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Scripture Reading: John 1:1, 14; 1 Cor. 15:45; 2 Tim. 3:16-17; John 6:63; 2 Cor. 3:6
Let us trace together the history of the Word of God.
The Old Testament is made up of thirty-nine books. The first five, which are called the Pentateuch, were written by Moses, as we know. Other books were gradually added. Then, after the return from the Babylonian captivity, further books, like Daniel, Nehemiah, Ezra, Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi were written. Although the date cannot be accurately fixed, from either the fourth or third century B.C. all thirty-nine books were generally recognized by the Jews as their sacred writings. Sometimes, however, the books were grouped together to make a total of twenty-two. In the time of Christ the Old Testament was called the law (John 12:34) and the Scripture (10:35).
The central focus of the Old Testament is the prophecy and the types of Christ. Then Christ Himself came and lived on this earth for thirty-three and a half years. His life was actually a speaking, expressing God Himself as the reality to mankind. His living was more than a model or pattern; it spoke forth God to man. In a sense He was held in the flesh for those years, waiting to be processed from the flesh into another form. After His death by crucifixion He was processed into resurrection. As God, He had taken the step of incarnation to become flesh and was confined in this form until released by crucifixion. Once He was ushered into resurrection, He took a further step and became the life-giving Spirit. The Lord Jesus Christ, as the life-giving Spirit, includes God and divinity; man and humanity; the mingling of these two in incarnation; a pattern of the uplifted human living that can satisfy God’s eternal purpose; His precious, all-inclusive death; and His mysterious, all-transcending resurrection and ascension. This One represents God, man, and all His accomplishments.
Although He is so great, He is as available as the air that we breathe. When we take Him into us, we receive God, the proper humanity, the proper human living, the incarnation, the all-inclusive death, the wonderful resurrection, and the transcendent ascension. By breathing Him in, all His accomplishments become our reality.
It is the New Testament that reveals this to us, though for all these centuries the vision has not been as clear as it is today. How could we know these marvelous truths if the four Gospels had not been written and printed? Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John present a composite picture of this wonderful One, each written from a different side or angle. Without all four, our picture of Him would be incomplete.
The New Testament continues with Acts. In this book we have the record of how Christ was preached, propagated, and reproduced. Without Acts, how could we know that this wonderful person has been propagated into humanity and become the churches?
Without the Epistles from Romans to Jude, how could we know that the churches are His Body, His expression? How could we know how the Christian life and the church life should be?
In Revelation we have the completing of the revelation of Christ and the church. Without this final book, we would not know that the churches today are the lampstands and tomorrow are the New Jerusalem, expressing Him in full.
Without the Word all these things would exist, but they would not be understandable or available to our faculties. God made us not only to drink of the Spirit; He made us with a wonderful mind to understand and grasp, and then to convey to our spirit what the mind understands, so that we might drink of it. He also gave us two eyes so that we could read and a voice so that we could speak. Under God’s sovereignty man has invented writing and printing; this was so that He might reach us. God is abstract and invisible. For us to know Him He arranged the invention of language and designed us to comprehend it. What God has spoken through the centuries has been written down in the Bible. This book is the very embodiment of God, of all that He is and all that He has accomplished. We can read, understand, and accept it.
Every day when we come to this Word, we use our eyes to read it, our mind to understand it, our heart to appreciate it, and our spirit to receive and realize it. The result is that we receive God, Jesus Christ, the Spirit, life, light, love, kindness, humility, and patience, that is, all the divine and human virtues found in Him. Eventually, we ourselves become the embodiment of God, just like the Bible.
Soon after the books of the New Testament had been completed and the apostles had passed from the scene, a new group arose, known as the church fathers. They initiated the study of Christology and became ensnared in debates. The person of Christ is beyond the understanding of our limited mentality. Unresolvable argument was the result of these mental efforts to categorize Him.
The debate on the person of Christ persisted from the end of the first century to the beginning of the fourth. Finally, the emperor Constantine took a hand in the situation. Ambitious to unite all the different factions that made up the Roman Empire, he called a convention at Nicaea to settle these theological debates. This Roman Caesar asserted his authority to end the fighting and to see that a creed was drawn up. In A.D. 325 the Nicene Creed was formed by this council over which Constantine presided.
It was not until A.D. 397, however, that the twenty-seven books of the New Testament were formally recognized by a council that met in Carthage, North Africa. Before this date, seven books of the New Testament, including Hebrews and Revelation, were in question. You can see how incomplete a creed would be with seven of the New Testament books not even regarded as authoritative. The seven Spirits spoken of in Revelation (4:5), for example, are not mentioned in the Nicene Creed.
It was around this time that Catholicism developed. By the end of the sixth century, the Roman Catholic Church and the papacy prevailed. They exercised their authority to forbid the common people to read the Bible, claiming that laymen could not understand it rightly. The result was that the Bible was locked up from the common people, with only the clergy being allowed to study it, and even then only according to the official interpretation.
These ten centuries, when the Bible was hidden, are called the Dark Ages. Without the Word of God shining, mankind was in darkness.
