Read: John 1:1,14;
Revelation 19:13; John 6:63; John 8:47; 14:10.
We come to the fourth of those
four greatnesses of Divine revelation—the greatness of the
Word of God. Let me say at once that it is not my intention
to argue that the Word of God is great. We might gather all
kinds of evidences to build up an argument for the place of the
Word of God, but what we are concerned about just now is the
nature of the greatness.
By way of introduction, let me
say that in this matter, as in the other three which have engaged
our hearts, there is tremendous need for a new
understanding. I do not think we get very far in real
spiritual value when we launch out in arguments for the
inspiration of Scripture. To be taken up with a
‘fundamental’ movement simply to seek to prove that the
Bible is the Word of God from cover to cover and that it is
inspired (whether it be verbal or plenary) does not get us very
far spiritually. It does not mean that we make little of
that, but the important thing is that by the Word of God we
should be brought into all the mind and purpose of God; and that
is not done by theories, or interpretations of inspiration. It
can only be as we really know what the Word of God is, for the
Word of God is much more than something written.
The Identity
Between the Divine Person and the Divine Word
Having said that, we find
ourselves immediately at the point which gives the indication of
what is the greatness of the Word of God, and it is found inside
that very first statement in the Gospel by John. “In
the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the
Word was God.” As you know, a particular Greek word is
used there, while another word is used in the other passage:
“The words that I have spoken unto you are spirit, and are
life” (John 6:63; ASV). And in between those two
statements we put this: “He that is of God heareth the words
of God: for this cause ye hear them not, because ye are not of
God” (John 8:47)—and yet the Lord was speaking these
very words in the hearing of those concerned. They heard
just as much as anybody else His actual words and statements, but
He said they did not hear—indeed, He said more: “Ye cannot
hear My word” (John 8:43). Here we have the identity
between the Divine Person and the Divine Word. In that
matter, the same is true of the Word of God as we have seen to be
true of Christ Himself and of the Church. We have seen that
Christ was a complete mystery to the natural man, and to this
world as He passed up and down in the midst of men—men of
ordinary intelligence and men of unusual intelligence, men of no
learning and men of great learning, men who naturally may have
had great sagacity and natural understanding, and good judgment
and perception. He moved amongst such continually and they
knew Him not. As we have said, God passed incognito,
unrecognized, through this world. “No one knoweth the
Son, save the Father” (Matthew 11:27; ASV). It was the
mystery of God incarnate.
In our previous meditation we
passed that on to the Church. The true Church, according to
God’s mind and according to revelation, is not a thing that
you can recognize or identify here on this earth. It is
something hidden, something heavenly, a mystery; even while here
on the earth it is a mystery. Its true nature and identity
are hidden even from the wise and prudent, and from the best
faculties and brains and intelligence of men. To try to
make the Church to be recognized or bring it within the
apprehension and understanding and knowledge of men is to rob it
of its essential Divine nature, and to bring it down to a level
where it will be stripped and shorn of its power. A great
deal of history hangs upon that fact, and it explains much of the
weakness and futility today in what is called ‘the
Church.’
Now, what is true of Christ and
of the Church is true of the Word of God. It is a
mystery. God manifest in a hidden way—a contradiction,
a paradox; but that is the meaning of mystery.
The Word of
God the Unique Language of God
The Word of God is firstly
God’s language, which is not the Hebrew language, nor the
Greek language, nor any language known to us on this earth.
It is God’s language, a language which no one knows
and which no one can learn with any human faculty at all.
In what is being said now you are hearing a lot of things which I
trust are true—and I trust they are the truths of God—but
you will go away and will pass some kind of judgment upon what
has been said, and that is all there will be to it, unless
something else happens in and through the hearing, and deeper and
further back than the mere listening with your natural
ears. Something must come to you as from God Himself, and
unless that happens, whatever you have heard will remain for just
a few hours or a few days, and then it will fail altogether, and
leave you with your own verdict and judgment upon what has been
said. The Word of God is something very much other than
what I am saying about it and about Him, though I trust I am
speaking the truth. The Word of God is a mystery; it is
God’s language, and you have to have some kind of God-given
faculty for understanding His language. It is outside this
world and outside all the nations and languages and tongues of
this world. It is something different and something other,
and you have to receive a heavenly faculty, by a new birth from
heaven, and to learn an entirely new language from the very
alphabet, the A.B.C. of heaven. You can know the Bible from
cover to cover and not know a word of God’s language.
