HOW TO MASTER THE ENGLISH BIBLE
HOW TO MASTER THE ENGLISH BIBLE
AN EXPERIENCE, A METHOD
A RESULT, AN ILLUSTRATION
BY
REV. JAMES M. GRAY, D.D.
MINISTER IN THE REFORMED EPISCOPAL CHURCH
AUTHOR OF "SYNTHETIC BIBLE STUDIES"
"THE ANTIDOTE TO CHRISTIAN SCIENCE"
"PRIMERS OF THE FAITH" ETC. ETC.
EDINBURGH AND LONDON
OLIPHANT ANDERSON & FERRIER
1907
TABLE OF CONTENTS
I. The Story of the Case
II. Explanation of the Method
III. The Plan at Work
IV. Results in the Pulpit
V. Expository Outlines
NOTE BY THE PUBLISHERS OF THE BRITISH EDITION
The success of the author's book, _Synthetic Bible Studies_, has been
such that it is a pleasure to us to introduce this little book to
British Bible students.
NOTE BY THE PUBLISHERS OF THE AMERICAN EDITION
The author of this book requires no introduction to the Bible-loving
people of our time. A time it is of unusual quickening in the study
of God's Word along spiritual and evangelical lines, toward which, as
the editor of a leading newspaper has said, no one man has contributed
more than Rev. James M. Gray, D.D.
"He knows what is in the Book," says the _Christian Endeavour World,_
"and when he sounds the clear, strong notes of God's love, of victory
over sin, of the believer's assurance, it is no wonder that thousands
of young people wax as enthusiastic over the Bible as others do over
athletics or art."
The interdenominational Bible classes which he has carried on, and to
which his work directly and indirectly has given rise, are the
largest and in other respects the most remarkable known. His work has
revolutionised the method of teaching in some Sunday schools; it has
put life into dead prayer-meetings; in not a few instances it has
materially helped to solve the problem of the second service on the
Lord's day; it has been a boon to many pastors in the labours of
study and pulpit, whose gratitude is outspoken; it has contributed to
the efficiency of foreign missionary workers, whose testimony has
come from the uttermost parts of the earth; and it has reacted
beneficially on the instruction given in the English Bible in some of
our home academies, smaller colleges and seminaries. The secret of
these results is given in this book.
Nor is it as a Bible teacher only, but also as a Bible preacher, that
Dr. Gray holds a distinguished place in the current history of the
Church. His expository sermons leave an impress not to be effaced.
Presbyteries and ministerial associations are on record that they
have stirred communities to their depths. Even secular editors,
commonly unmoved by ordinary types of evangelism, have written: "Here
is something new for the people, something fresh and suggestive for
every active mind, which the business interests of the city cannot
afford to neglect." The testimony of one pastor given at a meeting of
the presbytery is practically that of scores of others throughout the
country. He had attended a series of popular meetings conducted by
Dr. Gray, and said: "I learned more during the few days I listened to
Dr. Gray about the true character of preaching than I had learned in
all my seminary course and my twenty years of ministry. Because of
what I learned there of true expository preaching I shall hope to
make the last years of my ministry the very best of all."
We are glad that this book contains a practical application of all
that the author has said and taught to the results which may be
gathered from it in the pulpit.
THE STORY OF THE CASE
HOW TO MASTER THE ENGLISH BIBLE
PART I
THE STORY OF THE CASE
[Sidenote: The Bible like a Farm]
How to master the English Bible! High-sounding title that, but does
it mean what it says? It is not how to study it, but how to master
it; for there is a sense in which the Bible must be mastered before
it can be studied, and it is the failure to see this which accounts
for other failures on the part of many earnest would-be Bible
students. I suppose it is something like a farm; for although never a
farmer myself, I have always imagined a farmer should know his farm
before he attempted to work it. How much upland and how much lowland?
How much wood and how much pasture? Where should the orchard be laid
out? Where plant my corn, oats, and potatoes? What plot is to be
seeded down to grass? When he has mastered his farm he begins to get
ready for results from it.
