CHAPTER six
CHAPTER six
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The Word Made Alive: Scripture, Writing, and the Hope of Israel
❆ ❆ ❆ Andrew A. Bonar: The Soul Winner of Scotland ❆ ❆ ❆
I have always been, at bottom, a man of one book. That is not a disparagement of other books — I have read widely, loved the Reformers and Covenanters deeply, treasured the writings of the Puritans, and found in the scholars of many generations companions for the long hours of study. But the one book that has governed all the others, the one book to which every other has been subordinate, is the Bible. The Bible has been the sun of my intellectual world. Everything else I have read has been read in its light.
A genial humour ran through my conversation, said one who knew me well, but it was always as a Christian scholar whose chief study was the Bible, and one of whose leading aims was to tell about its treasures to others. I liked that description when I first heard it, because it was precisely what I had always intended. Not merely to know the Bible myself, though that was a lifelong pursuit. Not merely to preach it, though that was the great work of my ministry. But to tell about its treasures to others — to open the box and show what was inside, and then to make people want to come and look for themselves.
The study was the place where this work began. I was at my desk early and late. Those who passed the manse window at night sometimes saw my figure standing at the high writing-desk — I preferred to stand when writing, as it kept the mind alert — with my eyes lifted toward heaven and the best of books before me. The study was not merely a room where sermons were prepared. It was the inner chamber of the ministry, the place where the preacher met the Word before the Word was brought to the people. Everything that came out of the pulpit had to come first from that room, and the quality of what came out of the pulpit was inseparable from the quality of what happened in there.
❆ Andrew A. Bonar: The Soul Winner of Scotland ❆
THE COMMENTARY ON LEVITICUS: CHRIST IN THE TYPES
Of all my published works, the one that has given me the most lasting satisfaction is the Commentary on Leviticus, written during my years at Collace and published in 1846. It is not the most widely read of my books — that distinction belongs to the Memoir of M’Cheyne. But it is the one that cost me the most, and the one that, I believe, best expresses what I understood the whole ministry of the Word to be about.
Leviticus is not a book that most readers approach with enthusiasm. It is the third book of the Bible, and it is full of regulations — detailed, precise, seemingly endless regulations about sacrifices and offerings and washings and feasts. Many a reader who has resolved to read the Bible straight through has foundered in Leviticus. The pages that were bright and alive in Genesis and Exodus seem to darken and thicken here. The narrative, which moved with such urgency through the Exodus, comes to what feels like a full stop.
But I saw in Leviticus something entirely different from what the surface suggested. I saw Christ. Every sacrifice, every offering, every regulation about blood and fire and incense and the high priest’s garments — all of it was pointing forward to the one Sacrifice who would make all the others unnecessary, the one High Priest who would enter the Holiest not with the blood of bulls and goats but with His own blood, and obtain not a temporary covering for sin but an eternal redemption. To read Leviticus without seeing Christ is to see the frame without the portrait. To read it with Christ in view is to see that the whole book is a portrait of Him, drawn in the language of shadow and type, every line of it waiting for the original to appear and make the likeness plain.
I began the commentary with a conviction that every word of Leviticus was given by inspiration, that there was no regulation in it that was not deliberate, and that the deliberateness was God’s — every detail chosen to illuminate something about the nature of the atonement, the person of the Saviour, or the way of access to God. That conviction drove me deeper into the text than I might otherwise have gone, and what I found there delighted and humbled me. The Book of Leviticus is a love letter from God about His Son.
Mr. Spurgeon was kind enough to write to me about the commentary: “I often consult your Leviticus, and never in vain.” Those words from such a man were worth more to me than any review in any journal. Spurgeon had read more books than most men alive, and his judgment of a commentary was not formed by theory but by use. If he went back to the Leviticus commentary again and again, it was because he found something there that helped him preach Christ more fully. That is all I ever wanted any of my books to do.
(Colossians 2:17 KJV)
“Which are a shadow of things to come; but the body is of Christ.”
I should describe what the writing of the Leviticus commentary was actually like, because behind every published book there is a labour that the reader never sees and the writer seldom describes. I wrote it in the mornings, before visiting and before the endless correspondence of parish life laid claim to the hours. I wrote with the Hebrew text before me, and with the New Testament alongside it, moving back and forth between the type and the antitype, the shadow and the substance. Every morning I came to the desk asking the same question: What is God showing me about His Son in this text? And every morning — not always immediately, but always eventually — the answer came.
