IT is particularly important to encourage Christians, especially those young in the faith, to a constant and prayerful study of Scripture. No amount of teaching in the assemblies of believers, good and valuable though it be in its place, can make up for private study and meditation on God’s Word. Yet one has found by experience, and one has heard it remarked over and over again by others, how many things will absorb the time we should give to the reading of Scripture. Business, various duties and engagements, it may be even the reading of good books, a thousand and one things come in to turn the Lord’s people aside from the reading of Scripture.
Now, even if the time which some who are very much occupied can give to Bible study be necessarily short, it is nevertheless a great encouragement to know that God can and does make up what such might miss, as compared with others who have more leisure. He can feed the soul from His Word, and He does in every case where there is diligence and earnestness. He satisfies the longing soul, and fills the hungry soul with good things. We need daily supplies; the manna must be gathered fresh every day — it must be sought for early before the work of the day comes on. We have to combat enemies, and we need to be strengthened and equipped.
To go forward in our own strength is sure to lead to failure, we want power and wisdom from above. What untold value there is in a little time spent in quiet meditation on the Word of God!
We have a most instructive example in the case of Joshua. He was just about to fight the battles of the Lord, and he was not only encouraged to be strong and of a good courage, but the book of the law was not to depart out of his mouth, and he was to meditate therein day and night.
Our blessed Lord Himself is the perfect example in this as in all else. We find Him using the little phrase “It is written” on some fourteen or fifteen different occasions. At the very outset of His ministry, when confronted with the power and subtlety of Satan, He met and overcame him with the simple word “It is written.” This was enough for Him. He would not turn the stone into bread, although He had the power to do so — would not act without a command from God. No craft, no seductive power of the enemy could induce Him for one moment to leave the place of obedience to God and dependence on His will as expressed in the written Word. He answers Satan simply from the book of Deuteronomy, which contained the instructions given by God through Moses for the guidance of the godly man when he should have entered the land of promise. When Satan misapplied Scripture, our Lord answered him again by Scripture; and Satan, failing to get any vantage-point against the One who was governed absolutely by the Word of God, departed from Him for a season. The Lord did not meet Satan by using His Godhead power, but by the written Word, and He is therefore a most precious example for us.
As we read through the Gospels, we find that the Lord Jesus put all Honor on the Scriptures. He fully owned the divinely inspired character of the Old Testament. For example, when quoting Psalms 110, He introduced the quotation with the words, “David himself said by the Holy Ghost” (Matt. 12:3636But I say unto you, That every idle word that men shall speak, they shall give account thereof in the day of judgment. (Matthew 12:36)). The Holy Spirit had inspired David many hundreds of years before to record the fact that the Messiah would be David’s Lord, as well as David’s son. The scribes were right in believing that He was David’s son, but they were unable to understand how he could be also David’s Lord, being ignorant of the glory of His Person as both God and man. But all this — so incomprehensible to man — had been revealed beforehand by inspiration in the Scriptures of truth.
“He beheld them and said, What is this then that is written?”
They had the Scriptures, and they ought to have known what was so plainly taught in them.
(To be continued.)