Finding The Word Of The Lord
CHAPTER SIX
GOD’S WORD HEARD
God has spoken, says the Bible; and godliness means hearing His word. ‘Hearing' in this phrase means more, of course, than just being within earshot while the message of God is read aloud or recited or explained. ‘Hear', in its full biblical sense, implies attention, assent, and application to oneself of the things learned; it means listening with a firm purpose to obey, and then doing as God’s Word proves to require. It is in this sense that we use the verb throughout this chapter.
What does it mean to hear God’s Word? According to Hebrews, it means, quite concretely, receiving and responding to God’s propositional Word (that is, His message) which He has spoken to us from heaven through the lips of His personal Word (that is, His Son), also through the utterances of prophets and apostles, concerning the ‘great salvation’ which the Son of God won for us by the shedding of His blood for our sins (see Heb. i:if., 2:3,12:25, etc.). God’s personal Word appears as the central subject of His propositional Word, both when spoken and as written. What Jesus said of the Scriptures of the Old Testament - ‘These are the scriptures that testify about me’(Jn. 5:39) - can be said of both Testaments with equal truth. To hear ‘God’s Word written’, therefore, means, in the last analysis, doing as God commanded at the transfiguration, when He said, ‘This is my Son, whom I love. Listen to himV (Mk. 9:7); which in its turn means, not just accepting Jesus’ moral teaching, but receiving Him as one’s living Saviour, relying on His shed blood for the pardon of one’s sins, and living henceforth as His bondslave - one of those who ‘follow the Lamb wherever he goes’ (Rev. 14:4). The homilist reminds us that the living Christ ‘speaketh presently unto us in the Holy Scriptures’ (The Homilies, p. 37of.), and godliness means responding directly to His appeal in repentance, and faith, and discipleship. T heard the voice of Jesus say, “Come unto me and rest” ... I came to Jesus . . .’ Nobody who is a stranger to godliness, in this fundamental Christian sense, can be held to have heard God’s Word as yet.
Three aspects of the life of godliness, viewed as a life of hearing God’s word, call for particular mention.
PROMISE
Firstly, it is a life of faith in God's promises. Faith in the Bible is not, as existentialists make out, a leap in the dark, but rather a step in the light, whereby (to extend the metaphor) one puts one’s whole weight on the firm ground of God’s unshakeable promises. Paul points to Abraham as the great exemplar of faith because, when God promised him, as a childless old man of seventy-five, a host of descendants, he believed the promise, and went on believing it through thick and thin, till it began to be fulfilled in the birth of Isaac, no less than a quarter of a century later. ‘Without weakening in his faith, he faced the fact that his body was as good as dead - since he was about a hundred years old - and that Sarah’s womb was also dead. Yet he did not waver through unbelief regarding the promise of God, but was strengthened in his faith and gave glory to God, being fully persuaded that God had power to do what he had promised. This is why “it was credited to him as righteousness.”’ (Rom. 4:19-22, alluding to the recorded witness to Abraham’s justification in Gen. 15:6). Paul’s immediate point is that the faith which justifies us is like that - a trust in God on the basis of His incredible-sounding assurance that He gave His Son to die, and then raised Him from death, for the express purpose of putting away our sins (verses 23f.). But this is not the only connection in which Paul’s analysis of faith applies. The truth is that all faith, at every stage in our Christian pilgrimage, is essentially a resting upon God’s promise. It has the nature of assurance, because it relies on God’s assurances. This comes out very clearly in Hebrews 11, where faith (‘being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see’ [verse i]) is depicted throughout as a spirit of obedience to God’s commands on the basis of trust in His promises, both general (the promise of reward [verse 6]) and particular (such as the promise of a child to Sarah, who ‘considered him faithful who had made the promise’ [verse II]).
The heart of the life of faith is in fact the recognition that all the promises which God is recorded as having made to His people in the past are still in principle (not always, of course, in detail, because of differing circumstances) extended to each individual Christian in the present. Faith, we may venture to say, rests upon the theology of the promise-box. This appears from Hebrews 13:5b, where the writer teaches his readers to take to themselves God’s promise to Joshua, T will never leave you nor forsake you’ (Josh. 1:5), as a basis for their own confidence and contentment in face of opposition. The true wellspring of the Christian’s peace, joy, hope, and strength to endure, lies in his being able to say, with Isaac Watts,
Engraved as in eternal brass The mighty promise shines;
Nor can the powers of darkness raze Those everlasting lines.
