THE Word of God is the sword of the Spirit, and by this weapon God overcomes the enemies of the Truth, and subdues men to Himself. A sword is absolutely uncompromising, and the sword of the Spirit, by the essence of its character, can never be changed. It will never become a plowshare or a pruning-hook in the domain of sin, to cultivate the growths of unbelief. This sword, the faithful soldier of the Lord Jesus Christ is bidden to take and to use in his warfare for God, both for defense and attack. And it is well to remember that it is the only weapon of offense granted to him by God.
A prime characteristic of “the Word of God "is that it is" living." The words of the most eloquent of men, which moved multitudes to action, after a few years lie dead upon the shelves of libraries, but the Word of God is ever a living Word. Today it is as full of life as it was when first it was given to man. The Lord Jesus says," The words that I speak unto you, they are spirit and they are life." : His words differed absolutely from the lifeless words of tradition of the Pharisees. The word of tradition too generally deals with a dead past, and seeks to enwrap the eager life of the present day in the shroud of bygone centuries, and to encase the mind of man today in the habit of antiquity. It sanctifies antiquity because it is past and gone, not because antiquity is truth. The Word of God deals with man today. It is truth. It is sharper than any two-edged sword, and, living and energetic as it is, it divides asunder soul and spirit, and discerns the thoughts and intents of the human heart. Man's innermost being is laid bare by it, and he finds himself in the presence of God, before whose eyes all things are naked and opened.
These essential qualities of the Word explain why it is that in a time of spiritual declension the man of God is thus exhorted: "Preach the Word; be instant in season, out of season; reprove, rebuke, exhort with all longsuffering and doctrine." And in our own day, if the "man of God" would observe the apostle's exhortation to Timothy, and insist upon the eternal truths of God, the lives of men would respond to the testimony. We never lift men up by descending to a low moral level, and thus the fashionable descent into religious amusements, or into the habits of tradition, instead of bringing men up to God, merely brings the messengers of God down to the level of caterers for public taste, or to that of bondsmen of a bygone age.
The personal and individual dealing of the Word of God with man is another essential of its character, and one upon which it is well to enlarge. By it man comes into direct dealing with God, and direct responsibility to God. By the Scriptures, God Himself speaks personally to man, and requires men individually to listen to Him and to obey Him. The notion that a man may entrust his spiritual concerns to a human religious authority does not find a place in the Scriptures; on the contrary, God by the Scriptures enjoins men to search the Scriptures, and every man who listens to God and obeys Him is exalted morally and spiritually, while all who place themselves under human control in religion are spiritually and morally debased.
When addressing the religious world Christ said, "Search the Scriptures;" all the Scriptures were to be investigated, to be carefully and painstakingly explored, if Christ would be found in them by the people addressed. And it is remarkable that when a division arose amongst these very religious people shortly afterward because of Christ, those who were against Christ used the very word "search" to maintain their position, by suggesting a limited search. The religious people (the Jews) of Berea stand commended by God upon the page of His Word, for their individual searching of the Scriptures. They had heard the apostle's testimony to Christ, and they pit his words, by an examination of the Scriptures, to the test. They subjected his words daily to the authority of the Scriptures, and tried and judged them— as in this case the word rendered search signifies by the infallible tribunal of the written Word.
Man has a judgment of his own, and he is called by God to use that judgment by the guidance of the Scriptures, and he is not to surrender it to mere human authority, and thus to forego his personal responsibility to his God.
The apostle John enjoins the people of God to examine the spirits, whose witnesses the false prophets were, and after' examination they were to decide as to their character; and he laid down a principle by which these spirits should be tested. We learn, further, that the spirit of truth and the spirit of error should be known by conformity or non-conformity to apostolic teaching. The people of God—the "beloved" whom the apostle addressed—were thus thrown upon "it is written," even as was the case with the elders of Ephesus, who, as the apostle Paul bade them farewell and warned them of the rising up of false teachers, were by him commended to God and the Word of His grace. If we surrender our personal responsibility to search the Scriptures and to act upon their testimony, we have lost personal touch with divine authority. This subjection to our God is quite another thing from our setting ourselves up, each one of us, as judges of God's Word. We shall be careful to be taught by the teachers of God's appointment, and shall not despise any teacher in the Church of God; but none the less shall we hold that the authority over our souls is vested not in the teacher—who is a servant of God—but in God, who is Lord of all.
The men who have been used for God throughout the centuries have been first filled with divine truth. The father of the faithful is a great example of this fact. God communicated to him great and eternal truths, and those truths molded Abraham's life. He believed what God said to him, and he acted accordingly. He did not receive the promises, for he died in faith, but his faith lives on in other lives. Moses, on the other' hand, lived to see actually fulfilled a vast amount of what God had promised to him; but in his case, likewise, the revelation given him of the glory of Jehovah's name, was the propelling force in his energy of action, whether in Egypt or in the wilderness. The unbroken zeal of the Apostle Paul's life was sustained by the majesty and honor of the exalted Christ, with which his soul was filled; and before this glory Judaism and its religion were in his eyes weak and beggarly, and paganism and its philosophy, empty and ignorant. Coming to men used, though not inspired of God, we find the same principle in practice. The man who influences men is himself under the influence of the truth he proclaims. The truth has entered into him by the operation of the Spirit of God, and it comes forth in power by the energy of the Spirit. Luther did not proclaim the doctrine of justification by faith merely as a doctrine, but as part of himself, as part of his spiritual being. When men were mown down under Whitfield's calls to repentance, it was not the theological importance of repentance that moved them, but the sense of their sins and the terrors of the Lord. In our own times we see occasionally kindred work in the souls of men, and that work is produced by God the Spirit using outspoken truth, which truth burns like a fire within the heart of the speaker. Correctness without power does not move souls. It is like setting the clock right which for some cause or other does not "go." We have seen this done time after time by an attendant in an hotel, whose duty it is to see that the clocks there are correctly timed-and before us now stands the lifeless clock pointing its motionless hands to the hour when it was last set right!
The Lord Jesus teaches us how we may be individually used for God. He says, "If any man thirst, let him come unto Me, and drink.... out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water." As we satisfy our souls with Christ, so does He fill us with Himself, and thus the overflowing to satisfy others arises. We obtain the "filling" by coming to' Christ, and the filling being obtained the "flowing" follows.