There were passages that took weeks to resolve — passages where the regulation seemed so specific and so remote from anything in the New Testament that I could not at first see what it pointed to. I found in those hours of puzzled searching that the answer, when it came, was always richer than I had expected. The details were not accidental. The particular animal prescribed, the particular day appointed, the particular ritual action required — each of these was a brushstroke in a portrait that only became fully visible when held up against the light of Christ. The more carefully I looked, the more I found. The book rewarded patience in proportion to the patience given.
I said in the introduction to that commentary that Leviticus was “a book for the closet rather than the lecture-room,” by which I meant that its riches are devotional rather than merely academic. It is not enough to understand what the regulations of Leviticus mean historically and theologically. One must feel them — must feel the weight of the sacrificial system, the repeated necessity of blood, the impossibility of approaching a holy God except through a prescribed means of atonement — in order to feel, with its proper force, the relief and the glory of the finished work of Christ. He who knows Leviticus well will never again be able to read the Epistle to the Hebrews as anything other than one of the most thrilling documents ever written.
❆ Andrew A. Bonar: The Soul Winner of Scotland ❆
CHRIST AND HIS CHURCH IN THE BOOK OF PSALMS
The other major commentary I wrote was Christ and His Church in the Book of Psalms, which appeared in 1859. The Psalms had been the companion of my inner life since childhood. They had sustained my mother through her long widowhood. They had been Isabella’s unfailing resort through the trials of her mother’s dying. They had been my own food in every season of the ministry — in the reviving seasons at Collace, in the long slow years before the wave of blessing broke, in the grief of 1864, in the early years of Glasgow when the church was nearly empty and the district seemed impenetrable.
My aim in that commentary was the same as in the Leviticus — to show that the whole of the Psalter is about Christ. Not merely the Messianic Psalms in the narrow sense — the Psalms that are explicitly quoted in the New Testament as referring to Him. But every Psalm, read in the light of its ultimate author, the Spirit of Christ who spoke through David and the other Psalmists, is a window into the inner life of the Saviour, a voice from the suffering or the triumph or the intercession of the One who is both the subject and the singer of the whole Psalter.
This reading of the Psalms was not my invention. It was the reading of the Church in every age before the rationalistic critics got to work and began treating the Psalms as merely human compositions about human experiences. I was simply recovering what the Church had always known — that David’s cry in Psalm twenty-two, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” was not only a cry of the historic David but the cry of the One whom David prefigured, and that the fulfilment of those words in the darkness of Calvary throws a light back onto the Psalm that no merely human reading can account for.
Spurgeon wrote to me also about the Psalms commentary: “Your valuable volume on the Psalms has long been in my library, and had a high place in my esteem. I have been, for some years, compiling extracts from all authors illustrating the Psalms, which extracts will be issued with my own commentary; and I am under great obligation to you for choice pieces which I have taken the liberty to cull.” To have contributed to Spurgeon’s treasury of Psalm exposition was a privilege I had not anticipated. The great preacher of the Metropolitan Tabernacle and the quiet minister of Finnieston were drawing water from the same well.
❆ Andrew A. Bonar: The Soul Winner of Scotland ❆
LETTERS AS MINISTRY: THE GIFT OF SHORT WORDS
I must say something about letter-writing, which was for me not merely a social obligation but a form of ministry as real as preaching. I was a prolific correspondent all my life — not because I enjoyed the mechanical labour of putting pen to paper, but because I believed that a letter, carefully written, could carry the truth of God into places and circumstances that a sermon could not reach.
My letters were generally short. I had neither the time nor, I confess, the temperament for long epistolary performances. But I tried to ensure that in every letter, even those written about the most ordinary subjects, there was a word or a thought that would be worth keeping. Friends told me that they kept my letters, some of them for decades. I found that both humbling and instructive. It suggested that even the briefest communication, if it contains something of Christ, has a life beyond its moment.
Here is the kind of thing I wrote to friends who were going through ordinary days and ordinary trials. To one: “Pray for blessing, for it is like the dew which Gideon prayed for. It falls where it is sought.” To another: “Dwell in the Tabernacle under the Shadow of the Almighty, and not a drop of wrath shall fall on a hair of your head. Walk, too, in the light of the cloud of glory over the mercy-seat. It is New Jerusalem glory.” To a third: “Behold the fowls of the air! How merrily they sing, not troubled about next day’s food or clothing. Be as they. Sing to your God and Father merrily today, and let the morrow take thought for itself.”