His very word of grace is strong As that which built the skies;
The voice that rolls the stars along Speaks all the promises.
My hiding-place, my refuge, tower,
And shield, art Thou, O Lord;
I firmly anchor all my hopes On thy unerring Word.
The comfort of knowing that every one of God’s ‘very great and precious promises’ (II Pet. 1:4) in Holy Scripture is ‘yes’ in Christ for me (cf. II Cor. 1:20) is as unspeakable as is the misery of not knowing this in times of hardship, loneliness, and depression. But such is the state to which those who deny the biblical doctrine of inspiration sentence themselves; for if we cannot be sure that what Scripture says, God says, we cannot be sure that He has actually made any of the promises which Scripture ascribes to Him. (Indeed if we deny that revelation is propositional, we make it quite certain that He has not. A God who uses no words cannot make any promises.)
We can now see why, as a matter of observable fact, ‘critical’ views of the Bible have always impoverished the life of faith, and why so many of those who hold such views today either water faith down to mere morality in a context of vague optimism, or else jazz it up into a tortured existentialist leap in the dark (or, indeed, like Robinson in Honest to God, do both together). In the nature of the case, it could hardly be otherwise. But this is neither the Christian nor the Anglican way. The Prayer Book points us insistently to God’s promises as the foundation for faith and hope. The collects for Trinity VI, XI, and XIII sum up the Christian hope in the phrase ‘thy promises'. The Catechism requires of adult candidates for baptism ‘faith, whereby they steadfastly believe the promises of God made to them in that sacrament’ (a thought unhappily missing from the Revised Catechism of 1961). One of the hinges on which the infant baptism service turns is the belief that ‘our Lord Jesus Christ hath promised in his Gospel to grant (the child) all these things (saving gifts and graces) that ye have prayed for’. This emphasis is specially strong in connection with forgiveness. ‘Restore thou them that are penitent; According to thy promises declared unto mankind in Christ Jesu our Lord’ (General Confession, Morning and Evening Prayer). ‘Almighty God . . . who . . . hath promised forgiveness . . . have mercy upon you . . .’ (Absolution, holy communion service). And the ‘comfortable words’ are simply divine promises and assurances, set forth as a basis for confidence that there is mercy even for us. Christians today need urgently to recover this Anglican awareness that the promises of God are the ground of faith; for where professed Christians are not living in the joy of the knowledge that all God’s promises are theirs, the truth is that God’s Word is not being heard.
LAW
Secondly, godliness involves obedience to God's laws. The Anglican view of the Bible is that it is a supremely practical book, not only leading us to know God through meeting Jesus Christ, but also giving us rules and maxims for bringing the whole of our life into line with God’s will. In 1540, in his Preface to that epoch-making book, the Great Bible, ordered to be set up for public reading in every church in the country, Archbishop Cranmer wrote: Tn the Scriptures be the fat pastures of the soul; therein is no venomous meat, no unwholesome thing; they be the very dainty and pure feeding. He that is ignorant, shall find there what he should learn . . . Herein may princes learn how to govern their subjects; subjects obedience ... to their princes: husbands, how they should behave them unto their wives; how to educate their children . . .: and contrary the wives, children, and servants may know their duty to their husbands, parents, and masters. Here may all manner of persons, men, women, young, old, learned, unlearned, rich, poor, priests, laymen, lords, ladies, officers, tenants, and mean men, virgins, wives, widows, lawyers, merchants, artificers, husbandmen, and all manner of persons, of what estate or condition soever they be, may in this book learn all things what they ought to believe, what they ought to do, and what they should not do, as well concerning Almighty God, as also concerning themselves and all other.’1 The Bible is as much a rule for life as it is a rule of faith.
