The Old Book

Thy word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path. PSALM 119:105

Moody was not a scholar of the Bible. He could not read Hebrew or Greek, and he never pretended to weigh the arguments of the critics who, in his later years, were beginning to unsettle the churches. But he was a man of one book, and he read it with a hunger that shamed many who knew far more about it. He called it, with affection, the old Book, and he wanted every Christian to read it for himself.

The book that came alive

In the chapter of The Way to God called Words of Counsel, Moody describes how the Bible changed for him. He remembered one night when it was the driest and darkest book in the world. The next day it was entirely different; he felt he had been given the key. The difference, he says, was that he had been born of the Spirit. But he adds a searching sentence: before he knew anything of the mind of God, he had to give up his sin.

If any man will do his will, he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God, or whether I speak of myself. JOHN 7:17

This was Moody’s answer to many honest sceptics. God does not reveal His secrets to those who are determined to keep their sins. But if a man is willing to turn from sin, he will be surprised, Moody says, at how the light comes in. “I believe God meets every soul on the spot of self-surrender.”

The secret of the LORD is with them that fear him; and he will shew them his covenant. PSALM 25:14

Faith comes by hearing

The Bible was central to Moody’s gospel because it is where faith comes from. He sent anxious people not into their feelings but into the Word. In the enquiry room he was always turning to a verse: for the man who said he had no strength, Romans 5:6; for the one who said he could not see, the promise that Christ is the light of the world; for the one afraid he would not hold out, Psalm 121. It is dangerous, he wrote, for seekers to lean on other people’s experiences. The best thing for the anxious is to go straight to the Word of God.

For ever, O LORD, thy word is settled in heaven. PSALM 119:89

He applied the same rule to himself. In The Right Kind of Faith he says that we are not to put our faith in any man, not even a prophet, if what he says is contrary to the word of God. “Let us cling to the word of God, and have faith in God.”

What he did not understand

Moody was refreshingly honest about the parts of the Bible he could not explain. When he was first converted, he says in The Way to God, he thought he had to defend the whole Bible from beginning to end against all comers, until a Boston unbeliever demolished all his arguments at once. He learned from it. “There are many things in the Word of God that I do not profess to understand.” When he was asked what he did with them, he said he believed them. He compared those who start with the hard passages to people who begin eating a fish by picking the bones. Leave the bones, he says, until you have light on them, and feed on what is plain.

The secret things belong unto the LORD our God: but those things which are revealed belong unto us and to our children for ever, that we may do all the words of this law. DEUTERONOMY 29:29

There is great wisdom here. Many people never read the Bible because they cannot get past the first difficulty. Moody’s counsel is to read what you understand, obey it, and trust that the rest will become clearer. He said that things which had been dark to him five years before had since been flooded with light, and that he expected to go on discovering new things about God throughout eternity.

Taking the Bible whole

Moody took the Bible as God’s word from Genesis to Revelation, and he was not ashamed of it. In his sermon on Noah he says that if he gives up the ark he will give up the whole Bible, because Christ Himself set His seal to the story of the flood.

But as the days of Noe were, so shall also the coming of the Son of man be. MATTHEW 24:37

He was persuaded that once a man begins to pick the Bible to pieces, it does not take him long to tear it all to pieces. “I pity any man that is picking the old Book to pieces.”

This is the place for honest qualification. Moody’s instinct was right: Christ did treat the Old Testament as the word of God, and a Christian cannot simply set aside what his Lord received. But the argument that questioning one detail must lead to throwing away the whole can become a way of refusing to think. Some believing scholars in his own day wrestled carefully with hard questions of history and interpretation without losing their faith, and Moody, with his gift for friendship, invited some of them to Northfield. The better response to hard questions is not to stop asking them but to ask them humbly, on our knees, with the Book open, as Moody himself did with the passages he could not yet explain.

Every Christian a reader

The practical heart of Moody’s teaching on Scripture is that it belongs to ordinary people. He founded the Northfield conferences largely for Bible teaching, and his school in Chicago to train lay men and women in the Word. In Pleasure and Profit in Bible Study he urges ordinary Christians to study for themselves, a book at a time and a subject at a time, and to mark their Bibles freely. He rose early to read it, and he wanted others to do the same. He had seen too many Christians who lived on sermons and never opened the Book themselves.

Search the scriptures; for in them ye think ye have eternal life: and they are they which testify of me. JOHN 5:39

That verse gives the last word on Moody’s view of the Bible. He did not love it as a monument. He loved it because it spoke of Christ. The old Book was precious to him because it was the place where he met his Saviour, and where he sent everyone else to meet Him too.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Is there a sin you are holding that may be keeping the Bible dark to you? Moody found the light came when he gave his up.

2. Choose one book of the Bible to read through this month, a chapter a day, with a pencil in hand.

3. Write down one passage you do not understand. Leave the bones for now, and feed on what is plain around it.

4. The next time you are anxious, go to a verse before you go to a friend. Keep a short list of promises to hand.

5. Read Words of Counsel in The Way to God, in the Ochorus library.

A PRAYER

Lord, thank You for Your word, settled in heaven and given to ordinary people like me.

Forgive me for living on other people’s experiences and leaving the Book closed.

Where it is dark to me, show me if there is anything I must give up; where I do not understand, teach me to trust and wait.

Open my eyes to see Christ on every page, and let me meet Him there each morning. Amen.