Union with Christ by the Spirit; the Spirit’s Work in Relation to the Scriptures

gents far we have dealt almost exclusively with the revealed truth of the Blessed Spirit’s personality and divine glory, only turning aside to remember that most sacred and wonderful of all His works, His action in the Incarnation of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Human Life of the Incarnate One. I do not attempt to retrace any of these steps in the present chapter. Only let me again claim for that last aspect of the doctrine of the Spirit the most earnest, reverent, loving attention of the believer, as he “lives by faith Gal. ii. 20 in the Son of God.” A great wealth of spiritual blessing surely lies ready for use, for the Christian who will recollect it and use it, in the truth of the Spirit’s work for, on, and in, the Incarnate Lord. That work, that unspeakably deep and precious connexion of the Spirit with the Redeemer in the work of redemption, is meant to throw the full light of life eternal upon owyv connexion by the Spirit with Christ Jesus, who is our Life. We shall recur often to this side of truth in later pages; but let it be kept always in view. We, every one of us who believe on the name of the Son of 1Cor.vixz, God, are “joined unto Him, one Spirit.” Our contact, our union, our embodiment, is such as to be rightly described in the holy Word by that surprising phrase. And is not light thrown upon the phrase by the remembrance that the Spirit who has given us our Life, who has imparted to us Christ, is indeed the Spirit of Christ, not only in the inner relations of Deity, but in the blessed Incarnation of our glorious Head? He who is Himself thus doubly united to Christ — if I may express it so — can He not indeed with richest and holiest fulness pour into us Christ’s members the power and virtues of our Head? Indeed He can. And we therefore, the favoured members, will bear that fact in wondering and loving memory. We will cherish it in our heart of hearts. We will use it in our hourly a a a

life. Having the Spirit, we will remember how fully and truly by the Spirit we possess the Son. And in weakness, in sadness, in temptation, under the burthening sense it may be of spiritual decline, we will without delay or misgiving wse our wonderful treasure. We will by the Spirit exjoy our possession of the Son, not after the hour of need but in it. With such a Bond to such a Head, why should we for one minute walk in failure? Nay, “when

we are weak, phen are we S{cOng sassy iilastne name of the Lord Jesus, and by, 6. xi. 5 the Spirit of our God.” * ae ake

And now to advance more directsy to the study of the work of the Holy Spirit “for us men and our salvation.” And do Thou, most blessed Spirit of God, shine on us and in us as we go!

1 I would earnestly commend to my readers Marshall’s Gospel Mystery of Sanctification (first published about 1680).. It is very old-fashioned, and by no means light reading; but it is full of truth inestimably precious to those who seek to walk with God at once in humble watchfulness and holy liberty. See further p. 174.

It might seem right that we should here first consider His divine work in creation, in the “old creation,” in ‘‘nature.” For in a large range of Scripture passages, from Gen. 1. 2 onwards, we find Him mysteriously but distinctly revealed as the immediate divine Agent in the making and manipulation, so to speak, of material things.

But our proposed subject a 1) is the Spirit’s work zz vedemption, a subject which indeed will give us material enough. All I would do here is to call attention in a general way to this Scriptural connexion of the SPIRIT with the world of Matter. It is one among the many suggestions in the divine Word that matter has for its immediate basis the absolutely immaterial will and power of God; that in this respect, as in others, la derniére raison des choses, cest Dreu.*, And, like all those other suggestions, it reminds the believer, as he rests on his God for sfzrztual life and power, that the whole material universe, wrought by the

1 Pascal. For a good account of pagan, apocryphal, and Scriptural views of matter see the note (by. Dr F. W. Farrar) on Wisdom xi. 17 in the Speaker’s Commentary.

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same will that saves him, is infinitely pliable in its Maker’s hands for the ultimate good of His spiritual new creation.

Reverently leaving alone, then, this field of truth I turn deliberately to another for some brief but earnest recollections and suggestions. That other field is the work of the Holy Spirit in relation to the Holy Scriptures.