But it is important to be clear as to what sort of rule for life it is. Its moral teaching is not a code of isolated externals, a Pharisaic formalism, but a connected series of principles and ideals, deriving directly from the revealed nature of God and His purpose for mankind, and calling for right motives as well as right types of action. The biblical law of God requires us to be persons of a certain kind, as well as to do things of a certain kind; and the biblical concept of love embraces both sides of the ideal. So opposing love to law, as some do, is as perverse as opposing a woman’s fondness for her husband to her efforts to provide the things she knows he likes. So far from being opposed, love and law belong inseparably together. Law is needed as love’s eyes; love is needed as law’s heartbeat. Law without love is Pharisaism; love without law is antinomianism; both are aberrations. Our Lord showed the connection between love and law when He said: ‘If you love me, you will obey what I command . . . whoever has my commands and obeys them, he is the one who loves me’ (Jn. 14:15, 21). John put it even more succinctly: ‘love means following the commands of God’ (II Jn. 6, N.E.B.). And where Christians do not constantly expose their lives to the detailed ‘rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness’ of Holy Scripture (II Tim. 3:16), the truth is that God’s Word is not being heard.
TRUTH
Thirdly, genuine godliness is always marked by delight in God’s truth. Psalm 119 makes this abundantly plain. The psalmist loves God’s law, rejoices to know God’s mind, and holds fast, at whatever cost to himself, the truths that God has taught him. His delight in God is, among other things, a delight in God’s Word. Elsewhere in Scripture, God’s Word is pictured, not only as food, because it nourishes and promotes growth (I Cor. 3:2; Heb. 5:i2ff.; cf. I Pet. 2:2), but also as honey, by reason of its sweetness (Ps. 19:10, 119:103; cf. Ezek. 3:3; Rev. io:9f.). One fears that many in our churches today are strangers to this sense of the sweetness of God’s truth, as they are evidently strangers to the love of the Bible which it evokes, and to the sense of duty to keep God’s truth inviolate, come what may, which found expression in the firmness of our Reformers against the pope and the mass - a firmness which under Mary led many to martyrdom. Tolerance of differences on secondary doctrinal questions is doubtless an Anglican virtue, but the all-round doctrinal indifferentism which we meet so often today is a travesty of the Anglican ideal. The Anglicanism of the 1662 Prayer Book, with its hundred-verses-a-day lectionary, its monthly passage through the Psalter, its Bible-crammed daily services, and its high valuation of expository preaching (witness the ordinal, and the collects for Advent III and St. Peter’s day), is a Bible-reading, Bible-loving, Bible-believing faith. Today, however, Anglicans devote their zeal to maintaining a state of doctrinal laxity rather than a confession of biblical truth. The Thirty-Nine Articles are constantly deprecated in those Anglican churches that still retain them, and clerical subscription to them is nowadays largely emptied of meaning. The idea that Anglican unity is ‘institutional’ and ‘cultic’ rather than confessional is hailed as a new revelation, and all thought of doctrinal discipline in Anglican churches is scouted. What a lapse this is from the Anglicanism of Cranmer, Jewel, Hooper, and Hooker (and, for that matter, of Hammond, Pearson, Beveridge, and Thorndike too!). Where biblical teaching is not revered as a transcript of God’s mind, and churchmen show little sign of being ready to ‘love the truth’ (II Thess. 2:10), so as to dwell on it, and prize it, and study to keep it intact (cf. II Tim. 1:13!.), and where vital gospel doctrines are allowed to be obscured in the interests of a hollow pleasantness - the thing that Paul would not let happen in Galatia and Colossae - then the truth is that God’s Word is not being heard.
THE HOLY SPIRIT
But how, we ask, does God’s Word actually come to be heard? In the first place, it will certainly not be heard where the Bible is not preached, studied, or read. The first need is to give the Bible its rightful place in personal and church life. But whether, even then, God’s Word will be heard depends on yet a further factor: namely, our openness to the work of the Holy Spirit.
