament injunction is: “Be courteous.” Charity itself is courteous, graceful, savored with the highest degree of refinement, and expressive of the completest reach of dignity. We have passed from the letter to the spirit; God has put
merely because of a literal direction which is guarded by solemn penalties, but because the Holy Ghost has sanctified us, made our hearts his dwelling place. Our prayer should continually be: “ Create in me a clean heart, O God.” — JOSEPH PARKER.
Importance of Studying the Bible.
One thing I have noticed in studying the Word of God, and that is, when a man is filled with the Spirit he deals largely with the Word of God;
whereas, the man who is filled with his own ideas refers rarely to the Word of God.
He gets along without it, and you seldom see it mentioned in his discourses. A great many use it only as a text-book. They get their text from the Bible, and go on without any further allusion to it; they ignore it.
But when a man is filled with the Word, as Stephen was, he can not help speaking Scripture. You will find that Moses was constantly repeating the commandments. You will find, too, that Joshua, when he came across the Jordan with his people, stood with them while the law of the Lord was read to them; and you will find all through Scripture the men of God dealing much with His Word. Why, you will find Christ constantly referring to them, and saying: “Thus saith the Scriptures.” Now, as old Dr.
Bonar of Glasgow said: “The Lord didn’t tell Joshua how to use the sword, but He told him how he should meditate on the Word day and night, and then he would have good success.” When we find a man meditating on the words of God, my friends, that man is full of boldness and is successful. And the reason why we have so little success in our teaching is because we know so little of the Word of God. You must know it and have it in your heart. — MOODY.
The Bible a Chart.
We sail upon an ocean whose farther bounds are far beyond our sight. The Bible gives every soul a course to sail by.
Follow this course, it says, and you will reach harbor; follow any other, and you will come to shipwreck. But what that harbor is, and what possibilities of rescue at the last from shipwreck there may be, it tells not.
The wise father neither promises nor threatens. He leaves His children to understand that obedience brings happiness; disobedience, suffering. God governs His children as a wise father, and to all our questionings — “What pay for doing right?” “What penalty for doing wrong?” — keeps a silence that is more eloquent than speech. The Bible contains no clear revelation respecting the nature of either eternal life or eternal death. It discloses nothing to curiosity. We can gather from its intimations some probable conclusions; but every kind of dogmatism respecting the eternal future is unscriptural.
— LYMAN ABBOTT. The Book of Job.
I propose to say something of the nature of this extraordinary book — a book of which it is to say little to call it unequaled of its kind, and which will one day, perhaps, when it is allowed to stand on its own merits, be seen towering up alone, far away above all the poetry of the world. How it found its way into the canon, smiting as it does through and through the most deeply seated Jewish prejudices, is the chief difficulty about it now;
to be explained only by a traditional acceptance among the sacred books, dating back from the old times of the national greatness, when the minds of the people were hewn in a larger type than was to be found among the Pharisees of the great synagogue. But its authorship, its date, and its history are alike a mystery to us. It existed at the time when the canon was composed, and this is all that we know beyond what we can gather out of the language and contents of the poem itself.
— FROUDE. The Four Gospels.
Why was this Gospel told four times over? A good story is none the worse, perhaps, for being twice told; but it is a great deal the worse for being three times told, while it is often utterly mangled and murdered the fourth time. You know what a risk is run by this repetition. Have not critics in all ages said: “Yet that is what spoils it; that is where we get hold
amount of critical strife and contention would have been removed; but in telling it four times, a great many discrepancies arise, and so we are able to cast doubt upon the whole thing.” Now, I think it was told four times because it was told every time by the best story-teller that ever tried it.
John wanted to write a composition upon this key-note — the essential Godhead and Divinity of that Man from Nazareth. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by Him, and without Him was not anything made that was made... And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory.” Not that John believed this more, and others less, but that was a side of Jesus that fascinated John. “I handled God; here is the head that leaned upon the bosom of Omnipotence.” And like every true musician, he ends on the key-note with which he started: “These things are written, that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that, believing, ye might have life through His name.” — MCNEILL.
The Bible a Westminster Abbey.
Heroism is indeed the beautiful in the soul. It is the old image of God coming to the surface again, as when, in scraping off a dingy wall in Florence, the workmen came upon the portrait of Dante. Often there come men who throw aside the rags of self, the tattered vestments of beggars, and let out the image of God within. Into no institution of man, into no philosophy, into no school of art, has there entered such a band of heroes as is seen filing down into this book of God. It seems perfectly wonderful that each page of the Christian’s book should have been composed by one of these children of heroism. The Bible is a Westminster Abbey, where none but the great sleep. — SWING.
New Testament Better Than the Old.
“Well, after all, is the New Testament brighter than the Old? Had not the Old Testament saints a grip of something tangible and real? Had not they an advantage that we have not? Oh, if there were only an Elijah living! If there were only an Elisha living today!”
Ah, my friends, we are living, after all, under a greater dispensation. Elisha was compelled to say: “The Lord hath hid it from me.” He had to confess limitation; and, says the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews, these great prophets, these great priests, these great mediators of a by-gone age, were not suffered to continue by reason of death. Out of that he works the argument which I am seeking to apply now to you — the greater blessing that has come to us in our heavenly, although invisible, Prophet and Priest, the Lord Jesus Christ. When I read this about Elisha — “the Lord hath not told it me” — I feel inclined to say to him: “Good-bye, Elisha. Great and all as you are, you will not serve my turn. Great and all as you are, I need one, after all, from whom nothing is hid — from whom nothing can be hid.