Now there are many ways of studying the Bible, any one of which may
be good enough in itself, but there is only one way to master it, as
we shall see. And it is the Bible itself we are to master, not books
about the Bible, nor yet "charts." I once listened to an earnest and
cultivated young man delivering a lecture on Bible study, illustrated
by a chart so long that when he unrolled and held one end of it above
his head, as high as his arms could reach, the other curled up on the
floor below the platform. As the auditor gazed upon its labyrinthian
lines, circles, crosses and other things intended to illuminate it,
and "gathered up the loins of his mind" to listen to the explanation
following, it was with an inward sigh of gratitude that God had never
put such a yoke upon us, "which neither we nor our fathers were able
to bear."
[Sidenote: The Vernacular and Bible Tongues]
And it is the English Bible we are thinking about, the Bible in the
vernacular, the tongue most of us best understand. One is grateful to
have studied Hebrew and Greek, just to be able to tell others who
have not that they do not require either to hearken to our Heavenly
Father's voice. He has an advantage as a scholar who can utilise the
original tongues; but the Bible was not given to scholars, but to the
people, and "hear we every man in our own tongue wherein we were
born" (Acts 2:8). It is not at all inconsistent to add that he who
masters the English Bible is possessed of the strongest inducement to
study it in Hebrew and Greek.
That which follows grows largely out of the writer's personal
experience. For the first eight or ten years of my ministry I did not
know my English Bible as I should have known it, a fact to which my
own spiritual life and the character of my pulpit ministrations bore
depressing witness. [Sidenote: The Bible in the Seminary] Nor was I
so fortunate as to meet with more than one or two brethren in the
ministry who knew their English Bible very much better than I knew
mine. They all declared that the theological seminaries did not
profess to teach the English Bible. They taught much about the Bible
of great importance for ministers to know, such as the Hebrew and
Greek tongues, the principles of exegesis and interpretation, the
history of the text, and the proofs and illustrations of Christian
doctrine; but, in the words of one of the ministers referred to (which
have appeared in print), "while we had some special lessons in one or
two of the epistles, several of the psalms, in some of the prophecies,
and in a few select portions of the gospels, other and vastly
important parts of the Bible were left out altogether. We had nothing
on the book of Revelation, no elaborate study of the Mosaic ritual and
its profound system of types, and especially were we left uninitiated
into the minute and wonderful co-ordination of parts in the various
books of the Old and New Testaments, which disclose a stupendous
divine plan running through the whole, linking them all together as an
indissoluble unit and carrying with them an amazing power of
conviction."
The seminaries have assumed that students were acquainted with the
great facts of the English Bible and their relation to one another
before matriculation, but so competent an authority as President
Harper declares that "to indicate the line of thought and chief ideas
of a particular prophet, or the argument of an epistle, or to state
even the most important events in the life of our Lord, would be
impossible for the average college graduate." It is such an
unfortunate state of things which, to a certain extent, accounts for
the rise and maintenance of those excellent institutions, the Moody
Bible Institute in this country and Spurgeon's College in London,
with their almost countless offspring and imitators everywhere,
creating as they have a distinct atmosphere of biblical and
evangelistic teaching and preaching. It is commonly supposed, it may
be said in passing, that these institutions cater to or attract only
men or women of very limited educational attainments, but in the case
of the first-named, at least, an incidental census taken recently
disclosed the fact that one-third of the male students then on the
rolls or who had lately left were college-trained; one may safely
hazard the opinion that in the women's department the proportion of
college-trained students would have been still larger.
[Sidenote: Help from a Layman]
The first practical help I ever received in the mastery of the
English Bible was from a layman. We were fellow-attendants at a
certain Christian conference or convention and thrown together a good
deal for several days, and I saw something in his Christian life to
which I was a comparative stranger--a peace, a rest, a joy, a kind of
spiritual poise I knew little about. One day I ventured to ask him
how he had become possessed of the experience, when he replied, "By
reading the epistle to the Ephesians." I was surprised, for I had
read it without such results, and therefore asked him to explain the
manner of his reading, when he related the following: He had gone
into the country to spend the Sabbath with his family on one
occasion, taking with him a pocket copy of Ephesians, and in the
afternoon, going out into the woods and lying down under a tree, he
began to read it; he read it through at a single reading, and finding
his interest aroused, read it through again in the same way, and, his
interest increasing, again and again. I think he added that he read
it some twelve or fifteen times, "and when I arose to go into the
house," said he, "I was in possession of Ephesians, or better yet, it
was in possession of me, and I had been 'lifted up to sit together in
heavenly places in Christ Jesus' in an experimental sense in which
that had not been true in me before, and will never cease to be true
in me again."
