MASTERED IT | AdventAI

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Dec 4, 1901

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 27, No. 49.

“MASTERED IT.”

One can not help wondering what men's idea of the Bible is when they speak of it in the following way:—

Lincoln . . . built up his entire reading upon his early study of the Bible. He had mastered it absolutely; mastered it as later he mastered only one or two other books, notably Shakespeare; mastered it so that he became almost “a man of one book,” who knew that book.

We have great respect for Lincoln, “the martyred president,” and we respect the hearty, strenuous, pushing man who was vice-president of this great republic when he uttered these words June 11, 1901, at the Long Island Bible Society, Oyster Bay, L. I., and who is now president; but we can not say that we have high regard for this conception of the Bible. If the Bible is God’s Word, it is infinite with His fulness. Neither Lincoln, great as was his heart or mind, nor all the great and good men that have lived, ever “mastered” the Bible. Men may read it through a few times, once or twice or thrice a year for a quarter century; they may have studied it topically and by books, or in other ways, so as readily to recall the place of record of any event, or to tell where a certain scripture is found, or to become in fact walking concordances, but all this is not “mastering” it.

One man may master an intricate machine made by another. It proves no more than that his mind is as comprehensive as the other’s work. One may master another’s development of a science and go farther; it would simply prove a slight difference perhaps in mental quality and capacity. Man can master the books and works of men. But man can not master God nor His Book. It is a mine of fabulous wealth, the surface diggings of which have only been touched. It is a fathomless, shoreless sea, of which man has explored only its beaches and sounded its little bays. It is an unfenced field growing ever richer in flower and foliage as we go out from its boundaries, but of which man has plucked but a few bright blossoms, and fed upon a little of its fruit. To aver that a man has mastered the Bible is to declare the Bible a mere human book. It is an infinitely larger conception of man that is warranted, or an infinitely smaller conception of the Bible, one may take his choice. “But the Bible is human?”—Yes; so is Jesus Christ; but He and the Bible are also as truly divine as human; and only those who recognize this will ever come to know either at all, to say nothing of mastering it. He only has learned God’s Word in whom dwells the perfection of sinlessness, knowledge, power, wisdom, and love.