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In the very first page of the Bible God is revealed in creation. How was His creative work carried out? There is no mention of the strength of His arm or the skill of His hand. Rather, “He spoke, and it was; / He commanded, and it stood” (Psa. 33:9). Nine times in Genesis 1 we have the words And God said. That is why the psalmist says, “By the word of Jehovah the heavens were made, / And all their host, by the breath of His mouth” (33:6). God’s work is accomplished and His power made manifest by His mouth.
The Lord Jesus exemplified this same principle in the Gospels. He healed people by His word, not by working. In the case of the centurion’s servant, the Lord’s word healed him even when he was in another place (Matt. 8:5-13). He also said, “He who hears My word...has eternal life” (John 5:24). We are saved not by the Lord’s working but by His speaking, by His word.
It is not easy to distinguish His word from God Himself. In fact, John 1:1 says, “The Word was God.” We may think that the language of John 1:1 is awkward. When I was young, I thought that John 1:1 should read, “In the beginning was God, and God was manifested as the Word.” But by saying, as John does, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God,” he is exalting the Word as the One who was there first before identifying that Word as God Himself.
In the Gospel of John, this book of life, the first vital point concerning life is the Word. When John describes the incarnation in 1:14, he does not say that God became flesh; he says, “The Word became flesh and tabernacled among us.” That God is called the Word is not a small thing. We cannot separate the Word from God.
Nor can we separate the Word from the Spirit. The Lord said, “The words which I have spoken to you are spirit and are life” (6:63). If His words are spirit, and the Word is God, these three are one.
The whole Bible is the word of God (2 Tim. 3:16). Do not take any word other than the Bible as the word of God; otherwise, you can be led into heresy. Apart from the Bible, you have no sure word of God. Whatever is in the Bible, you may rest assured, is the word of God.
You cannot say from this that the Bible is God, even though the Bible is God’s word, and the Word is God Himself. It would be superstitious to worship the Bible. Pointing your finger at a random verse and taking that verse as your guidance is superstitious. You need to exercise your spirit and your sober mind when you come to the Word, not your finger! In 1923 a brother who lived in the same county as Brother Nee tried to find the Lord’s will by pointing to a verse on a page he opened to at random. The verse was Matthew 27:5, where Judas “went away and hanged himself”! This is not the way to honor the Word. Do not consider that the Bible is God in any material sense; this is a heresy.
But the Bible is more than a secular book. Your sense when you come to this book differs from what you feel when you handle a secular magazine. I have tried to pick up my Bible after having a disagreement with my wife. The sense was there right away that I should not touch that book, should not come to the Lord’s presence, till I had first gone back to put matters right with my wife. Have you ever had such an experience? If you are stubborn and insist on opening the Word anyway, you get nothing from your reading. This book compels you to make restitution to your wife.
How rich is this book in which God has spoken! In it is Christ Himself. If you are asked by a learned professor where Christ is, do not reply that He is in the heavens; that is too far away. Do not say that He is in your spirit; that is too mysterious. The answer is that Christ is in the Bible. If the inquirer truly wants to meet Him, let him read John 1:1-29 over and over. He will surely find Him.
The Life-study messages are rich, but not one of them is as rich as the Bible. The writings of Confucius are of a high quality, with profound philosophical and ethical teachings, but they cannot compare with the Bible. I studied some of those writings when I was young, and I did appreciate them, but once I became familiar with them, there seemed to be not much more to them when I went back to consider them further. The Bible, in contrast, is inexhaustible. We have put out over sixty-five messages on the Gospel of John, yet we could easily have another sixty-five messages without the well running dry. The more we read the Bible, the more riches we discover. After fifty-five years of loving this book, I am still plumbing its depths and enjoying its riches.
It is best if we come to this Word knowing what its central thought is. Whatever part of the Bible we are reading, we should be aware that the basic concept of this Holy Book is that God desires to work Himself into us. Nothing pleases God as much as being one with us. He wants to be us and wants us to be Him. He would like to be our life. Yes, we already have life, but our life is not the real life. It is just a vessel, an empty vessel, to contain God as our real life. God’s desire is that we should be His vessel, containing Him, expressing Him, and living Him out.
Day by day I have the deep conviction within me that I should not live myself out. I am just a vessel with God as my life. In my speaking, if I do not contain, express, and convey Him to you, my words are just vanity. Before I speak, I pray, “Lord, I do not want to speak anything from myself. I want to speak only You. If You are not my speaking, whatever I speak is in vain.” I do believe that in my speaking the Lord’s word is spoken.
When we come to the Bible then, we must not think that we are coming just to the printed page. We need to realize that the Word, God, the Spirit, and the Bible are one. In coming to His Word, we come to Him. His intention is not to teach or correct us; it is rather to work Himself into us.
By what way does God work Himself into us? It is in the same way that we take food into us. By eating different forms of the animal and vegetable life, we get the essential elements we need to sustain our physical life. What we eat may be in the form of apples or cherries, beef or chicken. But it becomes part of us in the form of nutrients that our bodies can assimilate to keep us alive and healthy. What we eat does not stay in the form of an apple or a chicken; it is digested as vitamins, minerals, protein, and other substances that our bodies need.
