Harold St. John - Chapter 11 - The Bible Student

MEN who shared the platform with Mr. St. John were always amazed at his accurate knowledge of the Book to whose study he devoted a large part of his life. Professor F. F. Bruce writes: “We younger men referred to him as ‘The Maestro,’ but not to his face, as he would have strongly deprecated any attempt to place him on a higher level than those who delighted to sit at his feet. For detailed acquaintance with the text of Scripture he had few equals.”

Mr. G. C. D. Howley comments: “His command of Scripture was seen to full advantage when he was leading a conversational Bible Reading and answering questions. His answers were always immediate, and he would give full measure, pressed down and running over, full and informative beyond the expectation of his hearers.” It was his truly amazing knowledge and the insight into Holy Scripture that caused the late Mr. Fred Mitchell, Home Director of the China Inland Mission, to describe him as “the man who knew his Bible better than anyone else in Britain.” From all parts of the Bible he drew his material and his answers to questions. A classic example is of his being asked for an explanation of the words in Hebrews 9:22, “Almost all things are by the law purged with blood.” He replied immediately that there were half a dozen exceptions, and quoted a list of six instances where blood was not required for purification. On another occasion the lights went out during a large meeting while he was reading a rather obscure passage. While the lighting was being attended to, Mr. St. John went quietly on, reciting the passage from memory.

There was a legend, probably not far from the truth, that he could give the reference for every verse in the Bible; and the children he knew best when he lived at Clarendon School in later years used to love to shoot unexpected texts at him. But they seldom, if ever, succeeded in catching him out, not even the small, golden-haired girl who fixed him with a diminutive forefinger and stated solemnly, “Thy wife shall be a harlot in the city,” and Mr. St. John replied with equal solemnity, “Amos 7:17,” after which both relapsed into a state of mutual admiration and glee; for Mr. St. John had a great weakness for small, golden-haired girls.

But the knowledge was hard won. “Here we come to this dear Book that we’ve learned to love as light,” he once said as he opened a meeting; but that love was the result of countless hours of patient study, self-tuition in Greek and Hebrew, and exhaustive exploration along every channel that might throw new light on some word or verse. One wrote of him, “Behind his outstanding facility of speech was an industry that explains it, though this was so far-reaching that few could grasp it fully. We have in our possession some of his working books, in which every Hebrew or Greek word used in the book he was studying at the time is listed. There would follow separate lists, giving every reference to certain main themes in the book, the leading ideas, and sometimes the minor points also, set out in the same careful detail; the divine names, etc., etc., so that each working book so filled represented the most indefatigable workmanship. Nothing was left to chance or feeling, and his knowledge of Scripture was based upon the most thorough research. We have met him in London sometimes and found him busy at work with technical books beside him, and always his Revised Version Bible at his hand. His reading was wide, and he was versed in the writing of most schools of thought, besides having somehow fitted in the reading of many of the really important contemporary expository or theological works.”

These notes filled thousands of loose-leaved sheets and represented the passion of his life. “Many a night in my youth,” he once told his young hearers, “(though God forbid you should be so foolish) the blaze of the light of Scripture has so grown upon me that I have seen light breaking in the dawn before I could tear myself away from my Bible as the Book poured its treasures out. Many a time long hours have passed chasing one word to its lair, one tense to its perfection. And remember this, man’s life will never be lonely, never be broken, never be wearisome, if he makes friends with Moses and the prophets, and, supremely, with Christ.”

One thing that specially struck Professor Bruce was the way he never reverted to old study. “To the end of his days,” wrote the Professor, “he imposed on himself the discipline of study, and that was one reason for the perennial freshness of his ministry. The gold which he brought forth from the Divine Treasury was always fresh minted.” In his closing years, when he taught Scripture to the girls at Clarendon School, he prepared his lessons with as much conscientious thoroughness as if he were digesting them for the first time. Late in life, when giving a series of lectures on a certain book of the Bible at South Park Chapel, Ilford (perhaps the place where he felt more at home than any other), he confessed to having read through the book in question a hundred times previously.

