p. 12 | Bible Study

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Jan 30, 1908

Bible Study

EVEN Jesus found it necessary to study the Bible. As he had divine intuition of the truth, one might have supposed that for him Bible study was not imperative. But we must conclude from the Gospels that he not only studied the Scriptures, but that he mastered them thoroughly. None understood their real spiritual import as he. None, too, set a higher value on the divine word and its function in religion than he. “It is the spirit that giveth life, . . . The words that I have spoken unto you are spirit, and are life.” “Ye are [spiritually] clean,” he said to his disciples, “because of the word which I have spoken unto you.” He made the indwelling word a condition of answered prayer. “If ye abide in me and my words abide in you, ye shall ask,” etc. John 15:7. In his last great prayer one of his petitions is, “Sanctify them through [or in] thy truth: thy word is truth.” The same high sense of the value of the divine word is shown when he made it the chief business of his disciples to teach it and preach it. It was not by the power of armies, nor by the edicts of rulers, nor the terrors of law, nor by any outward compulsion, but by the heart-searching prosecution of the divine word that his kingdom was to be built up. He thus laid it upon all who would become his devoted followers to search the Scriptures. In this high estimate of the importance of the divine truth and the study of it the disciples were close followers of their great Teacher. When John, near the close of the first century, sat down to write the Gospel that bears his name, after long years of meditation upon the gospel message, Jesus stands before him pre-eminently as the incarnate Word. “In the beginning was THE WORD, and THE WORD was with God, and THE WORD was God.” When the seer of Patmos sees the Son of man coming forth to war, the name that he bears is not “general,” nor “commander-in-chief,” nor any high-sounding military title, but “The Word of God.” Rev. 19:13. And though represented as a soldier, the only weapon named is a sharp two-edged sword, and that not wielded in his hand, but proceeding out of his mouth, for it, too, as well as himself, is the mighty word. And it is with it that he should smite the nations. In Paul’s aggressive warfare for Christ the word of God is the ever-present weapon. Not only by numerous and apposite quotations, but by well-knit argument he shows a marvelous grasp of Scripture. It is the means by which the church is to be cleansed and sanctified. Eph. 5:26. It is interesting to observe that in his description of the Christian soldier (Eph. 6:17) the only offensive weapon named is the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God; and of the other things necessary, one is that we should be girded with truth, and another, that we should be shod with a readiness (for the battle) made by the gospel. Paul’s ability to use the word of God mightily was doubtless one of the chief factors in his success as a preacher and missionary. No wonder he exhorted the fickle Colossians to let the word of God dwell in them richly, teaching and admonishing one another.

Paul strove hard to make young Timothy a first-rate Christian worker, and in doing so he could do no better than exhort him to abide in the Sacred Scriptures, which he had known from early childhood. These God by his own inspiration had made profitable (1) for instruction, (2) for reproof, (3) for correction for improvement, (4) for education in righteousness. And this fourfold profitableness had for its end that the man of God, the Christian worker, might be thoroughly furnished for every good work.

Peter, too, both in his addresses and epistles, reveals a mind deeply imbued with the Scriptures and facile in their application.

Of Apollos almost the only facts deemed worthy of record were that he was an eloquent man and mighty in the Scriptures. Doubtless his eloquence, as in the case of many great preachers, was due mainly to his commanding knowledge of the word of God.

If we turn from the apostles to the great leaders of the church in the post-apostolic times, the importance of a thorough knowledge of the Scriptures finds added proof and illustration. It was by this two-edged sword of the Spirit that Justin Martyr, Origen, Jerome, Augustine, Chrysostom, and other heroes of the faith were able to smite the polytheism in their times.

The men, too, most eminent in the church’s annals for saintliness drank continually at this fountain. Thomas a Kempis, the venerable Bede, Jeremy Taylor, Richard Baxter—whence came the rich aroma of their lives but from the flowers gathered in the garden of God’s truth?

Every onward movement of the church has sprung from a fresh study of the word of God.

All the reformers without exception were profound students of the Scriptures, and from that inexhaustible source drew their inspiration: Wycliffe, Erasmus, Melanchthon, Huss, Zwingle, Savonarola, Luther, Calvin, Knox, Comenius—great reformers and great Bible students, and the former chiefly because they were the latter.

The same has been and is true of the church’s great revivalists—the Wesleys, Whitefield, Finney, Moody, and many others. It was a fresh, ardent study of God’s message that filled their hearts with a glowing enthusiasm for the salvation of souls.

It would be easy, too, to show that many of our greatest statesmen have drawn their best guidance from the Book that excels all others in political wisdom. The great Gladstone was from early life a diligent student of the Bible, and with what profit he sets forth in this testimony: “What crisis, what trouble, what perplexity, has failed or can fail to draw from this indescribable treasure-house its proper supply? What profession, what position, is not daily and hourly enriched by these words which repetition never weakens; which carry with them now, as in the days of their first utterance, the freshness of youth and immortality?”—James Wallace, Ph. D., in The Bible Record for October, 1907.