Men of Like Passions

Elias was a man subject to like passions as we are, and he prayed earnestly that it might not rain: and it rained not on the earth by the space of three years and six months. JAMES 5:17

If Meyer is remembered for one kind of book above all, it is the Bible biography. Over many years he wrote a whole shelf of them — on Abraham, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Joshua, Samuel, David, Elijah, Jeremiah, John the Baptist, Peter and Paul — and they were read in homes and Bible classes across the world for generations. None of them is yet in the Ochorus library, so this chapter does not quote them; it describes what he was doing in them, and illustrates it from the books we have.

Mirrors, not monuments

Meyer did not write these books as history. He was not much interested in the questions of date and source that occupied the scholars of his day. He wrote them as portraits of the inner life. What he wanted to know about Abraham or Elijah was how God dealt with a real man — his call, his failures, his testing, his growth — and what that meant for the reader. The heroes of Scripture were for him not monuments on pedestals but mirrors, in which ordinary believers could see their own story and learn what God would do with it.

For whatsoever things were written aforetime were written for our learning, that we through patience and comfort of the scriptures might have hope. ROMANS 15:4

That is why James’s remark about Elijah suits his method so well. Elijah was a man of like passions with us. Meyer loved to show the great figures of the Bible in their weakness, because it put their faith within reach. If God could make something of a Jacob, He could make something of us.

Abraham, the pilgrim

The book on Abraham carries the subtitle The Obedience of Faith, and that is the heart of what Meyer saw in him. Abraham went out not knowing where he was going. In Our Daily Walk Meyer calls him the pilgrim of the unseen, and pictures him stepping out on the wide desert and “only learning his course day by day,” like a sailor on an unknown sea who never knows when the coastline will appear.

By faith Abraham, when he was called to go out into a place which he should after receive for an inheritance, obeyed; and he went out, not knowing whither he went. HEBREWS 11:8

This is Meyer’s teaching on guidance in the form of a life. The next step, not the whole road; the cloud followed day by day. And he made the same application every time: the blessing of Abraham is for all who share his faith, and his call is repeated in every believer who leaves the familiar to follow God.

Joseph, the prison and the palace

Joseph was for Meyer the great example of a life shaped by suffering that was not deserved. Sold by his brothers, falsely accused, forgotten in prison, then raised to rule Egypt, Joseph could say at the end that God had meant it all for good. Meyer drew from him the lesson he taught the sorrowing: that God’s hand is in the dark chapters as much as the bright ones. In Our Daily Walk he puts it in a sentence: “God as much sent Joseph to the drudgery and discipline of the prison as to the glory and responsibility of the palace.”

But as for you, ye thought evil against me; but God meant it unto good, to bring to pass, as it is this day, to save much people alive. GENESIS 50:20

Moses, the servant

Meyer called Moses the servant of God. Scripture gives Moses forty obscure years keeping sheep in Midian before his call, and Meyer’s whole teaching on waiting under the cloud suggests why such years are no waste. In The Way Into the Holiest he dwells on another side of Moses: the man who went up the mountain in stages, first with the elders, then with Joshua only, then alone into the cloud, and who was shown there the pattern of the true tabernacle. Moses was the servant because he was first the friend who spoke with God face to face.

By faith he forsook Egypt, not fearing the wrath of the king: for he endured, as seeing him who is invisible. HEBREWS 11:27

Elijah under the juniper

Meyer’s book on Elijah was subtitled The Secret of His Power, and in The Secret of Guidance he points to the prophet’s own words before Ahab, that he stood in the presence of God. But the scene that drew from him one of his kindest remarks was not Carmel but the juniper tree. After the strain of the contest and the flight from Jezebel, Elijah lay down in the desert and asked to die. Meyer notices, in The Secret of Guidance, that God met that request “not with rebuke, but with food and sleep.” Exhaustion is not apostasy, and God knows the difference.

But he himself went a day’s journey into the wilderness, and came and sat down under a juniper tree: and he requested for himself that he might die. 1 KINGS 19:4

Paul, the servant of Jesus Christ

Meyer’s life of Paul carried the subtitle A Servant of Jesus Christ, and he treated the apostle as the supreme example of the surrendered life — the bond-slave who counted all things loss. In Our Daily Walk he follows Paul to Troas, where one door after another had been shut and the little band stood facing the sea, and draws from it his teaching on closed doors and the small opening that leads to a great work. And he recalls how God waited until Paul had given up all confidence in his own strength before He whispered that His grace was sufficient.

And he said unto me, My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness. 2 CORINTHIANS 12:9

Reading him with care

The Bible biographies are warm, vivid and often wise, and their very vividness is their danger. Meyer fills the silences of the text with imagined thoughts, feelings and scenes, and he does it so well that a reader can come away remembering Meyer’s Abraham rather than Moses’s. He sometimes draws spiritual lessons from details that will not bear their weight, and like most devotional writers of his day he reads the stories almost wholly as lessons for the individual soul, with less attention to their place in the great story of redemption. Read his biographies with the Bible chapter open beside them, and let the text correct the portrait wherever they differ.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Choose one of the five figures in this chapter and read his story straight through in Scripture this week.

2. Which of them is most like you — the pilgrim, the prisoner, the servant, the exhausted prophet, or the man with the thorn? Why?

3. Look back over a dark chapter of your own life. Can you say yet, with Joseph, that God meant it for good?

4. If you are exhausted, do not mistake it for spiritual failure. Eat, sleep, and let God meet you as He met Elijah.

5. Get hold of one of Meyer’s Bible biographies and read it alongside the Bible text, noticing where he adds to the story.

A PRAYER

Lord, You made great servants out of men of like passions with me. Make something of me.

Give me Abraham’s obedience, Joseph’s patience, Moses’s hidden years with You, Elijah’s prayer, and Paul’s surrender.

When I lie down under the juniper tree, meet me with bread and sleep rather than rebuke.

And write Your story in my ordinary life, for Your glory. Amen.