“Let my younger brethren remember,” he warned them, “that true ministry must rest upon a platform of knowledge only acquired by holy, constant meditation in the Word of God. Kept manna breeds worms. A man who meditates in the Law day and night will always be fresh and thoughtful in his teaching of Christ.”

Like David he could have said, “Oh, how I love Thy Law!” “I have been fifty years a Christian,” he once remarked. “I’ve never suffered five minutes’ boredom in all those years. Every new morning sees something fresh to study.” And indeed he would come out from his room in the early morning, his face radiant like the face of a man who has seen God’s glory. Often the lingering joy of that communion was so great that he must find someone with whom to share it, and would seek out some other member of the family and greet them with, “I’ve had such a wonderful time with the Lord this morning!” Then he would sit down beside them and eagerly point out the verse or passage in question with the suppressed excitement of one who has made some great new discovery.

In one of his editorial articles in The Bible Scholar he explained something of the place that the Bible held in his heart as he saw it in the whole Christian system. The following is an extract from part of the article:

This morning I was reading a compressed report of a conversation between a priest of the Roman Church and an aged Christian named Angelica, who lives in one of the villages of Umbria, in Italy.

She was sitting outside her cottage, reading her Bible, when a passing priest addressed her:

Priest: What is that that you are reading?
Angelica: The Word of God, Sir.
Priest: How do you know it’s God’s Word?
Angelica: (Pointing to the sky) What is that light in the sky?
Priest: Why, the sun of course.
Angelica: How does your Reverence know that it’s the sun?
Priest: Because it gives me light and warmth.
Angelica: I thank you, Sir. That’s exactly how I know that this Book is God’s Word. It gives me light and warmth also.

This neatly worded retort will serve to introduce what I wish to write about, namely, the central place held by Holy Scripture in the Christian system.

I wonder how many of my readers ever sat down and considered what would be the moral and intellectual condition of civilization if the Bible was blotted out from our mental sky; if, after all, it could be shown that our faith was only beautiful myth? In the main, our loss would be threefold: firstly, we should be robbed of the only revelation of God which we possess. It is almost universally admitted that there is no serious rival to the Bible in our days. Scholars have examined the classics of the ancient world and the sacred books of the East, and by men outside and inside the Church they are confessed to be spiritually sterile. The Word of God has spanned the arch of history, and has withstood the shocks and discoveries of centuries. If this Word could fail us, our only idea of God would be that of a kind of super-millionaire, living far away across the Ocean of Eternity, and leaving his starving family to perish upon an unfriendly shore, refusing to send even one gleam of light to mitigate the darkness, or one crumb of bread to satisfy their hunger.

Again, our only fixed standard of morals would have fallen. If we surrender the Scripture, we lose the eternal difference between right and wrong, and every man and nation becomes a law unto itself—Politics and religion can both become merely the manifestations of man’s unfettered spirit, and we sink slowly into the morass beneath our own corruption.

Thirdly, our only hope of salvation is extinguished. Our racial history records an age-long warfare between sin and righteousness; in our dealings with vice and crime we swing between the iron severity of the laws of Draco, the tyrant of Athens, and the soft comfort of the modern penitentiary. Our statesmen feverishly explore every available avenue in search of a specific for our disease, and hope that by better methods of education we shall reach social salvation; but meanwhile the problems of human sin and sorrow stare at us like a row of skulls.

The Bible and the Bible alone holds out to us a final solution for our perplexities. It tells us of a pierced hand strong enough to lift the lowest from his degradation; of wounded feet fleet enough to follow the most wayward feet; and it reveals to us the cleansing stream that flowed from the Cross.

Mr. St. John has been called a man of one Book, but, as has been mentioned, he read widely round his subject. In fact, the range and variety of his reading were amazing, but it was all directed towards the ultimate goal of a better understanding and truer exposition of the Bible. He liked to keep abreast of the broad trend of history and politics, and particularly science: “For a Christian, science is merely the unravelling of the fringe of the Lord’s garment,” he wrote in a letter to a younger man. “Discoveries teach us the materials of which His robes are made; they will lead me to deeper trust in Him, not to doubt His existence.” Yet occasionally he could wax ironical on the subject. “It is now generally believed,” he once said, “that the world will ultimately be destroyed by fire. Strangely enough, a fisherman told us that two thousand years ago; but he didn’t know any science!”

