03.19. The Devotional Use of The Bible

The Devotional Use of the Bible Have we still got a Bible we can take into the holy place? The most disastrous result of paganizing the Bible is that it has so largely fallen into disuse as a Book of Devotion. An honest man cannot pray through a discredited book. Truth is as essential to man as to God. If he is to worship, he must worship in spirit and in truth. Some teachers and preachers have what the learned called a "complex." The unlearned call it a "bee in the bonnet." They never miss a chance to drag in a jibe at what they call the traditional view of the Bible, and yet they insist that nothing has been lost in the change. The Scriptures are still "the living and sovereign Word of God." They admit that "Jesus took the Bible at its face value," and that in it He found His gospel, on it He fed His soul, and in all the great crises of His life He relied upon its truth. The disciple may be content to be as his Lord.

There are methods of Bible study that do not belong to the inner sanctuary of prayer. Historical Sources, Literary Criticism, Higher Criticism, and Lower Criticism belong to the forum and the study. They are concerned with the external conditions and progressive development of Revealed Truth. In the Holy Place the Scriptures are received as "the living, sovereign Word of God." How many soever may be the inspired writers, there is but one Author. "Holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost." (2 Peter 1:21) Questions of date, authorship, and the like are left outside, not because ignorance is more helpful to prayer than intelligence, but because they are irrelevant. In all Scripture there is a local and immediate message of truth, but there is also a revelation that is timeless and universal. Local knowledge is essential to complete understanding, but the soul in prayer comes to the Word that it may find God, and to the soul at prayer it is the infallible, sovereign, saving Word of God. Therefore we may still take the Scriptures into the inner chamber. Even the critics are anxious to assure us that the things for which they contend are not among the things that really matter, and, after all, their "assured results" are nothing more than "agreed hypotheses."

I do not want to harp unduly on the subject of biblical criticism, but I think it may help you if I tell you how I regard the Scriptures. It always seems to me that there is a very real analogy between the Word of the Lord and the law of the land. The judge and jury accept the law, and it is their business, not to criticize or amend, but to interpret and administer. They have no concern with the politics and politicians by whom the law came. It is very interesting to study the historical situation it was intended to meet, to trace the agitation of the reformers, to know who framed the bill, and who was responsible for amending clauses, but that is the business of historians, experts, and antiquarians. Even a lawyer may be ignorant of them. His business is to know the law. The business of a judge is to interpret the law. The business of the jury is to submit their verdict to the authority of the law. So it is with the Word of God. There may be two Isaiahs or twenty, two contributors to the Pentateuch or two hundred, Mark’s Gospel may have begun with "Q" or any other letter of the’ alphabet. The Word has passed beyond personal and historical limitations, and because of the inspiration that gave them, the Scriptures are the Word of the Lord that abideth forever. We take the Bible into the inner sanctuary, not that we may know what is its literary history, but that we may hear what the Lord our God will say unto us.