“Open thou mine eyes, that I may behold wondrous things out of thy law” (Ps. 119:18).
There is never a week in the year when these valuable words are not made the vehicle of earnest prayer in some Christadelphian meeting or by some eager Bible student.
The evident meaning of them is that without some help from on high (over and above what can be had from books, concordances and one’s own native wit) much of the inner meaning and intrinsic value of Holy Scripture will go undiscovered.
There are few sincere students of the Word of God who have not had the stimulating (and humiliating) experience of reading an extremely familiar Bible passage and suddenly getting a new slant on the instruction it imparts. “Why have I never seen that before? Why have I read these words so many times without realising just what they teach? And the meaning is so obvious! It positively shouts!”
Do these things happen by accident? Or is it God at work on an uphill process — the spiritual regeneration of His servants? Passage after passage demands the second of these answers. The first is atheism.
“Make me to understand the way of thy precepts.” How does God respond to this prayer?
“I will run the way of thy commandments when thou shalt enlarge my heart.”
So it is God’s work to impart affection for His ways.
“Incline my heart unto thy testimonies.” How does God do this?
Simply by putting a Bible into a man’s hand?
“Turn away mine eyes from beholding vanity” (Ps. 119:27, 32, 36, 37).
Again, how?
By the transforming influence of the Bible? But when a man gives himself to steady contemplation of Bible truth, he is not “beholding vanity”, he has already turned away from it. These words describe an earlier stage in the process. What is it that gives him the disposition to seek Bible truth and godliness?
The Psalms have countless prayers for divine help, guidance and control of this kind:
“Create in me a clean heart, 0 God; and renew a right spirit within me.”
“0 Lord, open THOU my lips, and my mouth shall shew forth thy praise” (51:10, 15).
“Set a watch, 0 Lord, before my mouth; keep the door of my lips.”
“Incline not my heart to any evil things” (141:3, 4).
“Cause me to know the way wherein I should walk.”
“Teach me to do thy will…lead me in the land of uprightness” (143: 8, 10).
Between the last two of these citations comes this: “Deliver me, 0 Lord, from mine enemies” (men like Goliath, Saul, Absalom, Ahithophel). Why is it that those who can see God at work in external circumstance for the good of His servants are unwilling to see Him more intimately at work in the vastly more fundamental domain of the human spirit? Which is more important — that a man be saved from a broken leg or from a broken life in Christ?
“Now unto him that is able to keep you from falling.”! (Jude 24).
“The God of peace” can “make you perfect in every good work to do his will, working in you that which is well-pleasing in his sight, through Jesus Christ” (Heb. 13:21). How does He do it? Analysis of the process is often difficult, maybe impossible. But that He does it, somehow, “through Jesus Christ”, is only to be gainsaid by reducing this and many other gracious Scripture to triviality.
There must be no evacuating the meaning of such wonderful assurances: “He is able to do exceeding abundantly[1] above all that we ask or think, according to the power that worketh in us” (Eph. 3:20).
Was Paul’s prayer, “that ye might be filled with the knowledge of his will in all wisdom and spiritual understanding” (Col. 1:9) just a pious hope that his converts would read the Bible, or was he demanding from heaven a special aid that they might read the Bible to good purpose?
And if Holy Scripture is the beginning and end of a man’s salvation, why should Paul pray repeatedly for his Thessalonians that “the Lord make you to increase and abound in love one toward another”, and that He “fulfil all the good pleasure of his goodness, and the work of faith with power” among them? Why his petition that “the Lord direct your hearts into the love of God, and into the patient waiting for Christ” and that He “stablish you, and keep you from evil”, unless he knew not only that it was possible but necessary for God to be ceaselessly at work on the regeneration of His people? Indeed, such is His grace that He even continues the process with those who deny that it ever happens!
To be sure there are times when the grace of God goes in reverse. Hophni and Phinehas “hearkened not unto the voice of their father, because the Lord would slay them” (1 Sam. 2:25). Empty-head Rehoboam forsook good counsel and took a bad decision, because “the cause was from the Lord” (2 Kings 12:15) to split the nation.
These things are hard to understand, but true nevertheless. Only faith is aware of this secret activity of God. The classic example is the experience of Lydia, “whose heart the Lord opened, that she attended unto the things which were spoken by “Paul” (Acts 16:14). Here, indeed, is something to marvel at! She had a Bible. And her instructor was the finest expositor of Scripture in all the world. But, for the conversion of this member of God’s elect, it needed also the opening of her mind (naturally shut) to these holy things.
On a different level Peter had a similar experience without knowing it. When he made his great confession: “Thou art the Christ, the Son of the Living God”, the Lord’s response was: “Flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but my Father which is in heaven” (Matt. 16: 16, 17).
“Peter, what made you say such an astounding thing about this carpenter of Nazareth?”
“I said it, of course, because that’s what I think about him!”
That, for sure, would be Peter’s assessment. But the inner truth was spoken by Jesus. At that moment Peter was under the guidance of an over-ruling divine inspiration, and didn’t know it! Nor did anyone else, except Jesus. Is it just possible that from time to time the same thing happens in the experience of smaller men than Peter?
God at work! Danger?
No, only blessing!
[1] A superb phrase in Greek, of tremendous emphasis.
Study 1: Introduction