God’s language may be inside the Bible, and it is; but it is
not that which is in the actual letters and words. It is
something beyond that, and is the deeper language of God.
You may read this Book with all its sacredness and preciousness,
and not hear God speaking at all. To hear God’s
language a sovereign act of God is necessary. As we said
before about the recognition and identification of the Son of God
in Jesus Christ, it had to be so. “Flesh and blood
hath not revealed it unto thee, but My Father” (Matthew
16:17). So He, Who is the Word, demands for identification
this sovereign act of Divine revelation as the Word. The
perception may be but for an instant, as with Peter on the
occasion cited above, and then depart until something permanent
has been done inside the recipient. The fact that it is
God’s act does not remove man’s responsibility, for we can
control our prejudices. Preparedness and eagerness to hear
and receive are essential factors in the Divine communication and
quickening.
You see, the essence of the Word
of God is its spirituality, its spiritual nature, and not its
naturalness. The Jesus of history will never save you; only
the Christ risen, ascended, and coming in the power of the Holy
Spirit, will effect anything. The Word as an historical
document will never save you and never accomplish anything.
It has to come in the power of the life of the risen Lord, in the
power of the Holy Spirit, to effect its purpose. The
spiritual is the real Word of God. “The words that I
have spoken unto you are spirit, and are life” (John
6:63). “...not of the letter, but of the spirit: for
the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life” (2 Corinthians
3:6). They may be spoken, but apart from an act of God you
will not hear them; all will be in vain. Hence it is possible
to preach Christ and the Cross and make them of none effect
because they are preached in the wisdom of men.
The Impact of
God Through the Word
Further, we have seen that
Christ is the personal impact of God. When Christ really
does touch, or is really touched in a spiritual way, God is
found. We sought to show this in our previous meditation by
indicating that even when the multitude thronged and pressed Him,
hemming Him in on every side, they did not register anything; He
was to them but as any other man in a crowd. But one woman
was in a different realm altogether from the multitude. She
had faith, the essential link with God, and said: “If I
touch but His garments, I shall be made whole” (Mark 5:28;
ASV). And she pressed her way through and touched, and was
made whole that very moment, finding that in that One from Whom
the multitude were deriving nothing, though in closest proximity,
she met God. Hers was a testimony which stood in contrast
to that of the whole multitude. They had all seen Him and heard
Him, and He had been with them all, but one alone made the
discovery, that is, only one met the impact of God.
And what is true of Him
personally is true of Him as the Word, and true of the Word of
God.
God’s
Word His Act
You see, God’s Word is
always an act. Do not forget that! The Bible as
written is not always an act. How many times do you read
your Bible and come away with nothing? Many tell me:
‘I do not know the Bible as really alive. I read it,
but I do not seem to get anything.’ Is that not a
common experience? Ah, yes. The Word of God is
something that is more inward than the framework, than its
channel, and the real Word of God is God’s act.
“He spake, and it was done; He commanded, and it stood
fast” (Psalm 33:9; ASV). “By faith we understand
that the worlds have been framed by the word of God”
(Hebrews 11:3). Did you notice in that fragment from John
14: “The words that I say unto you I speak not from Myself:
but the Father abiding in Me doeth His works”?
You would expect Him to keep His full statement on the same line
and make the second half correspond to the first: ‘The words
that I say unto you I speak not from Myself; but the Father
abiding in Me speaketh the words.’ But He did not say
so. ‘Words . . . works’; and the works of the
Lord Jesus were largely done by His Word. There was an
utterance and something happened. “I say unto
you...” God’s word is an act.
