Pleasure & Profit in Bible StudyMoody, Dwight Lyman
Religion
Pleasure & Profit in Bible Study
Moody, Dwight Lyman
Bible -- Study and teaching
You ask what you are going to do when you come to a thing you cannot
understand. I thank God there is a height in that Book I do not know
anything about, a depth I have never been able to fathom, and it makes
the Book all the more fascinating. If I could take that Book up and read
it as I can any other book and understand it at one reading, I should
have lost faith in it years ago. It is one of the strongest proofs that
that Book must have come from God, that the acutest men who have dug for
fifty years have laid down their pens and said, "There is a depth we
know nothing of." "No scripture," said Spurgeon, "is exhausted by a
single explanation. The flowers of God's garden bloom, not only double,
but seven-fold: they are continually pouring forth fresh fragrance." A
man came to me with a difficult passage some time ago and said, "Moody,
what do you do with that?" "I do not do anything with it." "How do you
understand it?" "I do not understand it." "How do you explain it?" "I do
not explain it." "What do you do with it?" "I do not do anything." "You
do not believe it, do you?" "Oh, yes, I _believe_ it." There are lots of
things I do not understand, but I believe them. I do not know anything
about higher mathematics, but I believe in them. I do not understand
astronomy, but I believe in astronomy. Can you tell me why the same kind
of food turns into flesh, fish, hair, feathers, hoofs, finger-nails
--according as it is eaten by one animal or another? A man told me a
while ago he could not believe a thing he had never seen. I said,
"Man, did you ever see your brain?"
Dr. Talmage tells the story that one day while he was bothering his
theological professor with questions about the mysteries of the Bible,
the latter turned on him and said: "Mr. Talmage, you will have to let
God know some things you don't."
A man once said to an infidel: "The mysteries of the Bible don't bother
me. I read the Bible as I eat fish. When I am eating fish and come
across a bone. I don't try to swallow it, I lay it aside. And when I am
reading the Bible and come across something I can't understand, I say,
'There is a bone,' and I pass it by. But I don't throw the fish away
because of the bones in it; and I don't throw my Bible away because of a
few passages I can't explain."
Pascal said, "Human knowledge must be understood in order to be loved;
but Divine knowledge must be loved to be understood." That marks the
point of failure of most critics of the Bible. They do not make their
brain the servant of their heart.
CAVILLERS.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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