I confess that as I listened to this simple recital my heart was
going up in thanksgiving to God for answered prayer, the prayer
really of months, if not years, that I might come to know how to
master His Word. And yet, side by side with the thanksgiving was
humiliation that I had not discovered so simple a principle before,
which a boy of ten or twelve might have known. And to think that an
"ordained" minister must sit at the feet of a layman to learn the
most important secret of his trade!
[Sidenote: Dr. Stalker's Experience]
Since that day, however, the writer has found some comfort in the
thought that other ministers have had a not unlike experience. In an
address before the National Bible Society of Scotland, the Rev. Dr.
Stalker speaks of the first time he ever "read a whole book of the
Bible straight through at a sitting." It was while as a student he
was spending a winter in France, and there being no Protestant church
in the town where he was passing a Sunday, he was thrown on his own
resources. Leaving the hotel where he was staying, he lay down on a
green knoll and began reading here and there as it chanced, till,
coming to the epistle to the Romans, he read on and on through to the
end. "As I proceeded," he said, "I began to catch the drift of Paul's
thought; or rather, I was caught by it and drawn on. The mighty
argument opened out and arose like a great work of art above me till
at last it enclosed me within its perfect proportions. It was a
revolutionary experience. I saw for the first time that a book of
Scripture is a complete discussion of a single subject; I felt the
force of the book as a whole, and I understood the different parts in
the light of the whole as I had never understood them when reading
them by themselves. Thus to master book after book is to fill the
mind with the great thoughts of God."
[Sidenote: The Author's Plan]
Let me now speak of what I, personally, began to do after the
suggestion of the layman, for the results which, in the providence of
God, have grown out of it seem to warrant dwelling upon it even at
the risk of prolixity on the one hand or the suspicion of egotism on
the other. At first, supposing it more desirable to read the books in
the original than the vernacular, I began to memorise some of the
smaller epistles in Greek, but the Lord showed me "a more excellent
way" in view of the purpose which the event proved Him to have had in
mind in the matter. Accordingly, ignoring the Bible tongues for the
time, I read Genesis through in the English at a single reading, and
then repeated the process again and again until the book in its great
outlines had practically become mine. Then I took up Exodus in the
same way, Leviticus, Numbers, and practically all the other books of
the Old and New Testaments to Revelation, with the exception of
Proverbs, the Psalms and one or two others which do not lend
themselves readily to that plan of reading, and indeed do not require
it to their understanding and mastery. I am careful to emphasise the
fact that I did not read the Bible "in course," as it is commonly
understood. One might read it in that way a great many times and not
master it in the sense indicated above. The plan was to read and
re-read each book by itself and in its order, as though there were no
other in existence, until it had become a part of the very being.
[Sidenote: Joy and Power]
Was the task tedious and long? No more than was Jacob's when he
served Laban for his daughter Rachel. There were compensations all
along the way and ever-increasing delight. No romance ever held sway
over the thought and imagination in comparison with this Book of
books. A better investment of time were never made by any minister;
and, shut me up to-day to a choice between all the ministerial lore I
ever learned elsewhere and what was learned in this synthetic reading
of the Bible, and it would not take me many minutes to decide in
favour of the latter. Nor did I know until lately how closely my
feeling in this respect harmonised with that of a great educator and
theologian of an earlier day. [Sidenote: Dean Burgon and Dr. Routh]
Dean Burgon tells of an interview he had in 1846 with the learned
president of Magdalen College, Oxford, Dr. Martin Joseph Routh, then
aged ninety-one. He had called upon him for advice as to the best way
of pursuing his theological studies.
"I think, sir," said Dr. Routh, "were I you, sir--that I would--first
of all--read the--the Gospel according to St. Matthew." Here he
paused. "And after I had read the Gospel according to St. Matthew--I
would--were I you, sir--go on to read--the Gospel according to
St.--Mark."
"I looked at him," says Dean Burgon, "anxiously, to see whether he
was serious. One glance was enough. He was giving me, but at a very
slow rate, the outline of my future course."
