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"... reaching forth unto those things which are before ... toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus " (Philippians 3:13-14) Vol. 16, No. 1, Jan. - Feb. 1987 |
John H. Paterson
FOR those of us who stand in the Protestant and evangelical tradition of the Christian faith, "the counsel of God" (Acts 20:27) is contained in the Bible. God's Word is our guide, our source-book and our authority. This being the case, it is a little surprising that our use of it tends to be rather selective! By this I mean not only that we all too easily ignore, or avoid, its less comfortable passages, but also that we tend to favour some parts of it over others; that there are whole books or sections of it whose removal would disturb us very little, provided that our favourite parts were left intact.
Some of this selectivity in our enthusiasm for the Word of God is easy to explain. For the average reader, the long lists of names are something to be avoided; so, too, are the even longer lists of sacrifices. But, at the other extreme, "selectivity" is probably too weak a word for the taste of a pastor whom I once knew well, and at whose 25th anniversary service I was present. He was a man who expounded the Scriptures most faithfully, Sunday by Sunday and word by word -- but only the New Testament! Members of his congregation who had lived through his 25 years of ministry assured me that, during that time, he had never been known to preach out of the Old Testament.
Now in the pulpit ministry, of course, such selectivity can be very dangerous, for it may influence a whole congregation and its worship, by the constant repetition of the same few themes. Indeed, those of my friends who worship in the Church of England assure me that one of the benefits of doing so is, precisely, that they are protected against selectivity for, in the course of the liturgical year, the worshipper is led at one time or another to consider every important aspect of Christian truth.
But naturally, we all have our preferences when it comes to parts of the Bible -- I as well as you! I prefer Ephesians to Galatians or Colossians, Peter to James or John, and Hebrews -- whoever wrote that -- to all the others. Moses is my hero and Hosea my favourite prophet whereas, whenever a visiting preacher announces a text out of Proverbs or Ecclesiastes, I groan inwardly, fearing that I am not going to enjoy the next twenty minutes!
At a more serious level, however, does selectivity matter? Do we actually need all the Scriptures? Do we not all know of men and women who were converted through the words of a single Bible verse? What of those tribes or groups who have only a few passages translated into their native language? And would the deletion of some of the difficult passages of the Old Testament not save us a great deal of embarrassing explanation?
The answer to my questions is, surely, that preferences are excusable, but neglect is not, and that while it may be true that a tiny portion of the Word is sufficient, with the Holy Spirit's help, to bring about the conversion of a soul, the advance of that new believer into an understanding of "all the counsel of God" will certainly involve all His Word. As to how particular parts of that Word contribute to our understanding may well -- and probably will -- form a lifelong challenge: what can the latter chapters of Judges or the prophecies of Nahum do for us as Christians? But it is a challenge, and not an impossibility!
There is nothing very Christian about the custom of making New Year's resolutions. All too often, they serve as no more than support for Paul's admission, "The good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do"! -- at least from January 2nd onwards. I wonder, however, whether you will allow me, on this occasion, to propose a few New Year's resolutions for all of us who will be studying the Word of God in 1987 -- for its use and possible misuse? For the sake of clarity, it will be simplest to offer the points I want to raise in the form of such resolutions. Each of them, as you will see, is an appeal to avoid a wrong type of selectivity in our use of the Scriptures. [1/2]
Let us resolve that we shall not treat the Old Testament as either irrelevant now that we have the New or having purely symbolic or "spiritual" meaning. To recall my pastor friend, I think that the reason why he made no use of the Old Testament was because he believed that the old covenant had been superseded by a new one and a better; that the narrow, difficult, old way to God had been replaced by a new and living way. Why bother, then, with the old? In support of this view he would probably have quoted the Epistle to the Hebrews.
But I believe that to take this view is a mistake. It is a mistake because the one thing we must never forget about that old system -- and which Hebrews readily concedes -- is that it worked. It produced real contact between God and His people -- restricted, admittedly, but real. The argument of Hebrews is, to be sure, that the new way is better than the old but that old way, the old covenant, were in themselves a marvellous provision of God's, and they produced a real history of God's dealings with Israel. To say "We need none of that now", as if we had simply bought a new, improved refrigerator and were taking the old one to the town dump, leaves us, does it not, in the position of arguing that all God's Old Testament dealings with man were merely time-wasting; that He was simply playing out a kind of charade with Israel until the time came to start the real business of the New Testament; that before the coming of the Lord Jesus, therefore, He was fobbing people -- His people -- off with what He knew to be no true solution at all for their needs?