I also wrote to friends about their Bible reading in a tone that I hoped would make them feel that reading the Scripture was treasure-hunting rather than duty-fulfilling. “What was the last nugget of gold of Ophir you found in reading the Word?” I wrote to one friend. “What of the gold-diggings? Any recent discovery in the knowledge of Him who counsels us to buy ‘gold tried in the fire’?” Those who think the Bible is a dry obligation have not looked at it in the right light. The right light is Christ, and in that light, every book of the Bible glitters.
I had a conviction, too, that the letter written in the right spirit could reach a man at a moment when no other voice could. A visiting preacher comes and goes. A Sunday sermon is heard in a congregation with other people around. But a letter arrives alone, is opened alone, is read alone. It finds the reader in his private self — in the self he is when no one is watching, in the quiet of the study or the bedroom or the early morning before the household stirs. At that moment, a letter that contains a word from God can do work that public preaching cannot. I believed this, and I wrote accordingly.
The gift of letter-writing is given to very few people in its fullest form. I do not claim to have had it in the way that Samuel Rutherford had it — his letters are among the most remarkable productions in the English language, burning with a love for Christ that scorches the page. But I tried to write as a man who had been with Jesus, and to make every letter a small act of witness. The world is full of people who have no one to write to them in this way — who receive letters that deal only with business and weather and social arrangements, and never with the things that matter most. I believed that one of the ministry’s most neglected instruments was the pen.
❆ Andrew A. Bonar: The Soul Winner of Scotland ❆
THE MISSION TO THE HOLY LAND: 1839 AND ITS LIFELONG FRUIT
In the year 1839, barely a year after my settlement at Collace, I was appointed one of four ministers who formed a deputation from the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland to the Land of Israel. The purpose was to investigate the condition of the Jewish people in Palestine and the surrounding regions, and to consider opportunities for missionary work among them. It was an extraordinary commission for a young minister barely settled in his first parish, and I received it with a mixture of excitement and humility.
The journey took us through Europe, across the Mediterranean, and into the land that the Bible had made more familiar to my imagination than any country I had physically visited. To stand in Jerusalem, to walk the road to Bethlehem, to look across the Valley of Jehoshaphat, to sail on the Lake of Galilee — these were experiences that shook me to my foundations. Not because I had been in any doubt about the reality of the Bible, but because reality has a different weight from imagination, and what I had always known in my mind I now knew in my body.
I brought back from that journey physical objects that served me as sermon illustrations for decades afterward. A stone from Mount Sinai. An olive-leaf from Gethsemane. A shell from the shores of the Lake of Galilee. A piece of desert shittim-wood — the same wood from which the Ark of the Covenant had been made. These things were texts. When I held up the barley ears I had plucked on Mount Zion at a meeting in Kelso, I said: “If God keeps His threatenings so faithfully — and He has, for you can see the ruins of Jerusalem in these very ears — will He not keep His promises?” An old woman in the audience who had been in deep spiritual doubt, struggling with whether the promises of God were to be trusted, was struck through by that question. Her doubts fled. The physical evidence of God’s faithfulness to His word of judgment opened in her the confidence that His word of promise would also stand.
Our published account of that journey, the Narrative of a Mission of Inquiry to the Jews, was used of God in ways I had not anticipated. Not long after its publication, a lady in England wrote to tell me that it had been the means of the conversion of an infidel. The journey to the Holy Land, the sight of a ruined city and a scattered people, had reached a man who had turned his back on the God of the Bible and brought him to his knees. God uses strange instruments. An ear of barley plucked on Mount Zion in 1839, printed in a book, read in England in 1846, and a soul is saved.
(Romans 11:29 KJV)
“For the gifts and calling of God are without repentance.”
The Narrative of a Mission of Inquiry, which M’Cheyne and I worked on together — he writing certain portions and I writing others, exchanging one another’s parishes for a few weeks so that we could have fewer interruptions for the writing — was published in 1842 and was the first sustained record I gave to the public of anything I had observed and believed. The writing of it was itself a discipline in seeing. To write about what one has witnessed is to see it again, more slowly, and to find in the remembered scenes things that had not struck one at the time. As I wrote about the condition of the Jewish people in Palestine and throughout Europe — scattered, often persecuted, preserved by a providence that no historian of mere nations could account for — I found my conviction about their future deepening. A people so clearly preserved must be preserved for a purpose.
