THE BUILDER JULY 1919
THE WORD OF GOD
BY BRO. JOSEPH FORT NEWTON, ENGLAND

Many are they who ask us for a Masonic interpretation of the Book
of the Sacred Law but not often are we able to refer them to
anything so well put as the following; such a treatment of the
Bible is one that every Mason will find helpful, be he Christian,
Jew, or what not. As to the author, there is no need to introduce
him to our readers, for he was THE BUILDER'S first editor and will
remain to the last one of its warmest friends.

"The word of God is living and active." (Heb. iv. 12.)

FROM end to end the Bible is a unity in faith, in spirit, and in
purpose, yet it nowhere speaks of itself as a whole. It is too
wise, too modest, too intent on the great story it has to tell. Nor
does it ever call itself the Word of God. Indeed, it is a striking
fact that in the Bible the name "Word of God" is never once applied
to anything written. No, the Word of God is living, active,
creative, a seed, a fire, a light, a power at once august and
intimate, and no book, nor all the books in the world, can contain
it. Every land, every people, every age hears it, each in its own
tongue, and because there are always listening ears, however few,

One accent of the Holy Ghost
The heedless world has never lost.

The Word of God is eternal. It spoke to man before he had learned
to write; it will still speak when all books are faded and
forgotten. Heaven and earth may pass away, but the Word of God will
not fail of fulfilment. "All flesh is grass, and all the glory of
man as the flower of the grass. The grass withereth and the flower
thereof falleth away, but the Word of God endureth forever." What
God has to say to man, and what at last He actually did say, is
something too great, too wonderful for any human words, even the
most eloquent or searching or patient, ever to tell. It is a Living
Word, not known by pronunciation, but only by incarnation. As it
has been written: "God, who at sundry times and in divers manners
spake in times past unto our fathers by the prophets, hath in these
last days spoken unto us by His Son. The Word was made flesh, and
dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory, full of grace and truth."

WHAT, THEN, IS THE BIBLE ?

It is a record of the God-revealing experiences of the poets,
prophets, and apostles of a noble people, as they learned of God
through long, tragic ages and wrote what they had learned. Not in
writings primarily, but in living history, in actual life, God
shows Himself to men. From the Bible we learn not only the truth
made known in ancient time. but the method by which it was
revealed, and the one is hardly less vital than the other. God
spoke to the people which were of old, as He speaks today, if we
have ears to hear, through life, through facts and events and
actions and persons, through history and reflection, and the Bible
tells us of the life and action, both personal and national, in
which He was revealed. Thus God speaks in the Bible, but He does
not write. Then, as now, it was revelation through experience, and
the value of the Bible is not only that it tells us what men
learned of God in the long ago, but that it helps us to read His
newer Word as it is written in the events and actions of today.

Here lies the answer to these two profound questions: Does God
speak to man today? If so, how? Primarily, men are inspired, not
writings. Wherever a man, by any means soever, learns what reality
is, and what are the laws of the world, he is reading the Word of
God. Often he can decipher only here a line and there a stanza, but
God is speaking to him. Thus, when Job passed through his bitter
trial he learned a new Word of God about suffering, namely, that
suffering is not always punishment; and he was able to utter it in
a drama that has in it the wide spaces of the desert, its lucid
skies, its loneliness and storm. When David was an outcast, a
fugitive hunted and pursued, finding shelter in caves. he learned
that

GOD LIVES IN THE HEART

more than in palaces, and he told in song what he had learned in
sorrow. When the king died and the nation was shaken, and men felt
the insecurity of all things mortal, it was given Isaiah to look
through that event and see One who never dies and a throne that
cannot be shaken; and he made record of his vision. When Jeremiah
was left to stand alone in defiance of the people whom he loved one
of the grandest and most tragic figures in history he made a new
adventure in prayer, and rose above book religion to life religion;
as, later, the Prophet of the Exile discovered, in the dark night
of his sorrow, the Suffering Servant of God walking the dreamy ways
of prophecy.

After this manner the Bible was written, slowly and painfully; not
so much written as wrought out amid the struggle and sorrow of
human life, each page lived before it was written each line, as
Whitman said, wet with human tears. Hence the power that is in it
which passes like fire from heart to heart adown the ages; and
hence, also, the close connection between this Book and the living
and abiding word of God. No other book has such power to comfort
and command. A famous Master of Balliol has told us that we should
"read the Bible as we read any other book"; and that is the surest
way to learn that it is unlike any other book. The Bible is
literature, if by that we mean "the lasting expression in words of
the meaning of life"; but it is something more. It is not art, it
is life. Men feel this to be so. Let a man try to read the Bible as
literature only, and he will find that in the drama which it
unfolds there can be no spectators, no lookers on. Everybody the
reader included is drawn into the action; each must take sides or
make "the great refusal." Something reaches out from its pages and
pulls us into the play of its realities. It is not a fiction of
what life might have been; it is