The Bible, if we knew it aright,
is not just a book at all. It is a Person. It is not
a collection of truths and doctrines, laws, commandments and
technicalities. It is just a Person, and the Bible will
miss its purpose unless it is all the time bringing us into touch
with the Person—and that Person is the Lord Jesus
Christ. There is only one system in the whole Bible, and
that is a personal one—Christ. You may not quite grasp
that, but think about it. The Word of God is creative;
something happens, and something results. *
* All that we have said above
does not mean that the written Word in itself has no value or purpose.
The fact that we have the Bible at all is going to be a basis of
judgment. We are responsible to God just by having His
written revelation; but its power to effect anything in our lives
is through faith, and, apart from a combination of the
Spirit’s action upon faith in quickening us to
“know,” the Word itself remains but the verbal
statement, and not “life.”
God’s
Word is Spirit
Let me try to get at it in this
way. What is the object of God’s speaking? What
is the object of all Divine revelation? What is the object
of the Word of God? There is only one object, and that is
to bring back the lost relationship with Himself. From
beginning to end, the one object of the Word of God is to
recover, to restore, to secure again a relationship with Himself
personally which has been lost. How is that done? How
can that be done by the human language of words? It can
only be done in a personal way, so it is a relationship with a
living Person. But how can man have a living relationship
with the living God? That is utterly impossible as man
is. God is a Spirit, and only spirit can have a vital
relationship with God. If, then, the object of the Word of
God is to recover relatedness with God, something spiritual has
to come about in the persons concerned to link them with God, Who
is Spirit; and the Word of God, the Word which Christ has spoken,
is spirit and is life. Then the effect of the Word of God
should ever and always be to quicken our spirits and make us live
by Divine life.
If this is true, I am sure you
agree with my opening statement: that a new understanding of the
Word of God is very necessary today, and the failure to
understand this about the Word of God accounts for so much weakness
and loss. We can be fundamental to the utmost limit,
arguing for the authority and inspiration of the Scriptures, and
still be spiritually dead and ineffective. The Word of God is
something more than that.
Now you see, in order to destroy
the Word of God, you have to destroy the Person of Jesus Christ,
and so also the other way round. That is exactly what the
devil has sought to do. You cannot separate these two; they
go together. If Christ is the Son of God, if He is God
incarnate, then the Word of God stands supreme. Now, to get
rid of the authority and the supremacy of the Word of God, you
have to undermine the Person of Jesus Christ, and you notice that
is exactly what is happening in Modernism. Why does the
devil seek to take away His essential Deity from Christ and make
Him the Jesus of history? It is in order to get rid of His
mighty impact as the Word of God for the quickening and making
alive of others. So the Word always goes with the
Person. Modernism must logically follow up the reducing of
Christ to the level of a great man by reducing the Word of God to
the word of man. They stand or fall together.
The Word of
God the Cause of all Being
Then if this is true we are led
to this further fact: that the Word of God, being God’s
language and God’s act, is the very occasion and cause and
explanation of our being. “By faith we understand that
the worlds have been framed by the word of God.” He
commanded and He spoke; it was His act. The existence of
the world, or the ages, then, is because God spoke and something
happened. Dear friends, as the Lord’s new creation we
are attributable to God’s having spoken in this sense of
very being. We are begotten again by the Word of God. It is
not simply our taking the letter of the Word and trying to give
some response to it, and making some decision. Oh, I do not
want to be misunderstood or to be thought critical, for God knows
how we value and appreciate anything and everything that is of
Him and can be used by Him, but we have said before in these meditations
that the great peril of our time in evangelical Christianity is
the cheapening of everything and making it so easy by flinging
open the widest door possible for anyone to come in on the
easiest lines. While it is not desired to make things
difficult, I do think there is a need in this matter to realize
that it requires something altogether beyond the natural to bring
someone back into that restored relatedness with God. It
requires nothing less than this Word-act of God which brings into
being, and without which there is no existence, so far as relationship
with God is concerned. We can only have a being as members
of the new creation if God has spoken and it is done. Do
not let us deceive ourselves. It must be like that.
