Reading with prayer and the Spirit's light

The giver opens the gift

The last lesson said that because the Bible is God's word in human words, we read it with faith and with care. This lesson takes up the first of these, reading with faith. Writing to the church in Corinth about the wisdom of the cross, Paul says that this wisdom was not worked out by human cleverness. The Spirit made it known:

We have not received the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, that we may understand what God has freely given us. … The natural man does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God. For they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually discerned.

1 Corinthians 2:12-14

Paul is not talking about intelligence. Corinth had no shortage of people proud of their wisdom, yet what God did at the cross is received only when the Spirit opens it. The same holds for the Bible. Anyone can read its sentences; for them to come home to us as God's word is the Spirit's work.

The risen Jesus did exactly this. In Jerusalem he spoke to his disciples of all that was written about him in the Law of Moses, the Prophets and the Psalms, and Luke tells us what followed: "Then He opened their minds to understand the Scriptures" (Luke 24:45). He did not hand them a new book; he opened the one they already had. The English minister Matthew Henry comments on this verse: "Even good men need to have their understandings opened. But that we may have right thoughts of Christ, there needs no more than to be made to understand the Scriptures" Matthew Henry, Luke 24:45.

On the night before he died, Jesus made his disciples a promise: "However, when the Spirit of truth comes, He will guide you into all truth" (John 16:13). The promise was first for the apostles in that room, and what they preached and wrote has come down to us. The same Spirit now opens their words to us as we read. The church calls this illumination. Who the Spirit is and what he does belongs to the doctrine course: Who the Holy Spirit is.

Light, not new revelation

The Westminster Confession of the Presbyterian churches first confesses that everything God wills for his glory and for our salvation, faith and life is given in Scripture. Then it goes on:

…unto which nothing at any time is to be added, whether by new revelations of the Spirit, or traditions of men. Nevertheless we acknowledge the inward illumination of the Spirit of God to be necessary for the saving understanding of such things as are revealed in the Word…

ch. 1.6

The two sentences belong together. The Spirit does not add news that Scripture lacks; he lights up what is written. So when something we read strikes us deeply, we test it by what is written. The Spirit who gave the Scriptures and the Spirit who opens them are one and the same, so his light never contradicts his word.

John Calvin, the Reformer of Geneva, taught that even our certainty that Scripture is God's word comes from the Spirit, and he called this the Spirit's inner witness: "The same Spirit, therefore, who spoke by the mouth of the prophets, must penetrate our hearts, in order to convince us that they faithfully delivered the message with which they were divinely entrusted" Institutes 1.7.4. The one who had the word written also brings us to believe it.

Pentecostal and charismatic Christians believe that the Spirit still speaks vividly through the word today, and builds up the church through gifts such as prophecy, and they teach that all of it is to be weighed by Scripture (The Pentecostal and charismatic movements). They stand with other Christians in holding that the Spirit never speaks against Scripture, and that Scripture judges every experience.

Prayer, humility, diligence

Martin Luther, the Reformer of Wittenberg, wrote a preface in 1539 to the collected edition of his German writings. In it he gives three rules for studying Scripture, and says that the whole of Psalm 119 sets them out Luther, Preface to the German Writings. The first is prayer (oratio): do not trust your own reason, but kneel and ask God to give you his Spirit to enlighten you. The second is meditation (meditatio): not in the heart only, but aloud, reading the words again and again and comparing them, to see what the Spirit means by them. The third is trial (tentatio): in the struggles that come to anyone who holds to the word, we learn by experience how true, how sweet, how strong and how comforting it is.

Scripture describes the reader's heart in the same way. Through Isaiah the LORD says: "This is the one I will esteem: he who is humble and contrite in spirit, who trembles at My word" (Isaiah 66:2). And James writes:

Therefore, get rid of all moral filth and every expression of evil, and humbly accept the word planted in you, which can save your souls. Be doers of the word, and not hearers only. Otherwise, you are deceiving yourselves.

James 1:21-22

To accept the word humbly is not to pick out the parts that suit us, but to open ourselves to the word that corrects us. And the word opens further to those who do what it says.

Prayer does not replace the work of searching. The Bereans "received the message with great eagerness and examined the Scriptures every day to see if these teachings were true" (Acts 17:11). Eagerness and care go together, and the Spirit works through the ordinary labour of reading slowly, looking at the context, and asking questions together with the church. So if understanding comes slowly today, do not blame yourself. Understanding is God's gift, not our achievement, and he waits for the one who prays and opens the book again.

Try it

Open Psalm 119 on the map. In the map under the Jesus tab, open Psalms and tap chapter 119: it has a ‘One-line summary’ and ‘Notes’. On the map, each psalm is a chapter. ‘Read Psalms 119’ opens the text; before you read, pray verse 18.

Read verses 17 to 24 aloud, twice. Read slowly and repeat, as Luther meant by meditation. In Notes, write what the psalmist asks for, what he is going through, and what God's word is to him: ‘v. 18: a prayer to see’, ‘v. 23: slandered, yet meditating’.

Turn one verse into a prayer. Choose the verse that reached you and write it as a prayer in your own words; then put the eight verses into a one-line summary. If your own situation meets the psalmist's somewhere, note that too. Luther said that it is in just such places that we learn how true the word is.

Practice