"Here was a theologian of ninety-one," says the narrator of this
incident, "who, after surveying the entire field of sacred science,
had come back to the starting point, and had nothing better to advise
me to read than--the Gospel!" And thus he kept on until he had
mentioned all the books of the New Testament. Sad, however, that the
story should have been spoiled by his not beginning at Genesis!
[Sidenote: Lightening Labour]
Words fail me to express the blessing that reading has been to
me--strengthening my conviction as to the integrity and plenary
inspiration of the whole Book, enlarging my mental vision as to the
divine plan along the line of dispensational truth, purifying my life
and lightening my labours in the ministry until that which before had
often been a burden and weariness to the flesh, became a continual
joy and delight.
To speak of this last-named matter a little further. The claims on a
city pastor in these days are enough to break down the strongest men,
especially when their pulpit preparation involves the production of
two orations or finished theses each week for which they must "read
up in systematic treatises, philosophic disquisitions, works of
literature, magazine articles and what not, drawing upon their
ingenuity of invention and fertility of imagination all the time in
order to be original, striking, elegant and fresh." But when they
come to know their Bible, and get imbued with its lore and anointed
by the Spirit through whom it speaks, "sermonising" will give place
to preaching--the preaching that God bids us to preach, the
exposition of His own Word, which is not only much easier to do, but
correspondingly more fruitful in spiritual results. And, indeed, it
is the kind of preaching that people want to hear--all kinds of
people, the converted and the unconverted, the rich and the poor. A
wide experience convinces me of this. Here is the minister's field,
his specialty, his throne. He may not be a master in other things; he
may and should be a master in this. The really great preachers
to-day, the MacLarens, the Torreys, the Campbell Morgans, are Bible
expounders. George Whitefield, in Boston, had a congregation of two
thousand people at six o'clock in the morning to hear him "expound
the Bible." The people trod on Jesus to hear the Word of God, and if
pastors only knew it, it is the way to get and to hold the people
still.
[Sidenote: D. L. Moody and the International Bible Classes]
My experience in the premises soon began to be that of others. Some
theological students under my care at the time undertook the mastery
of the English Bible in the same way and with the same blessing. Then
the work began to broaden, and God's further purpose to reveal
itself. Such Bible institutes as those already spoken of, organised
for the purpose of training Christian young men and women as
evangelists, pastors' helpers, missionaries and gospel workers
generally, were in need of some simple, yet practical, method of
putting their students in possession of the facts of the Word of God
for use among the people with whom they had to deal, and God had been
making ready to supply their need. But out of these institutes again
have grown those large interdenominational Bible classes which have
become a feature of our church life in different parts of the
country. Their origin is traceable, like that of so many other good
things of the kind, to the suggestion and support of the late D. L.
Moody. One summer, while conducting a special course of Bible study
in the Chicago Institute, he said to the writer: "If this synthetic
method of teaching the Bible is so desirable for and popular with our
day classes, why would it not take equally well with the masses of
the people on a large scale? If I arrange for a mass meeting in the
Chicago Avenue Church, will you speak to the people on 'How to Master
the English Bible' and let us see what will come of it?" The
suggestion being acted upon, as a result about four hundred persons
out of some one thousand present that evening resolved themselves into
a union Bible class for the synthetic study of the Bible under the
leadership of Mr. William R. Newell, then assistant superintendent
of the Institute. This class continued to meet regularly once a week
with unabated interest throughout the whole of that fall and winter,
and the next year had multiplied into five classes held in different
parts of the city, on different evenings of the week, but under the
same teacher, and with an aggregate membership of over four thousand.
The year following, this had increased to over five thousand, two or
three of the classes averaging separately an attendance of twelve
hundred to fifteen hundred. Since that time several similar classes
have attained a membership approaching two thousand, and one, in
Toronto, to nearly four thousand. At the time of this writing, in the
heat of the summer, such a class is being held weekly in Chicago.
From Chicago the work spread in other cities of the East and Middle
West, and under other teachers. Classes for briefer periods have been
carried on in Canada and Great Britain. A religious weekly organised
a class to be conducted through its columns, enrolling tens of
thousands in its membership, and through its influence many pastors,
Y.M.C.A. and Y.W.C.A. workers have instituted classes in their own
fields which have, in turn, multiplied the interest in the popular
study of the English Bible in increasing ratio.
EXPLANATION OF THE METHOD