Understanding the Scriptures | Page 7

has its chief significance for the experiences of actual life.
Even the most superficial perusal of the Scriptures shows that they came of practical contact with men and things. There is comparatively little in the entire content of our Sacred Book to suggest the speculations of abstract philosophy. The writers deal with the concrete. They tell of men and of peoples who had to face facts and who achieved comprehensions and convictions through grappling with facts. There is about the Scriptures what some one has called a sort of "out-of-doors-ness." There is very little hint of withdrawal from the push and pressure of daily living. If the prophets ever withdrew to solitude, they did not retire to closets, but rather to deserts or to mountains. We must not allow our modern familiarity with bookmaking as an affair of library research and tranquil meditation in seclusion to mislead us into thinking that the Christian Bible was wrought out in similar fashion. The Book is full of the tingle and even the roar of the life out of which it was born. Jesus gathered up in a single sentence the process by which the scriptural revelation can be apprehended by man when he said, "He that doeth the will shall know of the truth." The entire scriptural unfolding is one vast commentary on this utterance of Jesus.
It is impossible for us in this series of studies to attempt any detailed survey of the revealing movement of which our Scriptures are the outcome. It is important, however, that we should see clearly that the revelation came to those who opened themselves to the light in an obedient spirit. While it is not in accord with our modern knowledge of psychology to assort and divide human activities too sharply, it is nevertheless permissible to insist that the biblical revelation was in a sense primarily to the will. As Frederick W. Robertson used to say, obedience is the organ of spiritual knowledge. The first men to whom illuminations came evidently received these gifts out of some purity of intention and moral excellence. These early leaders gathered others around them and set them on the path of determined striving toward a definite goal. As the idea of the seer or the prophet found general acceptance it gradually hardened into law, law meant for scrupulous observance. If a singer felt stirred to write a psalm, he voiced his experiences or his aspirations in the midst of a throbbing world. If a statesman drew a wide survey of God's dealings with the nations of the earth, he did so at some mighty crisis in Israel's relations to Egypt or Assyria or Babylon. When we reach New Testament times we find that even the Gospels seem to have been books struck out of immediate practical urgencies rather than composed tranquilly with a scholar's interest merely in doing a fine piece of professional work. The early Christians were anxious to hold the believers to the strait and narrow way. To do this they repeated often the words of the Lord Jesus. When, however, the older members of the first circles began to fall away, the words were written down, not because some scholar felt moved thus to improve his leisure, but because it was absolutely necessary to preserve the words. Moreover, conflicts were arising between the growing church and the forces of the world round about. Some scriptures were written to supply instruments with which to carry on the warfare. Always the fundamental aim was to keep the people acting according to the teachings which lay at the heart of the Christian system. The object of the biblical revelation was from the beginning just what it is to-day in the hands of Christian believers--the object of using the Scriptures as an instrument for practicing the Christian spirit into all the phases of life.
We would by no means deny that there are imposing philosophies or, rather, hints toward such philosophies, in the Scriptures, but we insist that these did not come out of a purely philosophizing temper. They came as men tried to put into some form or order the understandings at which they had arrived as they wrestled with the tough facts of a world which they were trying to subject to the rule of their religion. As we have said in the previous chapter, the Scriptures bear scars of all such conflicts. The revelation was knocked into its shape in the rough-and- tumble of an attempt to convert the world. And this is not to claim for the Bible any difference in method of creation from that which obtains in the shaping of any vitally effective piece of literature. The world- shaking conceptions have always been won in profound experience. This chapter is not written with the principles of the