The Bread of Life is sweetest when we are alone with God

By G. H. Knight

In the secret place we need to do far more than speak to God. We need to listen as He speaks to us: and we hear His voice in the Sacred Word, which conveys a message from Him to every one who “has ears to hear.” Do we really prize this book of God as we ought? Do we really know it? Do we treat it as He means it to be treated? Do we make it our souls’ daily food?

Few things are more amazing than the ignorance of this blessed Book that is discoverable in thousands who call themselves by the Christian name. It is no breach of charity to say that there are multitudes in all the Churches who never open their Bibles except once a week in the house of worship, and even there betray by unmistakable signs how ignorant of its contents they are. They would be ashamed to be as ignorant of the newspaper or of the last novel as they are of the Word of God. An allusion to Bible-story has more than once set half of the House of Commons wondering where it came from. We can easily tell, when talking with any one about Divine things, whether he has much converse with the Divine Book or not. Men of the world, keen, well-educated, well-read in current and ancient literature, skilled in many abstruse departments of human research, often make fools of themselves when they talk about spiritual realities; and that simply because they never read the only book that speaks authoritatively about these realities. The Bible is not only a sealed book to them, it is like a dead book altogether.

These days of ours are far less Bible-searching days than former ones, even within our recollection, were. Religious literature, not to speak of secular, has come almost to displace the Bible, even in Christian homes. Family reading of the Bible, and instruction in it, is getting to be a thing of the past; and from this, more than anything else, comes the current laxity of belief and of practice too.

We are sometimes told that we make too much of the Bible: that we worship it too much: and that idolatry of the Bible is as pernicious as idolatry of anything else; and in saying this, it is implied that this is a too common state of things. But where are they, these idolaters? One would like to discover them,   that he might go and live amongst them! For most men seem to make far too little of the Bible instead of too much. They read it too little; they study it too little; they believe it too little; they practice it too little. One would travel a long way to see a real idolater of the Bible; for there are not many of them near at hand!

To many the Bible is merely an antiquarian museum of curiosities; to others merely a storehouse of weapons for controversy. Some read it critically; some read it skeptically; some read it mechanically as if performing a task. How few read it as children in a far country listening to a letter from home! If it is to be of any real use to us, we must take it as God meant it to be taken, as bread for our hunger and water for our thirst, as medicine for our sicknesses and balm for our bruises, as a staff for our weariness, a spur for our indolence, a light for our darkness, a comforter in our sadness, a polestar for our wanderings, a lamp for our feet.

Of all these uses the most essential is the first. We need this Divine Word as the food by which alone our spiritual life can be sustained and grow. Many an enfeebled and diseased condition of body is accounted for simply by “insufficient nourishment”; and all spiritual energy and even vitality depends upon spiritual nutrition. Wherever we see a feeble Christian, we may be sure he is suffering from “lack of bread”: and the two things needed for bodily nutrition are needed also for the nutrition of the soul.

One of these is a personal appropriation of the food. So long as the food remains outside of us-a thing to be looked at and admired, but not tasted it does us no good. It must be taken in. “Thy words were found,” says Jeremiah, “and I did eat them, and they were to me the rejoicing of my heart.” We cannot eat by proxy. Eating must be our own personal food-appropriating act.

Then follows a further process-the incorporation of the food with the substance of the bodily frame. The food converted into flesh and blood reappears in the bright eye, the healthy complexion, the flexible muscle, the firm bone, the well-strung nerves, the active brain: and if the Word of God is really appropriated, it becomes incorporated too, and reappears in “love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance,” and all the other characteristics of a strong and healthy soul.

All of us, without exception, need daily food: the old as well as the young, the strong as well as the weak, the king as well as the beggar (for “the king himself is served by the field”), the philosopher as well as the child. And the act by which life is nourished is as simple in the case of the philosopher as in the case of the child. If the wise man will not stoop to that simple act, he will die as surely as the child who refuses food. And there is no man, however learned or however great, that can keep in spiritual health for a day if he will not nourish himself by the bread that endureth to everlasting life.