❆ Andrew A. Bonar: The Soul Winner of Scotland ❆
THE LOVE OF ISRAEL: A FLAME THAT NEVER DIED
The mission of 1839 gave a colour to all my future ministry. It kindled in me a love for the Jewish people and a conviction about their future that never diminished through the half-century that followed. I believed then, and I believe now with more settled certainty, that the promises of God to Israel are not merely spiritual metaphors to be appropriated by the Church. They are literal promises to a literal people, and they will be literally fulfilled.
I watched with intense interest anything connected with the Jewish people throughout my life. News of a Jewish person brought to faith in Christ was always among the most gladdening tidings I could receive. “Nothing was more gladdening to his heart than the news of one and another of the sons of Israel being brought into the fold of Christ,” wrote one who knew me well. That is exactly right. Every Jewish believer was to me a first-fruit of the great harvest that the prophets had promised — a down-payment on the restoration of Israel that I believed was written into the unbreakable purposes of God.
I loved to remind my congregations that the Hebrew words over the door of the church — He that winneth souls is wise — had been put there partly in the hope that some Jews passing by might see them and come in. The thought delighted me: that the same language in which God had given His promises to Abraham and Moses and David might be the thread by which a wandering son of Abraham might be drawn into a house where those promises were preached as finding their fulfilment in the Messiah Jesus.
I was never ashamed to be called a friend of the Jewish people at a time when such friendship was not fashionable in polite society. The antisemitism of Europe was a thing I found repugnant not only as a matter of human decency but as a matter of theology. To despise the Jewish people is to despise the stock from which the Saviour came, the nation through which the Scripture was given, and the people to whom the promises of restoration were made. It is also, I believed, to place oneself in opposition to the purposes of God, which must eventually come to pass whatever men do or do not do.
Once, an amusing incident occurred when Mr. Rabbinovitch — a notable Jewish believer — rose from his chair to offer it to me as I came into a friend’s house. I tried to prevent him from rising and said: “No, no, to the Jew first!” He replied, quoting Leviticus: “But thou shalt rise up before the face of the old man!” We both laughed. But behind the laughter was a genuine conviction on my part that the apostolic principle — to the Jew first, and also to the Greek — was not merely historical. It was a standing order.
❆ Andrew A. Bonar: The Soul Winner of Scotland ❆
THE COMING OF THE LORD: THE HORIZON OF ALL HOPE
The whole Bible was to me bright with the promise of the Lord’s return. This expectation gave joy and hopefulness to my whole life. Sorrow and bereavement made me think of the glorious time when death shall have become resurrection. Pain and suffering reminded me of the new heavens and the new earth yet to come. I was not a man who could speak for long about the Christian life without arriving at this horizon: the visible, bodily, personal return of the Lord Jesus Christ to reign.
I once knew a half-witted man in Jedburgh who had found Christ and had learned to rejoice in the thought of His return to earth. He went to Edinburgh on a visit and came home much dissatisfied with the ministers he had heard. When asked why, he said: “Oh, they a’ flee wi’ ae wing!” They preached Christ’s First Coming, but not His Second. That image — a bird with one wing, lurching and flapping but never truly flying — described very well what I observed in much of the preaching of my day. The Gospel is not complete without the return of its Hero. A story that ends at Calvary, or even at the empty tomb, has not reached its final chapter. The final chapter is the King returning in glory, death swallowed up in victory, creation restored, and the Lamb on the throne.
I said to my people often: “Many Christians make a great mistake. They think that because Christ said it was expedient that He should go away, therefore it is expedient that He should stay away! He went away to present His finished work to the Father, but He must come back again.” The same Jesus who ascended from the Mount of Olives will return as He went. The disciples who were told to stop gazing into heaven were not told to stop expecting His return. They were told to go and do the work of the Kingdom while waiting for it.
I also said: “I find the thought of Christ’s Coming very helpful in keeping me awake. Those who are waiting for His appearing will get a special blessing. Perhaps they will get nearer His Person. I sometimes hope it will be so, and that He will beckon me nearer to Him if I am waiting for Him — just as at a meeting, you often see one beckoned to come up to the platform nearer the speakers.” That image of being beckoned nearer — the Lord calling forward those who had been watching and waiting for Him — was one of the ways I tried to make the doctrine of the Return something not merely to assent to but to long for.