Good-bye, Elisha. You are a wonderful man. You could do wonderful things; but I can bid you goodbye without a tear. I can bear to see you disappear from the stage of time, because He has come from whom nothing is hid; who is mightier than all Elijahs and Elishas and prophets put together.” “Consider the Apostle and Priest of our profession.” Think of Him who stands, it may be, unknown, unperceived today in the midst of this assembly; for mole-eyed men and women, groping down in the earth, do not see Him and do not know Him. The Lord of Life and Glory, Jesus Christ, stands with us; and when we see Him, even Elisha’s glory
begins to dim and fade away. — MCNEILL.
Something That Was Not a Mistake.
When the modern critics, in the church and out of it, are enlarging upon the
“Mistakes of Moses” and upon the historical childishness of the Bible, they should not forget to tell us that there ran through the whole Bible period a something that was no mistake, a something whose history rises up before us as real as the earth itself and as beautiful as its four seasons, as magnificent as its June. That something was worship! Theology came and went; the laws of Moses were passed and obeyed and repealed; fables were told and forgotten; Paul and Apollos differed; James and John were unlike — but in worship all seemed to meet, and the Jacob who saw angels on the night-ladder is beautifully akin to St. John and Paul. All are wonderfully akin to our age, which sings the one hymn of the whole race,
“Nearer, My God, to Thee.” — SWING.
Scholars and the Bible.
The new movement for the study of the Bible, as the finest of English classics, introducing it into colleges and seminaries of the highest grade, is full of possibilities for Christian progress and development. The marvel is that Christian scholars should ever have permitted the heathen classics to outrank the psalms of David, the visions of Isaiah and the wonderful philosophy of the four Gospels. — FRANCES E. WILLARD.
Condensed Comments.
What can botanists tell you of the Lily of the Valley? You must study this book for that. What can geologists tell you of the Rock of Ages, or mere astronomers about the Bright Morning Star? In those pages we find all knowledge unto salvation; here we read of the ruin of man by nature, redemption by the blood, and regeneration by the Holy Ghost. These three things run all through and through them. — MOODY.
Now, I am no prophet nor the son of a prophet, but one thing I can predict: That every one of our new converts who goes to studying his Bible, and loves this book above every other book, is sure to hold out. The world will have no charm for him; he will get the world under his feet, because in this book he will find something better than the world can give
him. — MOODY.
Give the Bible the place in your families to which it is entitled; and then, through the unsearchable riches of Christ, many a household among you may hereafter realize that most blessed consummation, and appear a whole
family in Heaven. — H. A. BOARDMAN.
Few books can stand three readings. But the word of God is solid; it will stand a thousand readings, and the man who has gone over it the most frequently and the most carefully is the surest of finding new wonders
there. — HAMILTON.
It is the wonderful property of the Bible, though the authorship is spread over a long list of centuries, that it never withdraws any truth once advanced, and never adds new without giving fresh force to the old.
— MELVILL.
The answer to the Shastas is India; the answer to Confucianism is China;
the answer to the Koran is Turkey; the answer to the Bible is the Christian civilization of Protestant Europe and America.
— WENDELL PHILLIPS.
Do you know a book that you are willing to put under your head for a pillow when you lie dying? Very well; that is the book you want to study while you are living. There is but one such book in the world.
— JOSEPH COOK.
There are dark and mysterious things in the Bible now, but when you begin to trust Christ your eyes will be opened, and the Bible will be a new book to you. It will become the Book of books to you.
— MOODY.
While the works of once famous skeptics are left to rot on book shelves, every year sees the Bible translated into some new tongue, acquire a greater influence, and receive a wider circulation.
— GUTHRIE.
I haven’t found the first man who ever read the Bible from back to back carefully who remained an infidel. My friends, the Bible of our mothers
and fathers is true. — MOODY.
In the waters of life, the Divine Scriptures, there are shallows and there are deeps; shallows where the lamb may wade, and deeps where the elephant
may swim. — HALL.
Refuse the works of our philosophers with all their pomp of diction; how contemptible they are, compared with the Scriptures!
— J. J. ROUSSEAU.
If God is a reality, and the soul is a reality, and you are an immortal being, what are you doing with your Bible shut? — HERRICK JOHNSON.
There are over two hundred passages in the Old Testament which prophesied about Christ, and every one of them has come true.
— MOODY.
Time can take nothing from the Bible. Like the sun, it is the same in its light and influence to man this day which it was ages ago. — CECIL.
The Bible is the most thought-suggesting book in the world. No other deals with such grand themes. — HERRICK JOHNSON. No crisis has ever yet appeared when Christ’s Word was not ready to take
the van of human movement. — KER.
The Bible is a window in this prison-world through which we may look
into eternity. — TIMOTHY DWIGHT.
One gem from that ocean is worth all the pebbles from earthly streams.
— ROBERT MCCHEYNE. We count the Scriptures of God to be the most sublime philosophy.
— SIR ISAAC NEWTON. Liberty without the Bible is either dead or delirious. — GUTHRIE.
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