Yet he was strangely uninterested in controversy, and was so loth to press his own views on the ordinary controversial subjects on which orthodox Christians differ, that he was sometimes suspected as not having any. Those who thought this were quite mistaken. His personal attitude to the Second Advent, for instance, is clearly indicated by these words: “I know that for myself I love to draw up the blinds in the morning and say, ‘It may be today,’ and pull them down at night thinking, ‘Perhaps before dawn,’ but I shall be told by men of far deeper spirituality than myself that I’m wrong in this. It matters little. I have not found that divergence in prophetic views dims the eye of faith or hinders a life in the gladness of God.”

He was often, during the last war, asked his views on noncombatism, and he realized that in some assemblies it was becoming a real bone of contention. Certain opening remarks of a talk he gave on the subject, while leaving every man free to follow the dictates of his conscience, brought both parties more or less into line and unity before the question was ever even faced in detail.

“The results of this brief enquiry may be this: you will be in a better position for clear thinking; not necessarily to agree with your brethren, but to see that instead of your sitting on the top of the North Pole and your brother freezing on top of the South Pole, there may possibly be some temperate clime for you both. And the first thing we need to do is to define our terms. I understand that a militarist is a man who delights wholeheartedly in war; but in all the men and women I know there isn’t one militarist—we are all pacifists in that we hate and dread the shadow of war falling on our shores and our homes. The only point in which Christians differ is as to the best means to gain the goal of peace toward which all our faces are set. And this to begin with might perhaps bring us a little nearer, make our faces a little less red and the veins stand out less pronouncedly upon our necks when we discuss these matters.”

For he was a man of far horizons. Seen against the whole, wide perspective of Biblical truth, the controversy in itself often appeared a mere unimportant detail, a matter of opinion, while the atmosphere of ill-will and emotion and heat that it might provoke could cloud the whole of a man’s spiritual life. He had no room for real heresy, but he was slow to apply the term to the convictions of an honest Christian. “The term ‘heresy’ might be applied to such movements as Christian Science,” he affirmed, “provided the speaker were in a very humble frame of mind.”

“The letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life,” and in all Mr St. John’s studies he was searching for two things—never for mere knowledge but, firstly, for a fresh, fairer view of Christ. Knowledge that stops short of this becomes an end in itself, he said, a dangerous stumbling block to any age. To an old friend, Mr. Robert Balloch, he wrote, “We who are constantly thinking of the Scriptures are in danger of becoming mere channels of information from the Book to its hearers. May you and I be kept in simplicity, more engaged with Christ than with sermons or readings.”

And to a group of young people he uttered this solemn warning with regard to their study: “It is not enough for us to be living in the Book, blessed and holy as that Book is. It is always possible to be greatly engaged with the text of Holy Scripture, and even to be considering its meaning, without ever really reaching Christ. So remember, the Bible is never the end in itself. It is not the home of the heart, but it’s the official highway that leads to it. It’s the path by which you reach Christ, and it is that which tells you all you know of Him historically. But tell me, is that all you want? Will a historical Christ satisfy you? Do you want simply to know facts about Him, or to keep company with Christ, to have Him show things to your heart that are in the Bible, but which come fresh from Him to you?