It is the promised privilege of all Christians, we are told, to be ‘taught by God’ (Jn. 6:45, citing Is. 54:13), and it is the Spirit of God who teaches them. The Spirit who taught all things to the apostles (Jn. 14:26, 16:13f; I Cor. 2:10, 13) is the ‘anointing’ that teaches all Christ’s people (I Jn. 2:27). He teaches us not by fresh disclosures of hitherto unknown truth, like those whereby the apostles were taught, but by enabling us, who, being fallen, are by nature wholly insensitive and unresponsive to God and the things of God, to acknowledge the reality, recognize the divinity, and bow to the authority, of divine facts and truths set before us, and to see how they bear on our lives. Historically, theologians have called this work illumination, or enlightenment, or the inner witness of the Spirit. It was to this work that our Lord referred when He said that the Spirit’s task would be to convict (Jn. 16:8). By it, the Spirit authenticates the prophetic and apostolic word to our consciences as being, in truth, what it claims to be, God’s message, just as He authenticates Jesus Christ to us as being, in truth, what He claimed to be, God’s Son and our Saviour. The Spirit brings us to acknowledge the divinity claimed by, and for, Christ on the one hand, and the Scriptures on the other, as being, in truth, self-evidencing; thus He leads us to bow to the conjoint authority of both. He further enables us to grasp what both are saying to us, and works in our minds and hearts to apply the divine instruction effectively, and make us respond. It was through the Spirit’s work that the Thessalonians, having ‘received the word of God, which you heard from us [Paul] . . . accepted it not as the word of men, but as it actually is, the word of God’. It was also in virtue of the Spirit’s action that Paul could speak of his message as a word which ‘is at work in you who believe’ (I Thess. 2:13).
But are we open to this working of the Spirit? As long as we approach the Scriptures with detachment, concerned only to appreciate them historically, or aesthetically, and as long as we treat them as a merely human record, we scarcely are. We are only open to the Spirit’s ministry so far as we are willing, as it were, to step into the Bible, to take our stand alongside the people to whom God spoke - Abraham listening to God in Ur, Moses listening to God at Sinai, the Israelites listening to God’s word from the lips of Moses and the prophets, the Jews listening to Jesus, the Romans and Corinthians and Timothy listening to Paul, and so on - and, in terms of our earlier illustration, to share joint tutorials with them, noting what God said to them and then seeking to see, in the light of that, what He would say to us. Such willingness is in most of us very limited; we are prejudiced, lazy, and unprepared for the exercise of spirit and conscience that it involves. But greater willingness and increased receptiveness are themselves the Spirit’s gifts. Therefore we must use the prayer, Teach me your decrees’ (Ps. 119:12, and seven times more in this Psalm), as a plea, not only for teaching but also for teachableness; for without the latter we shall never have the former.
FINDING THE WORD OF THE LORD
We began this book by bringing into focus a problem, the reality of which seems undeniable - namely, that for all the intense biblical study and detailed biblical knowledge of our day, our churches suffer from a widespread ‘famine of hearing the words of the Lord’. We have tried to see how this came about, and to outline as simply as we could the way of approach to the Bible which we believe to be both right in itself, and authentically Anglican, and which, if followed, will lead us to the place where God’s Word is effectively heard once more. Readers of this book, who, like its writer, are children of an age that is heavily conditioned against the ‘old paths’ will feel that this approach raises problems. It is no part of our concern to deny this; we would only invite our readers to consider, in the light of what we have said, whether alternative approaches do not raise greater problems still. In a book of this brevity it is not possible to consider many of the problems of which one would have to take note in a treatise, any more than it is possible to deal with the hundred and one questions - exegetical, historical, moral, scientific - that arise when one actually gets down to studying and meditating on the biblical text in the light of the principles stated. Nor, perhaps, would it have been desirable to do so in any case. For this book is offered, not as a treatise, but simply as a tract - a mental and spiritual preparation and, we hope, incentive to the venture of studying the Bible for oneself in the waiting, expectant, God-seeking, God-fearing spirit of Samuel in the temple - ‘Speak, for your servant is listening’ (I Sam. 3:10). If we allow our study of the Bible to wait upon our finding solutions to every problem that its contents raise, we shall never get started at all. All Bible students carry around with them all their lives a quiverful of unsolved problems, as well as their quota of God-taught certainties. It is idle to expect to find the answer to everything while we are in this world. What matters is that, problems notwithstanding, we should all actually be engaged in searching the Scriptures by the light of right principles and a right method, and so daily learning of God about our sin, and about His Son.
