“Surely the Lord is in this place; and I knew it not.”

(Genesis 28:16)

Many years ago, during our family worship one morning, I made an interesting discovery. For several days we had been reading and learning familiar hymns, taking a different hymn each day.  We would read the words, discuss the meaning of the more difficult phrases, and then memorize a stanza. Our family found this an interesting variation of our usual procedure of reading a brief passage of scripture and saying a short prayer.

On that particular morning when I made my new discovery, we had chosen for our hymn study that old familiar one, “Nearer, My God, to Thee.” I must confess that the tune and the words have a funereal flavor for me, perhaps because I always associate it with the sinking of the “Titanic” and the vision of the doomed passengers standing on the listing deck and singing, Nearer, My God, to Thee.

But on that morning it suddenly dawned on my consciousness that the Biblical story of Jacob’s dream at Bethel was the background theme upon which the hymn writer had based his poetry and that we could not understand the hymn until we knew the scripture. When we got out our Bibles and read the Genesis story all those difficult phrases and queer allusions began to take on meaning.  With new understanding we traced the hymn’s words:

             Though like a wanderer, the sun gone down,

             Darkness be over me, my rest a stone,

             Yet in my dreams I’ll be, nearer, my God, to Thee.

 

            There let the way appear, steps up to heaven –

            Angels to beckon me . . . Out of my stony griefs

            Bethel I’ll raise.

While a student studying music in Paris, Albert Schweitzer made a discovery which cleared up the mystery surrounding the Chorales of Johann Sebastian Bach. The most erudite musicians of that day had puzzled long over the enigmatic portions of the Bach Chorales. No one could explain the order and organization of Bach’s great work. Then young Schweitzer came forward with the suggestion that Bach’s Chorales could be understood only when interpreted by the scripture text which had inspired each composition.  When the correct scripture was found, read, and applied to the musical setting, all became clear.

Here is a parable of life for each of us. The symphony of human existence, the music of the years, the solo of personal experiences, can be understood and explained only by finding and studying and applying the proper scriptures. “The Bible, containing as it does the record of the self-disclosure of God and His will for human life, is the only text that can explain our thoughts and our aspirations, our aberrations and our tragedies. When this text is studied the enigma of life’s strange, meaningless music becomes plain, and the nature of our predicament is made clear to us.” (John Mackay, Heritage and Destiny — p. 75 — Macmillan Co. 1943)

Now the great purpose of the work and worship of the Church is to teach the word of God to men and women, boys and girls, so they will be ready and able to apply the right text to the correct experience and so find themselves in harmony with and in beautiful understanding of the eternal purposes of the great conductor. That is what Christian worship, and preaching, and Bible study is all about.

And how is this accomplished? Well, two things almost invariably follow when the Bible is read, learned, and applied to life’s experiences: First, we discover that God is there with us. He’s been there all the time, wherever we were, but we did not know it until our spiritual eyes were opened by His word.

You will remember that in the Genesis story we just read are these words: “And Jacob wakened out of his sleep and he said, ‘Surely the Lord is in this place, and I knew it not.’” That is what worship, Sunday School attendance, and Bible study should always be doing for us — waking us up, out of our dream walking in a world of material unreality, to the world of eternal reality, so that we see God is there, in that very moment of our existence, in that very place where we are. It is not that we should wait until life is about over for us, and we realize that our sun is setting, or our ship is sinking, that we should plead: “Nearer, My God, to Thee”, but that every day by His grace and through the use of His word we should be drawn closer to Him.

Years ago a Christian missionary to China received into the church at a morning worship service a whole Chinese family consisting of a father and mother, the twelve year old son and the six month old son, and the aged grandfather. The minister told the family he would come that afternoon for a private consecration service in their home. When he came the family was assembled in their humble living room. The minister set five candles of varying heights on the window sill, and having slowly lit them, he turned to the twelve year old boy and asked, “Can you tell me what I’ve done?” “Yes, sir, I think I can,” said the bright young lad. “You have lit a candle for each one of us in our family.” “Yes, but can you tell me which candle is for which one?” And in characteristic Chinese respect for the aged, the boy said, “The tallest candle is for grandfather, because he is the oldest and wisest, and the next two larger candles are for mother and father, and the next to the smallest is for me, and the wee, tiny candle is for baby brother.” “No, said the missionary, “the short candle is for grandfather because his life is almost finished, and he has but a little while longer for the light of his life to shine in this world. The next two larger candles are for your mother and father who have reached the midway mark in their lives, and the tallest candles of all are for you and your baby brother who have your life before you to let your light shine for Christ.” How glorious the privilege of parents and grandparents, and friends and Sunday School teachers to light the tall candles with the flame of His spirit.