No: we must take the Old Testament seriously, as it is evident that God Himself did. And that means (to come to my second alternative) that we must beware of treating the Old Testament simply as a parable. Once again, we may use the Epistle to the Hebrews to argue from a false position, by generalising from one particular item to the whole. For Hebrews describes the Tabernacle in the wilderness and its contents as a parable of spiritual realities (Hebrews 9:9). And so we are apt to take this as our authorisation for interpreting the whole testament in spiritual terms -- for regarding the real history of God's people as "only" a parable.
I love, as I am sure you do, to read or listen to such interpretations: Joseph as a type of Christ, or the spiritual significance of crossing the River Jordan. They can be fascinating! But at the end of it all let us not forget that what we have is a record of God's great moral declarations about Himself and His standards: that then as now He "commands all men everywhere to repent" (Acts 17:30) -- and that is no parable; that is reality!
Christians often describe the Old Testament as God's picture book, and so it is. But it is not just a picture book. Old Testament or New, the character and purposes of God are unchanged: only the means are different.
Let us resolve that the fascination with biblical prophecy which many Christians possess shall not blind us to the fact thatmost of the prophecy is not predictions about a future which we have yet to penetrate: it is about the inevitable consequences of displeasing God in particular ways. We often speak about "interpreting" prophecy, by which we generally mean that we search for clues in the Scriptures that will enable us to link prophetic references with people or events in our own day. But while there may be references in Daniel, Zechariah, or the visions of Revelation which can be treated in that way, most of the prophets were only too anxious to see to it that their prophecies needed no interpreting. Generally, their message was as plain as a pikestaff; "If you do this, God will do that." The only element of "prediction" necessary was provided by the prophet's knowledge of the unchanging nature of God; by his realising that, with God, His reactions are indeed entirely predictable, inevitable. As a matter of fact, these prophets would probably have been quite disconcerted if they had thought that their message would have to wait two or three thousand years for its point to emerge. What they wanted was to impress their message on people then and there!
And that message was, as you know, first and foremost a moral message. It was a timeless call to righteousness. By far the most urgent words, [2/3] the most resounding calls in the Bible came from the prophets. Of all the scriptural authors they were the least academic, the most involved in their own ministry. In this they stood in sharp contrast to today's horoscope merchants, who risk nothing except a little ridicule if they are proved wrong: in sharp contrast, too, it must be said, to some readers of the Bible who find, in the study of prophecy, a form of escapism from the real and present world, or else just a kind of substitute for crossword puzzles.
There are, of course, encouragement and hope to be found in the words of the prophets, though always following upon repentance and return. Not for a moment should we deprive a believer of those. But I cannot help noticing that the prophet Jeremiah himself forestalled any light-heartedness on that account, and saw the basic business of the prophet as severe, admonitory and moral. The Living Bible has an interesting paraphrase of Jeremiah 28:8-9:
"The ancient prophets who preceded you and me spoke against many nations, always warning of war, famine andplague. So a prophet who foretells peace has the burden of proof on him to prove that God has really sent him."
Let us resolve never to neglect the reading of the Gospels, especially the first three Gospels. I say the first three because you may find, as I do, the Gospel of John much easier to deal with than the others! I suspect that the reason is this: that John has given us less a narrative of the life of Jesus than a philosophical commentary, long extracts from His teaching and only a small choice of actual events, and those avowedly chosen as examples or, to use his own word, "signs". It is much more difficult to follow the Lord Jesus through the kaleidoscope of events and words presented by the other writers: through the practical details and challenges of His earthly life. I fund myself falling further and further behind in my understanding of this Life: hopelessly stumbled by the deceptive simplicities of the Sermon on the Mount: bewildered by the parables of the Kingdom. Certainly, it will take me a lifetime to grasp all this: so there is work to be done in 1987!