But no hasty, indifferent surface-reading of the Divine Book will give any nourishment to the soul. An ancient Bible-lover said, “I will meditate upon Thy statutes.” That is something deeper than merely listening to them. We need to ponder them till they are felt to be distinct personal messages from God: and as Augustine said, comparing the Bible to the water of life, “there are first draughts, and second draughts, and third draughts of this water to be enjoyed.” It is often only the third, and even the fourth, draught that proves how sweet and how refreshing it is. But this “meditation” needs silence. “Only in the sacredness of silence does the soul truly meet with the secret, hiding God,” the God who reveals Himself in the Word, but also veils Himself under it, and can be seen only when the veil is thinned to transparency by that heavenly light that, like the mystic light of the Holy of Holies, shines only in “the secret place of the Most High.”

What “meditation” does can be seen in such glad utterances as these: “Oh! how I love Thy law!”  “It makes me wiser than all my teachers.” “It is sweeter to my taste than the honeycomb.” “It is  better to me than thousands of gold and silver.” And every humble, spirit-taught lover of Scripture still will heartily echo these words. But love for the Word will grow as our experience grows. There is much in it we never see till our own experience of life makes it a living book to us: and just as a letter written in “sympathetic” ink is illegible till exposed to the heat of the fire, many of God’s wonderful messages are never understood till the fire of suffering brings out the message clearly to the eye of faith. Many a man has never known what the Bible can do for him till he has taken it down and read it tearfully on some dark day when the light of his home was gone, and by the fireside there was only an empty chair.

This is our own human experience; but was there ever one who knew the Scriptures better, and more delighted in them than Christ Jesus did? They were more deeply in His heart and oftener on His lips than any other had them before or since. And yet He never possessed a copy of His own! Scarce any child in a Christian home but has a Bible of his own. We have all our favorite copies, and delight to mark them with our private marks, and carry them about with us for constant reference. Christ had no such pocket-Bible to carry about with Him, and yet no one knew it as He did. He had spent many an hour in the synagogues reading the copies that were there, and His holy memory did the rest, till He knew it so well that He never hesitated for a moment in using it either to defeat His foes, or to enlighten His disciples, or to comfort Himself: and it has been well said that “it is peculiarly enjoyable, in reading the Bible, to halt at some text, and know for certain by His quoting it, that out of the very vessel we are raising to our lips He Himself once drank the living water.”

If any one could have dispensed with the Scriptures, He could, but none ever lived upon them more.  He found everywhere in them His own portrait drawn-the Holy One, the humbled One, the rejected One, the crucified yet rising One, the suffering and thereafter glorified One; and He gave Himself to fulfill all that was written of Him there. We too must find our portrait in the Scriptures, the picture of what we are in our deformity and sin, the picture also of what God means us, through His transforming grace, to become: and we have to set ourselves to fulfill the high ideal of a sanctified life that is presented there. When we use the Scriptures as Christ did, they will do for us, what they did for Him.

But for this sanctifying look into the Divine Word we do need the quiet of a silent hour. The full sweetness of the hidden manna can be tasted only when we are alone with God. Reading and pondering it there, we will find that, whether as an instructor in righteousness or as a comforter in sorrow, it has no rival anywhere. All other books at last grow insipid except this. It is the one book we carry into the chamber of the dying and into the home of the bereaved. If it were suddenly taken out of the world altogether, what a dismal void would be left in myriads of broken hearts! What millions of feet would wander into paths of deeper sin than has yet been trod! Knowing that nothing can take its place, our hands may well grasp it tighter every day, and our souls ponder it with fresh delight, till, in the light of God’s secret heaven, we see and understand it all.

[From Chapter XVII of In The Secret Of His Presence, by G. H. Knight, Augustana Book Concern, Rock Island, Illinois, 1932  [Spelling updated - LK].

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