I hardly need say that I am aware of the present gravity of that subject, and of the extreme difficulty of speaking upon it to edification amidst the unsettlement, and indeed tumult, of present speculations and negations. But it may be both possible and helpful to take it up in this chapter along a line single, in a sense simple, and yet all-important. We will adhere strictly to the terms of our great subject — the Holy Spirit’s work in relation to the Scriptures. It appears to me that many widely prevalent present views of the nature and function of the written Word, however much truth of detail may enter into their formation, err in their ensemble by their deeply humanitarian, naturalistic character. Taking up the perfectly true position that human agency and natural process are largely present as factors in the production of Scripture, many an able theorist declines, or however fails, to see that nevertheless the resultant of the factors of production is not humanitarian, nor naturalistic, but the divine Word, the supernatural Oracle. All this failure is the effect far less of a patient and inductive study of the phenomena than of the general influence of the modern tendency to simplify and unify phenomena under laws as general as possible. It comes not a little of an instinctive wish to see a likeness, a homogeneity, and ultimately a oneness, under all spiritual operations and experiences. And so the “inspiration” of Prophet and Apostle is classified as the same in genus, and even in sfecies, as the “inspiration of the Christian believer of our day in his walk of faith and obedience; as,a development — in some respects very high, no doubt, but still only a development — of the general “consciousness” of the Church and its members. Isaiah, or the Isaiahs, and St Paul, were inspired undoubtedly; but so, and in essentially the same way, were Augustine and Anselm, Tauler and

IS THE BIBLE SAS“ANOTHER BOOK” P’: 49

Savonarola, Luther and Bunyan, Oberlin and Elizabeth Fry, nay Plato and Virgil, Shakespeare and Wordsworth, nay the earnest explorer of the structure and processes of material nature, or of the human spirit, or of the written products of that spirit, in whatever region, “secular” or “sacred,” human or divine. To all Christian minds and lives, indeed to all grave and elevated minds and lives, Christian or not, some fragments of eternal verities have been somehow disclosed. These they have rendered into word, or act, or both, not always exactly, not always truly, perhaps not always even truthfully, but still so as to give some hints and ‘broken lights” of the eternal archetype and original. To the devout men who produced the Biblical Literature such disclosures were made in a very remarkable degree, and Scripture accordingly gives us hints of archetypal and eternal truths in a very remarkable way. But to them, as to others, those hints were conveyed only naturally, through their moral nature, through experience and reflexion. And so in order to gather up these hints given in the Bible we

A
have to
“look

Wisely upon it, as another book.” 1

We have to get the gold of eternal Truth out of the rock of an indefinite amount of human prejudice, mistake, and partial points of view on the part of the human reporters of the truth. We are to expect more gold, no doubt, from quarrying the Psalms, and the Gospels, and the Epistles than from quarrying the Pedo, or the Divina Commedia, or the Pelgrim’s Progress. But we dig our shaft and sift our diggings in precisely the same way in all the cases.

I-am very well aware with what mental energy and skill, and along with what a range and depth of various knowledge, such theories

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1 And now,’ he cried, ‘I shall be pleased to get ‘Beyond the Bible — there I puzzle yet.’

“He spoke abash’d — ‘Nay, nay!’ the friend replied, ‘You need not lay the good old book aside; ‘ Antique and curious, I myself indeed ‘Read it at times, but as a man should read; ‘A fine old work it is, and I protest ‘I hate to hear it treated as a jest; ‘The book has wisdom in it, if you look ‘Wisely upon it, as another book.’” CRABBE, Zale xxi., The Learned Boy.

ITS WITNESS TO: LTTSELP; 5!

in many instances have been constructed and propagated — lI hardly need say now “defended,” so vast a currency have they obtained. Comparatively few and far between are the modern literary theologians who quite definitely and unmistakably hold that the Holy Scriptures are truly and properly saz generis among books as being (as well as containing) the Word of God, and as carrying in a way quite of their own that precious. thing, Divine AutTHority. But I also recollect that in many a past period and crisis the deep tide of intellectual consciousness has taken directions which, on the whole, needed afterwards to be reversed, on a fuller discovery or more calm and reverent review of great facts which had remained all the while unaltered. And I humbly believe that the day will come when the intellectual consciousness of Biblical scientific students as a class will be vastly more alive than it is now to the superhuman and authoritative aspect of the Holy Bible and to the immense significance of that aspect. And such a change of general mental

1 Some weighty words on this subject will be found in Bp Ellicott’s recent little volume, Salutary Doctrine.

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attitude will vastly modify many present theories about the construction of the Bible, theories built much less than is sometimes thought upon the whole facts.

What I attempt to do here is simply to recall my reader’s attention earnestly, gravely, and with deep conviction to the witness which the Holy Scripture bears to its own unique character among books as the Book whose Author is none other than the Third Person of the Blessed Trinity. And need I say that this is no argument in a circle? I ask the Bible to witness to the Bible; but I ask the Bible as literature, as history, to witness to the Bible as revelation, oracular, authoritative, divine. As history, capable of verification, it shows me Jesus Christ, God and Man, living, dying, rising, proving Himself to be profoundly, ultimately, trustworthy. But this Jesus Christ, as presented in the same historical mirror, is seen laying one hand upon the Prophets and the other upon the Apostles, and bidding His followers regard with an altogether unique attention their uttered messages. And I attend accordingly to those messages. And in them I find disclosures and

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‘ntimations as to the quality and authority of the Biblical writings as the oracles of God which, if words have meaning, put those writings — as to their total character — on a level different in kind from all other literature. I find nothing to forbid me to ask, with deep reverence, whether human personality and natural process were not factors to the product; and I assuredly find that they were. But I find it emphasized with vastly greater earnestness and fulness that so did the other factor of ultimate divine Authorship govern and manipulate the lower factor that the true Designer and Architect of the Book has Aad His way all along, in the total and in the details too.

