How to Master the English Bible

How to master the English Bible! High-sounding title that, but does it mean what it The Bible says? It is not how to study it,

Like a Farm lyUt how to master it; for there is a sense in which the Bible must be mastered before it can be studied, and it is the failure to see this which accounts for other failures on the part of many earnest Bible students. I suppose it is something like a farm; for although never a farmer myself, I have always imagined a farmer should know his farm before he attempted to work it. How much upland and how much lowland? How much wood and how much pasture? Where should the orchard be laid out? Where plant my corn, oats, and potatoes? What plot is to be seeded down to grass? When he has mastered his farm he begins to get ready for results from it.

Now there are many ways of studying the Bible, any one of which may be good enough 13

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in itself, but there is only one way to master it, as we shall see. And it is the Bible itself we are to master, not books about the Bible, nor yet “charts.” I once listened to an earnest and cultivated young man delivering a lecture on Bible study, illustrated by a chart so long that when he unrolled and held one end of it above his head, as high as his arms could reach, the other curled up on the floor below the platform. As the auditor gazed upon its labyrinthian lines, circles, crosses and other things intended to illuminate it, and “gathered up the loins of his mind” to listen to the explanation following, it was with an inward sigh of gratitude that God had never put such a yoke upon us, “which neither we nor our fathers were able to bear.”

And it is the English Bible we are thinking about, the Bible in the vernacular, the tongue The most of us best understand. One

andnmbiear s Sre^ to have studied He-Tongues brew and Greek, just to be able to tell others who have not that they do not require either to hearken to our Heavenly Father’s voice. He has an advantage as a scholar who can utilize the original tongues; but the Bible was not given to scholars, but 14

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to the people, and “hear we every man in our own tongue wherein we were born” (Acts 2:8). It is not at all inconsistent to add that he who masters the Engish Bible is possessed of the strongest inducement to study it in Hebrew and Greek.

That which follows grows largely out of the writer’s personal experience. For the first eight or ten years of my ministry I did not know my English Bible as I should have known it, a fact to which my own spiritual life and the character of my pulpit ministrations bore depressing witness. Nor was I so fortunate as to meet with more than one or two brethren in the ministry who knew their English Bible

The Bible in very muc better than I knew the seminary mine. They all declared that the theological seminaries did not profess to teach the English Bible. They taught much about the Bible of great importance for ministers to know, such as the Hebrew and Greek tongues, the principles of exegesis and interpretation, the history of the text, and the proofs and illustrations of Christian doctrine; but, in the words of one of the ministers referred to (which have appeared in print),” while we 15

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had some special lessons in one or two of the epistles, several of the psalms, in some of the prophecies, and in a few select portions of the gospels, other and vastly important parts of the Bible were left out altogether. We had nothing on the book of Revelation, no elaborate study of the Mosaic ritual and its profound system of types, and especially were we left uninitiated into the minute and wonderful coordination of parts in the various books of the Old and New Testaments, which disclose a stupendous divine plan running through the whole, linking them all together as an indissoluble unit and carrying with them an amazing power of conviction.”

The seminaries have assumed that students were acquainted with the great facts of the English Bible and their relation to one another before matriculation, but so competent an authority as President Harper declares that “to indicate the line of thought and chief ideas of a particular prophet, or the argument of an epistle, or to state even the most important events in the life of our Lord, would be impossible for the average college graduate.” It is such an unfortunate state of things which, to a certain extent, accounts for the rise and 16

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maintenance of those excellent institutions, the Moody Bible Institute in this country and Spurgeon’s College in London, with their almost countless offspring and imitators everywhere, creating as they have a distinct atmosphere of biblical and evangelistic teaching and preaching. It is commonly supposed, it may be said in passing, that these institutions cater to or attract only men or women of very limited educational attainments, but in the case of the first-named, at least, an incidental census taken recently disclosed the fact that one-third of the male students then on the rolls or who had lately left were college-trained; one may safely hazard the opinion that in the woman’s department the proportion of college-trained students would have been still larger.

The first practical help I ever received in the mastery of the English Bible was from a Help from a layman. We were f ellow-attend-Layman ants at a certain Christian conference or convention and thrown together a good deal for several days, and I saw something in his Christian life to which I was a comparative stranger — a peace, a rest, a joy, 17

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a kind of spiritual poise I knew little about. One day I ventured to ask him how he had become possessed of the experience, when he replied, “By reading the epistle to the Ephesians.” I was surprised, for I had read it without such results, and therefore asked him to explain the manner of his reading, when he related the following: He had gone into the country to spend the Sabbath with his family on one occasion, taking with him a pocket copy of Ephesians, and in the afternoon, going out into the woods and lying down under a tree, he began to read it; he read it through at a single reading, and finding his interest aroused, read it through again in the same way, and, his interest increasing, again and again. I think he added that he read it some twelve or fifteen times, “and when I arose to go into the house,” said he, “I was in possession of Ephesians, or better yet, it was in possession of me, and I had been ‘lifted up to sit together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus’ in an experimental sense in which that had not been true in me before, and will never cease to be true in me again.”

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