LIFE ITSELF SPEAKING TO US

Nor is this to disparage literature and its service to the human
spirit. Far from it. How we love to wander in its Chamber of
Imagery, amid forms lovely and haunting, where Homer sings, and
Plato speaks, and Hamlet dies; and there are lines in the great
poets  often, even, in lesser poets which open, in the light of a
flash, a vista half on earth and half in heaven. Literature is
beautiful and benign, free, ideal, and richly rewarding. But the
Bible is more compelling than persuasive. It does not entertain; it
commands. It is too serious, too earnest, too honest to care for
art for the sake of art. Its art is artless, its purpose being to
lay hold of the heart, the conscience, the will, bringing to the
service and solace of man the truth made known in the agony and
bloody sweat of mortal life. When a man tries to read the 51st
Psalm as he reads any other poem, he finds himself face to face
with God and the soul, humbled, subdued, rebuked, exalted. He will
not doubt its inspiration; the sense that he is one with that long-
dead singer will melt his heart, and he will say, if he be wise,
"This thing is of God." Such is the power of the Bible, as unique
as it is searching, and if we let it have its way with us, yielding
our souls to its passion for righteousness, and its sense of the
Eternal Life in Time, it will lead us infallibly in the way
everlasting.

Yes, infallibly. Argument is not needed; the fact proves it. The
Bible grew up out of a religious life, rich, profound, revealing,
and if rightly used and obeyed it will reproduce in us, infallibly,
the kind of life which produced it.

NO OTHER KIND OF INFALLIBILITY

is needed. Strong men, serious men who wish to fight the battle of
character through to something like decency, ask for no surer
token. As the Bible is a Book of Life, so its verity and value are
to be known only in the midst of life. Experience is the final
test. "The word is very nigh unto thee, in thy mouth, and in thy
heart, that thou mayest do it." Texts often tell us their meaning
if we turn them over, and if we invert this text we learn that the
word that is nigh unto us, in our mouth, and in our hearts, is the
Word of God. Evermore the challenge of Jesus, is, If we do, we
shall know. The writers of the Bible did not argue; they obeyed.
They lived before they wrote. They were men of like passions as
ourselves, of like faiths and fears and failings. They wrestled
with reality; they were sorely tried, and their cries of anguish
echo to this day deathless trumpets from the oblivion of olden
time. In weakness they were made strong; in darkness they saw "the
brightness on the other side of life"; in death they were not
dismayed. They show us in actual life, in outward experience and
inward realisation, how the victory is won how truth is learned by
living.

Here, in this wise and faithful Book, is the very stuff of life
itself; the human realities out of which, not as a theory, but as
a fact, faith in God grows. How many they are! The two characters
of this Book are the Sky and the Dirt. Its story is

THE ROMANCE OF GOD AND MAN

and their eternal life together. Sunrise, sunset, summer, autumn,
winter, calm, storm, birth, marriage, love, laughter, pain, sorrow,
sin, repentance, the broken heart and the open grave these old,
familiar, human things live in the Bible against a background of
Eternity. Those men of old needed guidance as they faced the
mystery of life and realised how many questions remain unanswered.
They needed comfort in sorrow, courage in disappointment, hope in
failure. They needed forgiveness for sin, inspiration in monotony,
and companionship as one by one their friends dropped away, leaving
them to walk alone. Above all they needed light as they looked out
upon the world of their day, so tangled and so troubled, and were
tempted to despair of finding a way out. They found what they
needed in God, and in God alone, and set down in simple words what
they learned of His will, His care, His plans for them and their
duty to Him. God was made known to them in heroic experience, in
sins forgiven, in minds made clear of earthly mists, in hearts
healed of the old hurt of life that dumb and nameless pain that
throbs at the heart of our being as we march or creep or crowd
through the welter of war, poverty, disease and death.

WHAT ABOUT OUR OWN DAY?

This, at least: God is not the great I was, but the great I am, and
His Word speaks to us today, as of old, through the facts, the
events, the actions, the persons of our time, in actual life, as it
unfolds, in history as it is wrought out in blood and fire and
tears. "This day hath this Scripture been fulfilled in your ears,"
not as some one event was foreshadowed in the imagery of Ezekiel or
the visions of the Apocalypse, but as the same laws of
righteousness which ruled in the past fulfil themselves anew in the
outworking of events in the overthrow of injustice, in the triumph
of right over might, in the deliverance of the poor and the
afflicted. "God is not dumb that He should speak no more." He who
awakened the soul of Israel and lifted Isaiah to a purer vision
through the march of the Assyrian army must have some word to speak
to us in the upheavals and overturnings of our day. Manifestly, it
is a word not only for our individual leading, but for humanity in
its collective life, if we have the insight to read and interpret
it. But who is sufficient for these things ?

How can we read aright the strange, troubled, tragic history of our
own day? Here the Bible is our surest guide, prophet, and friend,
if we would trace the ways of God in "long-lived storm of great
events," since His newer Word must confirm the old, fulfilling
itself in the processes of the years. The mighty prophets were the
first to see that events do not run wild, but are held and guided
by an unseen Hand. Not only one nation, but as their vision
broadened, all nations, all lands, all ages, were seen to be
subject to Divine control; all events of history the march of
armies, the fate of dynasties, the fall of cities are at the
bidding of His will. Assyria was a razor to cut away things
outgrown. Egypt was a pruning hook. There is no fact today, however
appalling, that those watchers of the ways of God did not face.
Then, as now, the hills trembled and the uproar of the people was
like the roaring of the sea, but they saw God in all, through all,
over all. They discerned, now dimly, now clearly, the moral,
social, and spiritual purpose of God in history, and it is thus
that their Book of Vision is a light to our feet in this far-off
age.