I find nothing to enable me to define, in any full or exhaustive way most certainly, the mode of the supreme Author’s management of the subordinate authors. I find nothing to tell me “what it felt like to be inspired.” In many and many a case, I can well believe, it “felt -like” — nothing; nothing distinguishable from other things. I can well believe that when St Paul wrote to Philemon he “felt” nothing supernatural, any more than when Luther wrote to Melanchthon, or Newton to Cowper. J ao not say that 7t was so; but it may have been so, for all that we are told. On the other hand I not only can believe, but am sure, that Daniel and St John received their revelations in a state manifestly and entirely abnormal, as Abraham and Moses on certain occasions had done before them; unless we are to put quietly aside the profoundly solemn assertions to this effect made in Scripture as if they were so much poetical and imaginative excrescence, or framework, because there is so little in human experience outside Scripture, outside this Record of the divine Redemption of fallen man, to verify them. Yes, it is impossible to define or describe. Scriptural inspiration as a subjective experience. The mode, as to any general account of it, is unknown. “Our theory is not to have a theory.” But I do find abundant testimony on the historic surface of the New Testament Scriptures for the strong and unalterable conviction, sure as the historical reality of Jesus Christ our Lord, that a humanitarian, naturalistic view of Scripture is wholly and gravely inadequate to meet the mysterious facts.

I find our Lord and Master Himself handling the Old Testament Scriptures with the manner of One who not only owns their general significance but personally cherishes, I dare to say reveres, their authority, even in details of expression; and I find Him doing this not only in the early stages of His course but even more in the latter, in the last. And I see Him doing it nowhere more fully and unreservedly than when He has overcome death, and Luke xxiv. come back from the Unseen in the power of endless life. And when, exalted into heaven, He “sends” the blessed Paraclete, His own promised Representative, the Spirit of Truth, I find that one main result of the glorious emission was the incessant use by the Apostles of the writings of the Prophets, in precisely the spirit, no less and no more, of their Master before them.

And I observe one remarkable phenomenon of the whole case. I find that the Lord and the Apostles make comparatively little, if I may reverently say so, of the sacred wreters of the Old Testament and comparatively everything of the sacred wretings. They dwell not so much on who sazd it as on what ts written.

No grades of authority appear in their estimate. What stands within the scrolls of what we familiarly call the Old Testament, and what He called the Law, the Prophets, and the Psalms, is in the eyes of Jesus Christ His Father’s Word, whatever else it is. As such it is His weapon in the Temptation, His credential on the Mount of the Sermon, His mysterious solace in the Garden, His death-word on the Cross, His theme upon the Emmaus Road on the Easter afternoon and in the Upper Chamber where He stood that evening in His immortality. Oh blessed road and blessed chamber! Let us often take our Bibles out with us on the one, up with us to the other. We shall be the less likely then to think that to “look on the Bible as on another book” is to look upon it “wisely,”, even from the point of view of the strictest induction of truth from facts.

But now all this mysterious Divinity of the.

Bible, this properly miraculous character of it, this nature of it so entirely refusing to be accounted for by natural process and human

—.

consciousness, is assigned by itself not to God in general only, but to the Hoty Spirit in’ particular. This is our immediate concern in this enquiry. The statement of the fact is almost all the treatment I give to it; but what a fact it is to state!

He who was the divine Agent in the blessed Incarnation, He who made and sustained the Manhood of the Second Adam, adjusting it with infinite skill to the blessed Filial Godhead, it is He who was the divine Agent in this glorious parallel process, the construction of Scripture. He, the all-blessed Spirit, in that double union of His with Christ of which we spoke above, so managed the long antecedent march of prophecy, both its substance and its phraseology, that Moses, whatever was the Prophet’s “consciousness” in writing, wrote John v. 46, 47. of Christ, and ‘“‘ David in the Spirit ° Matt. xxii. 43. called Him his Master, and Isaiah John xii. 39-47. saw His glory and spake of Him; yes, so that the risen Redeemer Himself found ‘‘ zz all the Scriptures the things concerning Himself.” So did He design, mani- Luke xxiv. 27. pulate, and accomplish, that ‘‘every Scripture a

hath in it the Spirit of God.” * 2Tim iii. x.