Let us resolve, those of us who have a special interest in the Acts of the Apostles, that we shall always remember that it is a book of actions and not of doctrine. I suppose that, in the 20th century, more misleading ideas about the Church of God have been derived from Acts than from any other part of the Scriptures! Its readers have taken a single incident in the early days of the faith, and on it built a whole doctrine, if not a whole denomination. Since it is in the nature of these incidents sometimes to contradict each other, this inevitably leads to Christians falling out among themselves.
But as I have tried to point out in these pages before, the Acts of the Apostles is a book full of surprises engineered by the Holy Spirit. The early Church had little idea where it was going: it lived in an almost permanent state of astonishment! In a wonderful way it was enabled to accept, and adapt to, the Spirit's surprising acts. But for us now to take one of those particular surprises -- whether at Jerusalem, Samaria, Caesarea or Ephesus -- and make it the basis of a permanent position is to deny the very essence of the Church's experience. It required hindsight, and a measure of detachment among the apostolic writers, to turn these varied experiences into principles; to separate the once-only from the permanent. That brings us to the epistles.
Let us resolve that, in reading the epistles, we shall read them through to the end. However obvious, even unnecessary, that may sound, the point I am making here is, I think, an important one.
We tend to regard the epistles as our main source of Christian doctrine (which they are), and their more practical sections as simply tacked on to deal with local, domestic and transitory details; in other words, we infer that their main reason for existence lies in doctrine rather than in practice.
In some cases this may be so. But shall we for once, in 1987, try reversing that train of thought? We should then be saying that the apostles were concerned, first and foremost, with the way in which believers live, and that in order to bring home to them how important is a worthy walk (to use Paul's phrase in Ephesians), they filled in the doctrinal background; that is, they [3/4] were explaining why the believer's quality of life is so vital to his witness. They were answering the question: "Why go to all that trouble?" On this reading of the epistles, the practical sections are not tacked on as an afterthought: they contain the very purpose of the letters.
At least this reversal in thinking may encourage us to take a fresh look at these few, so familiar pages of our Bible!
Those are my New Year's resolutions. It may be that they merely betray my own prejudices, and you are welcome to draw up a list of your own. All that I should insist upon is that we take unlimited pains over "rightly dividing the word of truth" (2 Timothy 2:15).
But at the same time I am very much aware that what I have said so far is only one side of a two-sided matter. Because the Word of God only becomes "truth" to me in the full sense when the Holy Spirit teaches me (John 16:13), it is all too possible to spend a lifetime of study -- indeed, to know the Word by heart, as the Pharisees did in their day -- and still miss the real point.
We are most likely to "get the point" of the Word, of course, if and when the Holy Spirit leads us into circumstances that match those of the original writer or Bible character. To take only the most obvious example, my appreciation of the Book of Job is limited by the fact that, in the goodness of God, I have never been placed in the kind of trouble that Job had to suffer -- no great losses, no painful tests. That naturally restricts my ability to feel for him: it limits my appreciation of the Word of God through him.
When I was young, and read the biographies of pioneer missionaries, I remember being struck, even then, by the fact that the Scriptures which, in times of trouble, most often brought them comfort seemed always to be drawn from parts of the Bible which meant little or nothing to me: Lamentations, for example, or Ezekiel! I used to wonder why the Lord did not console them -- for they were always either suffering from disease or being captured by bandits! -- by means of quotations from the more obvious parts the His Word.
I think that I now understand a little better what was happening -- or what may happen. I think that the Lord, in giving us His Word, has kept some parts of it in reserve, so to speak, for teaching special lessons, on special occasions. How wonderful, then, if one day I find Lamentations sparkling with the same light as Ephesians! I cannot imagine the circumstances that might bring that about, but how good to know that the reserve is there; that there is, in this sense also, "more light and truth to break forth from His Word."
That thought necessarily leads me on to a further and final one. I shall put it, if I may, in the form of a question, and leave it with you, if only because I do not know how to answer it myself.
Here it is: If you were offered a choice of either coming to a fuller understanding of the Word of God in the Book of Job, with the necessary condition of being led into circumstances like his, or, on the other hand, living in peace and prosperity with only a limited appreciation of what that book contains, and eventually being "... carried to the skies on flowery beds of ease" -- which would you choose?
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