When the Reformation came, under Martin Luther, justification by faith was recovered. The Bible also was unlocked. This was the time when the printing press was invented, thus making the Bible more available. It no longer had to be copied by hand. Thousands of copies came into the hands of the laymen.
Still, however, the Bible was not open. People were free to read it, but they could not understand much of it.
The Bible was opened some three centuries later in the hands of the Plymouth Brethren, under the leadership of J. N. Darby and others. It was the Brethren who came to understand the Old Testament typology and prophecies. They studied, for example, the image in Daniel 2, and by comparing it with history, learned that after the head of gold represented by Nebuchadnezzar and Babylon came the shoulders of Media and Persia. They identified the bronze abdomen as Greece under Alexander the Great. They saw that the two iron legs were the eastern and western branches of the Roman Empire. They realized that the ten toes corresponded to the ten horns of the beast.
But alas! the Brethren fell into the snare of the subtle one. Yes, they opened up the Bible for us, but they fell into the trap of knowledge in letters. They came to care more for the doctrines than for the truth. How, for example, should the Lord’s table be held? With leavened or unleavened bread? With grape juice or wine? With one cup or many? With small pieces of bread or just one loaf? Should it be held morning or evening? Who can participate? Who should distribute the bread and the cup?
All these considerations have no end. They are in the realm of doctrine. They waste time, divide the saints, and create concepts. This is surely not the purpose of the Lord’s table. What is the truth regarding the Lord’s table? It is the Head and the Body and Christ’s death and resurrection. Let us care for these, not for the doctrines regarding the practice.
The same snare accompanied the matter of baptism. Should the water be hot or cold? Fresh water or salt water? Sprinkling or immersion? How many times to immerse? In whose name? All these arguments, arising from the study of doctrines, served only to divide. We must care for the truth of baptism. Baptism means that we are buried, terminated and then resurrected and put into the Triune God.
Do you see the subtle devices of the enemy? First, the Bible was locked; then it was released but not opened. Then it was opened but very much in a doctrinal way. The scholars who researched the Bible fell into the subtle one’s trap, turning unawares from the realm of truth to that of doctrines.
The Lord was forced to turn from the sullied soil of the Western world and go to a heathen land, China. From 1922 He raised up a group of young people. We studied the writings of the church fathers and the spiritual writings from the second century down to the present century. We read the histories and the biographies. The Lord gave us understanding and discernment; the revelation came. We realized that we were standing on the shoulders of all those who had gone before. The Lord showed us what was right and wrong, what was lacking or superfluous.
Now we are here. Whatever we minister is the result of the past two thousand years of church history. We give credit to all those who have preceded us. But by His mercy the Lord has shown us the proper way to open up the Word, not being deficient and not going to excess. I have been studying this book nearly every day since 1925, more than fifty years. I was helped by Brother Nee, and we were helped by many teachers and expositors from the past. I believe that what we put into print is the proper way to understand the Word. It is not too little or too much.
The Lord is now moving in the churches to bring us all back to His Word. Studying the Word is not a simple matter. Either you will be short, or the enemy will push you too far. You could then repeat the history of the Brethren, with their exhausting, divisive, opinion-creating doctrines.
You can be saved from these snares by the books we have made available to you. If you use the Recovery Version with the footnotes and the Life-study messages, you will save much time and be kept on the right track. These are not necessary when you are doing your daily reading of three chapters in the Old Testament and one in the New. But when you are reading for nourishment or planning to study, use the Recovery Version.
We have done the studying for you. Many times I have spent a whole day researching a single word. In spite of my having studied for so many years, there are still cases when I have to delve into the meaning of a certain word. I check the concordance, the lexicons, and the expository books. I look up how the word is translated in the forty or more English versions. There are many interpretations of the same word. It requires much prayer and much discernment to make a final decision as to how to translate that word in our Recovery Version. You can see how much labor is involved.
When you want to study Romans, for example, you simply use the Recovery Version along with the footnotes and Life-studies. This will save you time and keep you from being sidetracked. It will probably be another five years before we finish all the New Testament books. Meanwhile, study the ones we have already printed.
I was happy to hear that some of you have a plan of study. In addition to reading through the Bible every year and studying it with the help of the Recovery Version and Life-study messages, I would encourage you to read the books written by Brother Nee, read the back issues of The Stream magazine, and read the other books that we have published. This is a good program for the young people to follow.
Build up a habit of reading. Be sure that you have all the ministry books in your home. Whenever you have a few minutes, pick up one of the books and read. The English is quite simple, so you can read quite a few pages in a short time. There is no need to study these books; even going over them quickly will benefit you. The same is true of the Life-study messages. Simply read them in a smooth, flowing way; studying them may even be a frustration. As you take a few, spare minutes throughout the day to read even a few pages in a quick way, light will come. This reading is your entertainment; it is far better for you than television.
Everyone of us must be taught and trained to be a spokesman for God. Then we will all be His sent ones, prophesying, evangelizing, and shepherding and teaching. The Lord’s recovery is to deliver us from the clergy-laity system, hierarchy and rank, and all the other traditions of today’s Christianity. Pray about this. Make it your goal to be fresh in this heavenly vision.