So did He fashion “the Word” that it is “the Sword of the Spirit.” So did Eph. vi. x7.

He speak by the Prophets that when an apostolic Writer quotes the words of Heb. x. 15-1.

Jeremiah he ignores, as it were, the Prophet’s personality, intense, tender, and profoundly interesting and instructive as that particular personality was. MJajortbus intentus est; he is aiming deeper. He is citing the words as capable of carrying authoritative, decisive weight on eternal principles and facts. And he sees nothing for that purpose but their ultimate Authorship: ‘‘Whereof THE Hoty Guost also is a Witness unto us; for after that He had said before, This is the covenant that I will make with them after those days, saith the Lord: I will put My laws into their hearts, and in their minds will I write them, [then said He,] And their sins and their iniquities will Jer. xxxi.33,34 I remember no more.” The words, are, in a sense, in a true sense, Jeremiah’s.

1 The rendering, “Every Scripture inspired of God zs also profitable,” is not demanded by the Greek. Compare the Greek of. Tim. 1v.4.

But for the Writer to the Hebrews they are simply the words of the Holy Ghost. And so they must be tous, let me add, if we would lean the whole weight of our human need on them in life and in the hour of death. Evacuate Scripture of its divine authority, and you so far paralyse its power for divine consolation.

I thus state something of the outline of the revealed facts of this great and inestimably precious work of the Holy Spirit. I well know that it is but a fragment; it is but a suggestion; it is, in some of its parts, little more than a confession of faith, and a confession of a kind not always very easy to make at the present time. But such as it is I make it to my reader as in the presence of our Lord and Master. At this period in the history of the Church, if I mistake not, it is important in the highest degree to hold fast, and to hold in the foreground of our convictions and our consciousness, the supernatural, the miraculous, the divinely authoritative, aspect of the Holy Scriptures, as the work throughout of none other than the Holy Spirit of God, the blessed Lord of truth and light.

That conviction leaves me, as I have said, free to enquire into the mode and the materials of the construction of the Scriptural books by their human sub-authors; but with one important exception. It does not leave me free, as I believe, to entertain the theory that any book of the holy Canon, being as to its ultimate authorship the work of the Spirit of Truth, was, from the side of its human authorship, a late fabrication, whose writer sought to borrow an illegitimate prestige by the use of a venerated name and an immemorial date, other than his own.’

In conclusion, if indeed the Holy Book is thus the work and word of the Holy Spirit, we have good cause to turn with humble and glad expectation to that Spirit, who dwells in

1 I take occasion to direct the reader’s attention to the late Lord Hatherley’s Continuity of Scripture, to the Rev. C. H. Waller’s Authoritative Inspiration of Scripture, and to the Rev. A. Cave’s recent Congregational Union Lectures on the /zsfz7- ation of the Old Testament. See also a recent sermon by Dr Liddon, Zhe Worth of the Old Testament.

It is scarcely needful to point out that the later “editing” (1 use the fevmz under some protest) traceable in many passages is a quite different thing from fabrication. The Book of Ecclesiastes may have undergone considerable linguistic editing, and yet be no fabrication.

Christ and in us, to open up to the inmost soul as we read it the things of Christ which, according to Christ, are in it everywhere.

Let me quote a few sentences from that grand and “Fruitful Exhortation to the Reading and Knowledge of Holy Scripture,” our First Homily of the First Book, and so conclude : —

“The Scripture is full as well of low valleys, plain ways, and easy for every man to use and to walk in, as also of high hills and mountains, which few men can climb unto. And ‘whosoever giveth his mind to Holy Scripture with diligent study and burning desire, it cannot be,’ saith St John Chrysostom, ‘that he should be left without help. For either God Almighty will send him some godly doctor to teach him, ... or else, if we lack a learned man to instruct and teach us, yet God Himself from above will give light unto our minds, and teach us those things which are necessary for us, and wherein we be ignorant. And in another place Chrysostom saith that ‘man’s human and worldly wisdom needeth not to the understanding of Scripture, but the revelation of the Holy Ghost, who inspireth the true meaning unto them that with humility and diligence do search therefor.’”

‘Here is the cause’ of all our evils,” says the same Chrysostom,’ “our not Hom. ix.in Col. knowing the Scriptures.”

* Tovro mdvtwv airtoy Ty KaKOv, TO pi eidévat Tas yeadhds. This is but a specimen of the language about Scripture used by the Fathers of the first centuries. And yet their age was an age of seething speculation and discussion. They would scarcely have endorsed what has been recently said (not bya Romanist), ‘‘ The Bible is the most dangerous of God’s gifts to man.”

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