The feeling is sometimes voiced that the sheer quantity of technical information about the Bible which scholars possess today makes Bible study harder for laymen than it used to be, by giving them so much more to master. But the assumption that one cannot study the Bible effectively without a mass of technical theological equipment is false. If the questions one brings to Scripture are such as these - ‘What does this tell me about God? about myself? about my Saviour? How does this fit in with the rest of what I know of the Bible? If this is what God said to so-and-so then, what is His word to me here and now? If this is how God dealt with so-and-so in his situation, how would He deal with me in mine?’ - and if one pays attention to the context and flow of thought within each book as one reads it, especially if one uses a Bible with good marginal references, God the Spirit will see to it that, lay person no less than theologian, one will learn what one needs to know.
What does make Bible study harder for laypeople nowadays than it used to be is the widespread breakdown of the great evangelical tradition of large-scale expository preaching Sunday by Sunday from our pulpits. The New Testament pattern is that public preaching of God’s Word provides, so to speak, the main meals, and constitutes the chief means of grace, and one’s own personal meditations on biblical truth should come in as ancillary to this, having the nature of a series of supplementary snacks - necessary, indeed, in their place, but never intended to stand alone as a complete diet. There is something deeply unnatural and unsatisfactory in a situation where the people of God have to rely entirely on personal Bible study for their spiritual nourishment, due to lack of effective expository preaching in public worship. But this is a different issue, which we cannot pursue here.
Let it be clear, once more, that we are not belittling technical biblical scholarship. Our only point is that it is not to biblical experts alone that the Holy Spirit vouchsafes His teaching, and that the psalmist’s description of the law of the Lord as ‘making wise the simple’ (Ps. 19:7) still holds good.
At the 1958 Lambeth Conference, the first committee report dealt with ‘The Holy Bible: its Authority and Message’.2 Despite some unhappy features (its denial of the sufficiency of Scripture, noted above,3 and of biblical inerrancy, and the inadequacy of its treatment of the biblical thought of God as speaking),4 it contained much that was excellent, and laid specially welcome emphasis on the importance of biblical exposition in the pulpit and the reading of the Bible personally and in the home. In this, of course, it simply reaffirmed foundation-principles of Reformed Anglicanism. The Conference as a whole endorsed the report with a series of resolutions, including a call to ‘all Church people to reestablish the habit of Bible-reading at home’,5 and a summons to ‘the Churches of the Anglican Communion to engage in a special effort during the next ten years to extend the scope and deepen the quality of personal and corporate study of the Bible’.6 The Encyclical Letter spoke in this connection of the clergyman’s duty to work at his preaching in order to make the Bible ‘come alive’ to his hearers, and of ‘the duty of the laity to bring to the hearing of the Bible an expectant heart, and to learn again the art of private Bible study and meditation’.7 Admirable words - but it seems that neither in the decade following 1958 nor since has any serious response to them been made. Anglicans in the Western world generally, along with many other contemporary Christians, remain largely strangers to the Bible.
God therefore, for His mercies’ sake, vouchsafe to purify our minds through faith in His Son Jesus Christ, and to instil the heavenly drops of His grace into our hard stony hearts, to supple the same, that we be not contemners and deriders of His infallible Word; but that with all humbleness of mind and Christian reverence, we may endeavour ourselves to hear and to read His sacred Scriptures, and inwardly so to digest them, as shall be to the comfort of our souls, and sanctification of His holy name: to whom with the Son and the Holy Ghost, three Persons and one living God, be all laud, honour, and praise, for ever and ever. Amen (The Homilies, p. 383).
O Almighty God, who by thy Son Jesus Christ didst give to Thy apostle Saint Peter many excellent gifts, and commandedst him earnestly to feed Thy flock; Make, we beseech Thee, all bishops and pastors diligently to preach Thy holy Word, and the people obediently to follow the same, that they may receive the crown of everlasting glory; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen (collect for Saint Peter’s day).
Blessed Lord, who hast caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning; Grant that we may in such wise hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them, that by patience, and comfort of Thy holy Word, we may embrace, and ever hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life, which Thou has given us in our Saviour Jesus Christ. Amen (collect for Advent II).
Today if ye will hear his voice, harden not your hearts: as in the provocation, and as in the day of temptation in the wilderness;
When your fathers tempted Me: proved Me, and saw My works.
Forty years long was I grieved with this generation, and said: It is a people that do err in their hearts, for they have not known My ways.
Unto whom I sware in my wrath: that they should not enter into My rest (Ps. 95:7-11, Prayer Book version).