(Titus 2:13 KJV)
“Looking for that blessed hope, and the glorious appearing of the great God and our Saviour Jesus Christ.”
At a farewell meeting in Philadelphia in 1881, the chairman closed his address by saying that the Lord the Righteous Judge would give to His dear servant a crown of righteousness at the great day. He sat down, and I rose to reply. I said only this: “And not to me only, but to all them also that love His appearing.” That is the promise of 2 Timothy 4:8. Not a private reward for exceptional service. A crown freely given to all who love His appearing — who wake each morning with the genuine hope that this might be the day when the clouds part and the King comes home.
As my ministry drew near its close, I often said to my people: “I may not live to see Him return, but I expect some of you listening to me will.” Whether that has proved true, I do not know. But the attitude it expressed — the living expectancy, the sense that the event is real and near and personally relevant — is the right attitude for every Christian in every generation. He is coming. The question is not whether. It is only when, and whether we shall be ready.
The Prophetic Lectures I delivered once a month on Sabbath evenings from 1879 to 1883 were among the most joyful work of my later ministry. My voice, which was often feeble in those years, seemed to regain its power when it proclaimed through the crowded church the Coming of the King of Glory. Something about that subject drew out from me a strength that ordinary preaching did not always produce. It was as if the subject itself were alive, pressing toward the day of its own fulfilment, and lending its energy to the man who declared it.
❆ Andrew A. Bonar: The Soul Winner of Scotland ❆
FLYING WITH BOTH WINGS: THE WHOLE COUNSEL OF GOD
I want to close this chapter by returning to the half-witted man from Jedburgh and his image of the one-winged bird. He was right. A Gospel that leaves out the return of Christ is incomplete. But so is a Gospel that leaves out the Cross, or one that preaches the Cross without the resurrection, or one that speaks of heaven without speaking of the new earth, or one that addresses believers without addressing sinners. The whole counsel of God requires both wings, and more — it requires the whole bird, every feather of it, shaped and deployed for flight.
I was always suspicious of theological systems that required me to leave out parts of the Bible to make them work. The Bible is not a quarry from which we extract the stones we like and leave the rest. It is a whole. Its parts illuminate each other. The law illuminates the Gospel. The Old Testament illuminates the New. Prophecy illuminates the present. The present illuminates prophecy. A man who knows only the Psalms of comfort has not yet learned the Psalms of lament, and until he has, he does not fully know what the comfort is comforting. A man who knows only the promises has not yet felt the weight of the threatening, and until he has, the promises will seem too easy and too cheap.
I want to say one more thing about the Second Coming as a pastoral doctrine, not merely a prophetic one. I found, over the years, that the expectation of Christ’s return did as much pastoral work as any other doctrine I preached. It comforted the bereaved — not with a vague hope of reunion somewhere beyond death, but with the specific, bodily, personal promise that “the dead in Christ shall rise first.” It motivated the worker — not with the anxiety of one who fears the returning master will find the work undone, but with the joy of one who wants to be found at his post, doing what he was sent to do, when the Lord arrives. It humbled the proud — for how shall any man boast of his achievements in the presence of the King?
I wrote to a friend late in my ministry: “Christ’s Coming is nearer and nearer. When He cometh — we may say in another sense than the woman of Samaria, and yet like her — He will tell us all things.” That last phrase moved me greatly. The woman of Samaria said of the Messiah: “When he is come, he will tell us all things.” She meant that He would resolve the religious disputes that had separated Jews and Samaritans for generations. But there is a larger sense in which that is true of His return: all the unanswered questions of providence, all the mysteries of suffering, all the apparent waste of short lives and frustrated purposes — He will tell us all things. Not perhaps in a moment of explanation, but in the simple fact of His presence, which will make the questions themselves dissolve.
My aim in the commentary on Leviticus, in the commentary on the Psalms, in my prophetic lectures, in my letters, in fifty-six years of preaching — the same aim ran through all of it. I wanted the Bible to be, for every person who heard or read anything I produced, not a closed book or a duty-bound book or a merely historical book, but a living word from a living God, addressed to them personally, full of Christ, full of promise, full of the reality of the One who said: Behold, I make all things new.
❆ ❆ ❆ Andrew A. Bonar: The Soul Winner of Scotland ❆ ❆ ❆