CHAPTER XV

AN EXPANDING BIBLE

"The Bible," with its sixty-six books of so many chapters, so many verses, so many words, has remained the same for something like eighteen hundred years. It will remain the same, doubtless, forever, for though the Spirit of inspiration is not dead, yet no religious subject of prime importance to humanity stands in need of more light than can be obtained by a diligent study and application of the Bible as we have it, under the guidance of that same Holy Spirit. More light may be expected to break forth from the Word of God, but not more light beyond it or beside it.

But "your own Bible" may be expected to, ought to, expand indefinitely, just as your own family, town, nation, may be expected to expand for you, not in outer size, perhaps, but in inner meaning and value.

Not a Dwindling Bible

Not everyone has had the experience of an expanding Bible. To some it has almost seemed to dwindle. In a few cases it has vanished away completely. When we looked at the Holy Scriptures we looked with awe and reverence, almost with dread, as at a vast, awful, majestic landscape of mysterious heights and valleys, a treasurehouse of connected rooms, packed with riches, where the foot might wander farther and farther in while the eye

dazzled itself with riches. "The Book! The Book!" we said with bated breath and finger on our lip.

Then, with a certain degree of superficial familiarity, something of the glamour and the vastness disappeared. We were beginning to number its books and chapters, classify its contents, mark its metes and bounds. The immature mind, when it has classified, begins to despise. Some portions of it grew so familiar that there were no more depths and mysterious treasure-houses remaining. We had explored, we thought, every nook and cranny of these Scripture rooms. Other parts we gave up "; they did not yield any meaning to us; they might or might not be valuable in the abstract, or to others; they contained nothing for us; we let them alone. If you want to know how much your Bible has contracted, not from what it really was in itself, or really was to you, but from what you "traditionally" thought it to be, go over your own particular copy, used for years, and mark the vast stretches that are as clean and bright and unmarred as the day you got the book; it will reveal as accurately and as unmistakably as a stethoscope or skiagraph, the degree in which you are suffering from that wasting spiritual disease known as "contracted Bible."

It is said that there are those who have seen their Bible contract before their eyes under the malign rays of a destructive "criticism." But that is by no means the most prevalent cause of the complaint; it blights those who "would not know criticism if they met it in the street." And, with a steady head, a sound heart, and a living, active faith, there is not much damage that any kind of criticism" can do to your Bible or to you. You might have to change some of your theories about the

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Bible; or you might not; but the Bible itself you will not have to throw away; it is God's own self-evidencing Word. Keep on studying, living, working, walking with Jesus and you will get back every bit of it that you think you have lost.

The normal thing is to have an expanding Bible. No man as yet has had a full-sized one. But he and it ought steadily to grow; and they will grow, together, “with equal pace."

How Expand Your Bible

One very simple secret and method of an expanding Bible is to widen the range of the portion of it with which we are familiar. For one reason or another, bad or good, but mostly bad, there are many whole books of which we individually practically know nothing. When we seek to have " our own Bible," and refuse to let any man pick and choose for us the Bible around which the coats of our mental and spiritual stomachs shall contract and fit themselves, we do well; we must follow our own selective power. But we do well also to remember that our own selective power is very partial, very faulty, very feeble, and we must set ourselves to widen its range, increase its hospitality, and intensify its energy. Spiritually, very likely, we cannot eat but little meat, our stomach is not good." We must get ability to eat more. He who has already discovered Isaiah, Matthew, Romans, First John, because they "appeal to him," will find that he can grow to a very comfortable extent if he will apply himself manfully also to Deuteronomy, Proverbs, Ezekiel, John, and Revelation. Jehovah has nothing to say against that sort of “adding field to field and house to house."

Then, as a friend of mine suggests, in those books with which we consider ourselves really familiar, it is astonishing how few of the chapters we have actually made our own. We know John's Gospel pretty well; that is, we know the first chapter, and the third, and the fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth, seventeenth; but how about the fifth, sixth, eleventh, thirteenth? And so with Romans, Corinthians, and the rest. Any Bible book, the very one you know best, is full of unworked "pockets," or townships, or counties.

Another rich and fruitful Bible growth comes as passages which you had put aside as "hopeless hardheads " gradually yield to treatment with advancing and complete knowledge and more comprehensive and penetrating religious experience. Not all the passages which were once intractable will assuredly become "masterable." Some are not resoluble, perhaps, by any knowledge which will come to us, since the historical setting or allusions are lost, but many others will be explained as you get the bearing of other scriptures, and as your mind digests them more and more, works them over. Still others were hard because you had not arrived at that spiritual experience which enabled you to understand. You had not yet grown sufficiently.

What could Nicodemus know about the New Birth till he had experienced it, or the twelve Ephesian converts about the "gift of the Holy Spirit" before they had received it? How can a child Christian's Biblechild in years or in the Christian life-loom up beside the Bible of one who has walked with the Master through storm and trial and Christian conquest and deepening Christian life through sixty years of communion like that

of John? The secret of an expanding Bible is an expanding Christian.

The Process of Interrelation

The Bible will enlarge and deepen as you relate its different books and its different teachings to each other. A living, functioning whole is much larger than the sum of all its parts. You may know that you have a dead body or a dead engine on your hands when the whole is equal only to the sum of its parts. If one added not a single book, not a single chapter, not a single verse, to his Bible knowledge during one whole year, but did gain a new sense of their various relations, did begin to see the thread, the spinal column, the network of nerves, the vitality that throbs in them, he would have a Bible enough bigger to pay the largest wages for all his work.

The Bible expands, of course, when we set it in the midst of God's beautiful world of nature which illustrates it, and which it makes illustrious. It was not written, as Galileo remarked, "to show us how the heavens go, but to show us how to go to heaven." We cannot expect it to use the latest scientific phrases, or embody the latest scientific theories, for those will be antiquated tomorrow, while the Bible remains, but it is wonderful how the physical pictures of the Testaments, Old and New, and of Jesus' sayings especially, light up for us the pages of the word. While the land and the book and the sky remain, the meaning and glory of it all will glow and grow.

Still more shall we have an expanding Bible as we watch its principles, precepts, and promises exemplified in human life. History is a commentary on the Bible; the Bible is the clew to history. Each grows as they