Leslie Weatherhead, in dedicating one of his books to his mother and sister wrote these words: “To my mother and sister whose bodies were defeated in the battle against pain and disease, but who from the defeat wrested a spiritual victory which challenged and inspired all who knew them, and made glad the heart of God.”

An understanding of the scriptures helps us find God in the most unlikely places. Jacob was in the wilderness, a desert place without a tree in sight, just acres of rocks, no natural beauty to speak to his soul of the Creator, and yet he wakens to cry, “God is in this place and I knew it not.” Jacob was even in an uncongenial spiritual mood for an encounter with God. A fugitive, afraid, having wronged his brother, he fled to this place. If ever there was an unlikely candidate for visions of holy things and companionship with the eternal, Jacob was that man, yet he had a hunger and a need and God came near to him and made Himself known to him.

It may be an unlikely place, dismal, and unpromising of bright adventure, that we may have to pass through, but no place, absolutely no experience is off-limits to God. If His word is known to us and hidden in our hearts, then we can sing the Lord’s song in a strange land, and even if we take the winds of the morning and fly to the uttermost parts of the sea, we shall surely find that He is there and His right hand will guide us.

But there is a second thing which always takes place when scripture is applied correctly to life: not only do we see and know that God is in that place, but we ourselves, as well as the place or experience in which we find ourselves, however unlikely it may seem, are strangely changed.

“Jacob rose and called the name of that place Bethel, or “House of God,” but the name of the city was Luz at first.” (Genesis 28:19) Yes, “in the tradition that came down from Jacob, this neighborhood was no longer merely what men had called it, it was what God had made it, the House of God.” (Interpreters’ Bible)

How often in human history the ordinary place and the ordinary person have been strangely changed in name and nature because of an encounter with God. Jerusalem was at first just the rocky hilltop where Aranuah, the Jebusite, had his threshing floor, but it became the Holy City where the Temple was. The Bedford Jail was transformed from a prison for criminals to a religious shrine because God’s encounter with John Bunyan in that stinking hole inspired him to strike off his immortal Pilgrim’s Progress.

“Everywhere it is possible for Luz to become Bethel. There is a story of two simple folk who lived in a fisherman’s cottage in a village by the sea. When the man came home at the end of the day, the wife said to him, ‘The new minister came here today and asked a question I couldn’t answer.’ ‘What did he ask?’ ‘He asked me,’ she said, ‘Does Jesus Christ live here?’ ‘And what did you say?’ the husband demanded. ‘I didn’t know what to say.’ ‘Well, why didn’t you tell him we are respectable people?’ ‘But he didn’t ask that.’ ‘Well, why didn’t you tell him we go to church when we feel like it?’ ‘But he didn’t ask me that either.’ ‘Well, why didn’t you tell him we’re born again Christians?’ ‘But he didn’t ask me that. What he asked me was, ‘Does Jesus Christ live here?’  It is a question which goes far.”  (Interpreters’ Bible — Vol. I,  p. 694)

For, as Florence Allshorn says, “Christianity is quite simply a matter of friendship with Jesus Christ. It overrides every other experience in you in proportion to the degree in which Christ is that inner and unseen companion. Even in the exigencies of work, one does not forget a loved friend — certainly not the companion one works with. It is a condition of complete simplicity — costing nothing less than everything. What are we going to do about all the wrong things that dishonor Christ? Are we just going to sit around, say what a pity it is, and pass the stories on?  Love that is rooted in holiness cannot tolerate an ingrafting of sin.”  (The Notebooks of Florence Allshorn — Northumberland Press, Great Britain, 1957, p.45)

Out of all the regrettable agony we’ve gone through in racial strife, and are still suffering, there came this telling incident: a roving band of teenage white boys caught a black boy delivering an order from a store. They knocked the black boy from his bike and began beating him up.  Breaking away from his tormentors, the boy ran up the front steps of the first house he could get to and banged on the door. The white lady who lived there came and let him in. Then the gang began to tear to pieces the delivery boy’s bike. When they had finished with that, they called out to the woman to send the little black boy out to them, threatening to burn down her house if she did not do what they said. The lady appeared at the door and the mob yelled at her, “What are you, anyway, a nigger lover?” “No,” said the lady, “I’m a Christian.”

When God’s word, contained in the scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, is reverenced, learned, and applied to human life, something usually happens. The mysterious, inscrutable, difficult song of life becomes clearer, its meaning plainer. People discover, because their eyes are mysteriously opened, that God is Himself there with them in His world, though they were not conscious of His presence before, and mystery of mysteries, the place where they are, and they themselves, are wondrously changed.

Let the word of our God in us and in our world prevail!