God, Who said: ‘Let light be!’ must shine in our
hearts (2 Corinthians 4:6).
And when it is like that, as we
have been saying about Christ and the Church, eternity has broken
into time; the advent of eternity has simply swept time out of
existence, and we are linked with the eternal God. Something has
happened—“I give unto them eternal life” (John
10:28). New birth is the activity of the Word which
produces a new creation in which there is a new life linking with
eternity. What a tremendous thing the Word of God is!
It is a matter of very being!
Being
Maintained by the Word of God
And it is not only that.
The Lord Jesus said things which had to be opened up later on
through His Apostles when the Holy Spirit was come. He
said: “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word
that proceedeth out of the mouth of God” (Matthew
4:4). Not only is man’s being to be attributable to
this Word of God of which we are speaking, but his very
maintenance is on that basis. The maintenance of that imparted
spiritual life, and its sustenance throughout, is by the Word of
God, and that is something more than reading the Bible. Let
me ask you again, and let us be quite honest (and there is room
and need for honesty: I know I am open to misunderstanding, but I
am taking the risk in order to get right to the heart of things
and save people from deception and a false position, and honesty
is called for here)—do you find always and continually that
your spiritual life is sustained, nourished, built up and
maintained by reading the Bible? Do you always find that
you go on and grow spiritually by Bible study? The
universities can make doctors of law and philosophers, but they
cannot make, in the true sense, doctors of the Word of God.
Only the Holy Spirit can do that, for it is a spiritual
thing. And honesty must face this. There is a
difference between reading the Bible as a book—yes, the
greatest of all books, and a God-given book—and God coming
through it and causing us to say: ‘Oh, I have read that
passage many times, but I never saw that in it!
God has now spoken to me in a text that I have known from my
infancy, in a passage of Scripture with which I am most
familiar. God has now spoken in a way in which He never has
before through that Scripture!’ That is what I
mean. The Word of God lies behind the very maintenance of
our life in the sense that something from God is coming from
beyond (though it may be coming through this or that channel, or
along this or that line). It is coming from behind, from
beyond, as something extra, something more, and finding us.
And when we pass our conclusion upon the matter, we have to say
that we have come, not to some new apprehension of the Scripture,
but to some new knowledge of the Lord by means of that
Word. There is such a thing as Divine sovereignty operating
with the written word and making it His embodiment.
The Word of
God Requires Divine, Not Human, Interpretation
This explains one or two
things! In the first place, it explains why you can have a
number of different institutions which all contradict and exclude
one another, and yet all claim to be founded upon the
Bible. There is not a sect or denomination which does not
claim the Bible as the warrant for its existence and its order,
and yet they are mostly mutually exclusive. How do you
explain that? And, mark you, in the fact of the existence
of all those things there is spiritual limitation. When the
particular order and constitution and ecclesiastical position and
all that belongs thereto are forgotten for the time being, and
the Lord’s people come together in any one given place, and
are there only as the Lord’s people, you will find a
great deal more life and fulness and consciousness of the Lord
than when all are proceeding along the various lines of their
ecclesiastical departmentalism, for the Lord is met. Ought
this state of things to be?
If we had the Word of God in the
sense in which we have just been speaking of it—God coming
through in illumination, in quickening, in His act of new
creation—while there would be variety, there would be
essential oneness and unity, and no contradiction. Nature
is a great parable of this. It is strange how in nature,
despite all the God-given colors that there are, you never find
any real clash. But if you tried to wear those colors in a
garment, there would be a clash. In a garden, where they
are all found, there is no clash. In God’s realm there
may be endless variety, but there is no contradiction nor
clash. The Holy Spirit is One and God is One; and if we get
off the ground of human interpretations of the Word of God, of
man’s mental handling and apprehension of the Scriptures,
and get God’s revelation of His meaning, then there will be
an absolute oneness, and contradiction and exclusive expression
will go. You have left the earthly ground and come on to
heavenly ground.