God Himself is the nourishment we need. Both the animal and vegetable life are used in the Bible to illustrate the riches of His nourishment. Jesus said to His disciples, “I am the bread of life; he who comes to Me shall by no means hunger, and he who believes into Me shall by no means ever thirst” (John 6:35). Here Christ likens Himself to barley and wheat. He is symbolized by the vegetable life.
In this same chapter (John 6) He is also described as being of the animal life: “The bread which I will give is My flesh, given for the life of the world...Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you do not have life in yourselves. He who eats My flesh and drinks My blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up in the last day. For My flesh is true food, and My blood is true drink” (vv. 51-55).
From such verses we can see that God would impart Himself into us as nourishment, that our spiritual being might be constituted. Mere instruction in the Christian life is not sufficient; we must have the genuine food.
In addition to taking Him in as our nourishment, there is another way by which God becomes our constituent. It is by His speaking. In His speaking He breathes out whatever He is. He said, “I am the light of the world; he who follows Me shall by no means walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life” (8:12). Christ is wrought into us as light when He speaks. In His speaking light is conveyed to us. When He said, “I am...the life” (14:6), life was wrapped up with His word. When His word comes and is received, the healing life comes into the receiver. Whenever we receive God’s word, we receive God Himself as well.
The opening words of Hebrews remind us that God has spoken. “God, having spoken of old in many portions and in many ways to the fathers in the prophets, has at the last of these days spoken to us in the Son” (1:1-2). In Old Testament times God spoke to the fathers in many portions and in many ways, but now in this New Testament age God has spoken in the Son. How we thank Him that He is a speaking God, and that His speaking is on this earth, among men!
Just as the apostles spoke in the Son, so our speaking today is the Son’s speaking because we are one with Him and members of His Body. We need to learn to differentiate between the ministry that speaks God into us and one that does not. Whenever we come to a meeting and listen to a proper speaking, God Himself is conveyed to us in that speaking. We may, on the other hand, listen to an eloquent sermon that stirs us up, but once it is over, we have the feeling that nothing remains with us and that we are still the same. A real ministry of God’s speaking results in something of God getting into us. We may disagree with what is said or even reject it, but nonetheless the living God has been spoken into us.
The gospel through which we were saved came from the Bible. It is by this same book that we are saved day by day. If we neglect this book, however wonderful our initial experience of salvation was, we will find that we are not properly saved.
The saints of old have given abundant testimony of how they were saved by the Word. Psalm 119:147 reads, “I anticipated the dawn and cried out; / I hoped in Your words.” The psalmist is saying that he arose before dawn and cried out. All his future, all his living, was bound up with God’s word. Without it, he had no hope.
Consider how much better off we are than the Old Testament saints. Moses did not have even the first five books of the Bible. David’s Bible did not include the prophets. He had neither the sweet book of Isaiah, nor the mysterious Zechariah, nor the marvelous book of Daniel, nor the unveiling book of Ezekiel. We not only have all these; we have the Gospels, the Acts, the Epistles, and Revelation as well.
Do you realize what a precious heritage this is? I remember when I was newly saved how much I treasured the Bible. For me, nothing in the world could compare with it.
Reading this Word will save you. Even if you take just ten minutes in the morning, you will find a supply there. If you lack patience, patience will be your portion. If you are short of love, those ten minutes will supply you with love. As you pray-read the Word, you will be cleansed. Because you are still on this earth living in your flesh, in your natural life, you become contaminated. Without realizing it, you will be cleansed by reading this Word, and God, the very essence of the Word, will be imparted to you. You will become a different person.
This nourishment will sustain us. While I speak, the food that I have eaten is upholding me. I may not have noticed what I was eating, and I may be unaware of the nutrients in the food I ate, but nonetheless that food is going into my bloodstream and supplying me with physical strength and energy. We may not understand the Word that we pray-read, but eventually we shall find that it has been light, life, and even the anointing to us.
If we summarize how this Word benefits us as it nourishes, waters, and sustains us, we can say that it adds God into us. We must not be distracted by teachings about healing or power. In this Word faith is ours, power and authority are ours, and healing is ours.
The outcome of getting into the Word regularly will be a proper Christian life. Then as you come together with the saints, your meetings will display your daily walk. You are not coming together for a performance or to be entertained. You live Christ and feast on His word day by day. Then as you meet with the saints, if you have a hymn, you call it. If you have a prayer, you offer it. If you have a word, you utter it. If you have a message, you give it. The result will be the genuine church life, with the meetings enriched by prayers so full of life, by words so full of light, and by testimonies so full of help. How you meet does not depend on a form but on how you live. Surely you need more in your meetings than the candy of excitement and entertainment. Do not take any extraordinary way. Come back to the Bible and to the simplicity of cleaving to the tree of life. If you live according to His Word, when you meet together, you will experience His blessing.
