p. 10 | God's Secret Chambers by A. T. Pierson

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Nov 25, 1902

God's Secret Chambers

By A. T. Pierson

When a devout disciple takes God's Word in his hands, for studious and thoughtful meditation, he naturally lifts his heart to him who alone can unveil the eyes of his understanding to behold wondrous things out of his law. Ps. 119: 18. As he reads and searches, meditating therein, the same Spirit who first inspired the Word, illumines his mind. New light is thrown upon the sacred page, so that what was obscure or hidden, becomes visible and legible; and new clearness of sight and insight is given to the spiritual organ of vision, so that it becomes more capable of seeing, more keen-sighted and far-sighted.

Let those who have felt this double effect of the Spirit's teaching bear witness to the marvelous result. The Bible becomes a transformed book. It was before the best of all books, but it is now the book of God,—a chamber of disclosed mysteries,—a house of many mansions, in which new doors constantly open into new apartments, massive and magnificent, God's art galleries, museums of curious things, treasuries of celestial gems.

The devout student is filled with wonder, transported with delight. Words open with new meanings until we look through them into depths and heights, breadths and lengths, that are infinite. We are looking at a firmament which was before clouded; but the clouds are parting, and heavenly constellations are visible. Meanwhile the eye has become telescopic, and where before we saw a few scattered stars, and an indistinct nebulous cloud, everything is ablaze with the glories of countless and many colored lights.

When the Author of the Word becomes instructor and interpreter of his own text-book, we read Heaven's great Classic with the notes and comments of the divine author himself. And so he who devoutly searches the Scriptures, finds in them both eternal life and the testimony of Jesus; the reverent, searching, prayerful study of the Word of God is the cure of all honest doubt as to its divine origin, and the all-convincing proof of its plenary inspiration.

But, as the first Psalm teaches, he who would find such delight in the law of the Lord must meditate therein day and night. He must be a sort of sacramental tree of life, planted by the rivers of water. Mark the instructive, emphatic metaphor. The tree is permanently planted in the soil. Its roots are fixed organs of nutrition, constantly subordinate to the double purpose of growth and fruitfulness. Through the spongelets at their extremities, the tree takes up the moisture of the river into itself, transmuting the water into sap, which deposits woody fibers in the branches, and becomes juice in the fruit.

The disciple is planted by the river of God,—the Word which goeth forth out of his mouth; he takes up into himself the very water of life, transmuting truth into character, and precepts and promises into practice. And so he who reads God's Word and, like the cattle that chew the cud, ruminates upon it, comes to know God through his Word, as we come to know men through their candid and self-revealing utterances.

To meditate on God's Word introduces us to the secret chambers of God's thoughts, and imparts insight into God's character. He becomes sure there is a God, who sees him unveiled in the Scriptures, hears his still small voice in their audience chambers, traces his glorious footprints on their golden pavements; and in times of temptation, trial, sorrow, doubt, or any other need, God's words are so brought to his remembrance, and applied by the Spirit to his needs, that they become to such a reader, individually, God's words to him. He consults Holy Scripture as the oracles of God, and the oracles give answer. This is one of the closed mysteries, a stumbling-block of mysticism, or the foolishness of fanaticism, to the unbelieving; but, to him whose experience has been enriched by it, an open mystery, a fact as indisputable as anything in the realm of matter.—Dr. A. T. Pierson.