“There is no man in this building who gives more reverence, more honor, more love to this Book than I. But I’m sure that even in the use of it there’s a danger lest we should stop short of reaching the One to whom this Book bears witness. If your mind’s been merely engaged with texts, or you’ve merely been considering passages out of the Bible, you’ve lacked something. You haven’t gone all the way, for all the way is this: that the Lord Jesus Christ should present Himself to you as the only safe Guide on the dangerous road of life and the only way by which you can keep your pathway shining; that is, that the face of Christ should shine upon you, and you should behold as in a mirror the glory of the Lord. The Word, yes; but not the Word only, always the Word with the Spirit. There are scholars who have devoted forty years to the most painstaking study of every preposition and word in the Old Testament, but some of them are still a million leagues away from Christ. But remember, this is the problem: how can youth keep its way shining through a dark world? How can you reach the goal—Christ? By taking heed thereto, by stepping carefully and guiding your life by what your soul is learning of God in the text of Holy Scripture, and by keeping company with Christ as your best Friend—never ceasing until you are on such terms with Him that you talk to Him more intimately than to wife or child, lover or friend, and He talks with you. That does not only mean you have a Bible in your pocket—thank God if you have—but it means that you have Christ in your heart.”

Secondly, Harold St. John never considered any study really worth while unless it affected one’s daily conduct in a practical way. He insisted on this in particular when he studied the prophetic books, where a student may become side-tracked into the pursuit of dispensational truth while neglectful of any immediate practical value. In a series of lectures on the Revelation he emphasized this strongly. “I think this has been a great mistake in the study of dispensational truth: people have taken a passage and found, sometimes with a great deal of ingenuity, that they can fit it into the future, and they are enormously pleased with the discovery. But that never finishes the thing unless you read it again and say, ‘Lord, what has this got for me today?’ The dispensational interpretation of a passage is never its final meaning. The final meaning is always in the court of conscience. A dispensation is temporal, but you must find the eternal meaning. How does it fit into the realm of the soul? How does it answer some need of the heart?

“For God never places any event in the future without anything that saints can enjoy today. To every saint today, if only he has insight and spirituality enough to receive it, God says, ‘You can by faith have everything now that I’m going to give to my saints in the future, and there’s not a single blessing in the Millennium that you cannot enjoy by faith today.’”

And how he strove to impress upon the assemblies, where he visited, the need of systematic Bible teaching, book by book, chapter by chapter, and how he mourned the dying out of this practice in many circles. “We are not doing it as our fathers used to do,” he said in an urgent appeal towards the close of his life. “I remember in my youth how the late William Kelly used to come up to London and deliver his annual series of lectures. He would take perhaps seven lectures on Isaiah, on the captivity books, and each year he would lecture on some broad portion of Scripture. He spent months preparing his lectures, and there would be queues outside the largest hall they could get, and the good man would speak in a very studied, cultured English for over an hour, simply opening up the Word of God. I spoke to some young people in a meeting to which I came not long ago, because I wanted to know what line to take, and I said, ‘When did you last have a series of lectures on the Epistle to the Romans?’ They looked surprised and said, ‘We’ve never had such a thing.’ And I said, ‘When did you last have a series of lectures on the Messianic Psalms or the Song of Solomon?’ And they said, ‘We’ve never heard of such a thing.’ And I shook my head at those elders and wondered what they’d been up to, not feeding the flock properly. Now we understand that the first thing for which an assembly of God stands is that it be a place where the Scriptures are interpreted as God gave them; that is, by chapters, by books, and by sections, not in text preaching. I do not object to text preaching; I’m only saying it’s not the way God gave Scripture; He gave it in big masses, not in texts, and I would say with great deference to my elders, ‘I beseech you that you be exercised that you feed the flock of God. On your bookshelves you have books of lectures delivered by God’s servants forty years ago, but what is the use of them if you are not having any lectures? And the first thing to expect of an assembly is that it be a place for the exposition of the Word, to declare unto us the parable, open the Bible book by book, chapter by chapter, section by section, till our youth is grounded and settled in the Word of God as He gave it.’”

He himself loved to give series of lectures on some book or topic, and there were certain churches who felt that their spiritual growth was partly due to these lectures. His lectures on church life in Wellington, New Zealand, and his annual Bible Studies at South Park Chapel, Seven Kings, certainly had a profound influence on his hearers. One who heard him year by year at South Park wrote: “He loved to guide his hearers into an intensive study of the books of the Bible; he has given as many as sixteen addresses in a month when expounding some book of the Scriptures; and a careful check of available local records revealed that since the year 1910 most of the books of the Bible received detailed attention.”

