PROPER NAMES.
Another interesting study is the meaning of proper names. I need hardly remark that every name in the Bible, especially Hebrew names, has a meaning of its own. Notice the difference between Abram (a high father), and Abraham (father of a multitude), and you have a key to his life. Another example is Jacob (supplanter), and Israel (Prince of God). The names of Job’s three daughters were Jemima (a dove), Kezia (cassia), and Keren-happuch (horn of paint). These names signify beauty; so that Job’s leprosy left no taint.
[ CHAPTER XII. ]
Study of Subjects—Love—Sanctification—Faith—Justification—Atonement —Conversion—Heaven—Revivals—Separation—Grace—Prayer—Assurance —God’s Promises.
I FIND some people now and then who boast that they have read the Bible through in so many months. Others read the Bible chapter by chapter, and get through it in a year; but I think it would be almost better to spend a year over one book. If I were going into a court of justice, and wanted to carry the jury with me, I should get every witness I could to testify to the one point on which I wanted to convince the jury. I would not get them to testify to everything, but just to that one thing. And so it should be with the Scriptures.
I took up that word “Love” and I do not know how many weeks I spent in studying the passages in which it occurs, till at last I could not help loving people. I had been feeding so long on Love that I was anxious to do everybody good I came in contact with.
Take Sanctification. I would rather take my concordance and gather passages on sanctification and sit down for four or five days and study them than have men tell me about it.
I suppose that if all the time that I have prayed for Faith was put together, it would be months. I used to say when I was President of the Young Men’s Christian Association in Chicago, “What we want is faith; if we only have faith, we can turn Chicago upside down”—or rather, right side up. I thought that some day faith was going to come down, and strike me like lightning. But faith did not seem to come. One day I read in the tenth chapter of Romans, “Now faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the Word of God.” I had closed my Bible, and prayed for faith. I now opened my Bible, and began to study, and faith has been growing ever since.
Take the doctrine that made Martin Luther such a power, Justification—“The just shall live by faith.” When that thought flashed through Martin Luther’s mind as he was ascending the Scala Santa on his knees (although some people deny the truth of this statement), he rose and went forth to be a power among the nations of the earth. Justification puts a man before God as if he had never sinned; he stands before God like Jesus Christ. Thank God, in Jesus Christ we can be perfect, but there is no perfection out of Him. God looks in His ledger, and says, “Moody, your debts have all been paid by Another; there is nothing against you.”
In New England there is perhaps no doctrine assailed so much as the Atonement. The Atonement is foreshadowed in the garden of Eden; there is the innocent suffering for the guilty, the animals slain for Adam’s sin. We find it in Abraham’s day, in Moses’ day; all through the books of Moses and the prophets. Look at the fifty-third of Isaiah, and at the prophecy of Daniel. Then we come into the Gospels, and Christ says, “I lay down My life that I might take it again. No man taketh it from Me, but I lay it down of Myself.”