So what is true of the Church,
according to God’s mind, as a heavenly thing, altogether
other than of this earth, is true of the Word of God. When
you really get on to the ground, not of the letter only, but of
the essential nature of the Word of God—the speaking, the
breathing, the working of God—you get on to another level
which is altogether different from the earthly, and you find that
the clash and the contradiction go out. There is tremendous
need for the people of God to get on to God’s level of
things and away from man’s in all these matters; a need to
get right into the heart of God’s thought and mind. It
is costly. As we have said before, Christianity is such a
tight system now that it is well-nigh impossible for many who are
in it—and especially those who are in it officially—to
come into God’s full thought, because it means so much in
every way to escape from that system. But, oh! where it
does happen and there is escape: where the price is paid: where
there is obedience: where the heavenly vision is and there is no
disobedience to it: where God has spoken, and you cannot but hear
and know that it is God, and your heart gives the answer back to
Him and at all costs you go on: then you come out into a place of
tremendous spiritual enlargement and into a realm of fulness.
Faith Must
Accompany the Word of God
To sum up. The essential nature
of God’s Word is akin to the essential nature of God
Himself, which is spirit. God’s Word is spirit because God
is spirit. And God’s Word as a means of communication
defines the essential nature of Christ the living Word, for He
can only be known after the Spirit. We have said that
although He was there before people’s eyes, they saw Him
not, they heard Him not and knew Him not. Essentially, it was
what He was spiritually that was His real nature. Paul
makes that perfectly clear: “Though we have known Christ
after the flesh, yet now we know Him so no more” (2
Corinthians 5:16; ASV). He does not say so positively, but
he clearly indicates that our knowledge of Christ now is not that
of the Jesus of history. We know Him now after the
Spirit. The real nature of the Word of God is what Christ
is essentially, spiritually; so also the essential nature of the
Word of God is what the Church is spiritually. God is
spirit; the medium or vehicle of God’s speaking is Christ
known after the Spirit; the vessel receiving the speaking of
God—the Church—is spiritual. As the Church, we are
tested by this. Do we hear more than the Bible as something
written in words of men? Are we, as the Church, hearing through
it the more, the extra, which no man can hear unless it is given
him of God? Are we hearing that? Where that is truly
found, the Church is something of spiritual power, spiritual life
and spiritual growth. What is true of the Church, of
course, must be true of every part of it; every member of that
Body must be a spiritual person, made so by spiritual
birth. “That which is born of the Spirit is
spirit” (John 3:6). In order really to hear the Word
of God continually (though God may in a sovereign act make an
unregenerate man know that he is being spoken to through the
Scriptures) something must have been done inside us, and that
something must be continually maintained. What lies behind
everything with God is spiritual. He has bound Himself more
with the spiritual than with the natural. I will not pursue
that further.
I wonder if you are able to
discern even now, by the Lord’s help, the great difference,
and the great need to know what the Word of God really is, what
its possibilities and its potentialities are, and what is the
nature of its greatness? It is not just a verbal
statement. It is the impact of God Himself, and that impact
is sovereign. Therein is the place of faith in preaching and in
coming to read the Scriptures. It is possible to preach
without God coming through, and there is plenty of that, yet God
has ordained to come through preaching, and everyone who preaches
can only preach in faith, declaring the truth of God. He is
cast back upon this: that God must act sovereignly and make this
one here and that one there recognize that God is speaking; not a
man only, but God. Hundreds may be gathered, and yet only
one of them hear God speaking. We are cast upon that sovereignty
of God. Blessed be God, it does work like that! People are
able to say, and we ourselves are able to say as we look back
over our own spiritual history: ‘I knew the Bible well
enough. I could quote it, analyze it and set it forth; but
one day God came through it and smote me, and from that time the
Scriptures which were so familiar to me became the basis of a new
life and an entirely new position.’ That is the Word
of God coming through.
What is really needed today is a
recovery of the Word of God in its essential, intrinsic
greatness, and of the fact that the Word is God, with a
personal impact upon us.