He sought to inspire every earnest young Christian with this ideal of finding Christ in the Scriptures through painstaking, sanctified study; for he considered it an integral part of the Christian life. He once visited a young Christian university student and examined with pleasure a score of neat notebooks representing months of research in science. After careful examination of these volumes, Mr. St. John said, “Now show me your Bible study books,” to which the young man replied with some embarrassment, “I haven’t any, Sir, and indeed I shouldn’t know how to treat the Bible that way.”

The incident stirred Mr. St. John deeply. Here, as he pointed out, was a young man, able to give hours daily to meticulous, accurate study, yet only occasionally flinging a few fag ends of time to the profoundest subject that can engage the human mind—the study of the Book so marvelous that it cost the death of Christ to make its production possible; so powerful that by it alone we can keep ourselves from the power of the destroyer. And in order to help those who wanted to embark on the adventure of Bible Study he twice at least gave examples of his own method of study, taking the two Epistles, Ephesians and Philemon.

When asked as to commentaries and helps to Bible Study, he wrote the following answer:

“A man who deals with Scripture has a conscience which needs to be trained, a heart which must be warmed, and a will that should be yielded, and, finally, a mind which must be fed.

“For the conscience, none is better than Alexander Whyte—his Lord, Teach Us to Pray and With Mercy and with Judgment will make his readers hot and ashamed. For the heart, Rutherford’s Letters (not his Sermons) and Blaise Pascal’s Thoughts are invaluable. For the education of the will, the Confession of St. Augustine and John Bunyan’s Grace Abounding are simply unpriced.

“For the more routine departments of the brain, I like to have within reach Dr. Orr’s invaluable five volumes, International Standard Bible Encyclopaedia, the three volumes of the Englishman’s Greek and Hebrew Concordance, Andrew Juke’s Types of Genesis, a model of mystical interpretation (waters to swim in, not for paddlers), Westcott on John (English edition) Westcott on Hebrews, but, if his Greek hinders, then Davidson’s small handbook on Hebrews is most thoughtful. For the Acts Rackham in the Westminster Commentary is excellent and full, and, if Stifler’s Acts of the Apostles is obtainable, it will well repay reading several times.

“The best general commentary is the Speaker’s; it is old, but very reliable and scholarly. It may be picked up secondhand.”

When asked at the very end of his life about the dates of the Epistles, he scribbled his own thoughts on the subject from memory in pencil, but added at the bottom of the list, “Several are only approximate, up to fluctuations of 2-3 years. It matters little, as you simply shift all the figures. Bruce is best. Rackham gets tied up with many monks. Stick to Freddie!”

From the first glow of conversion to almost the last day of life, he never lost his appetite for the study of the Bible, and when he could no longer pass on his findings in public addresses, he said quietly, leaning back in bed with the worn old book in his hand, “It is no longer seed for the sower, but it’s wonderful bread for the eater.” And it was this bread that moulded his thoughts and character and made him what he was. He once categorized the direct results of Bible Study as follows:

a. The mental horizon widens. It is impossible to live in an intellectual prison if we are in constant contact with this unique library, in which the world’s finest poetry, deepest philosophy, and noblest literature abound. In Scripture alone do we discover a lucid, trustworthy account of earth’s origin and our own descent; a history of our race, written from the standpoint of its Creator, a final interpretation of the meaning and glory of life; and above all a light, whose rays illumine the far-flung future, enabling us to peer down into the lake of fire as well as to look upwards and count the towers of the city of God. In a sentence, no man can really be called well-educated if he does not know his Bible, nor badly educated if he does.

b. The manners are refined. To breathe the pure air of Holy Writ, to keep company with the holiest and highest of our race, necessarily softens our natural roughness, and we insensibly adopt the court manners of heaven. Some years ago I listened to a brother who while preaching so far forgot himself as to refer to a fellow-servant of Christ in a disparaging way. Later as we walked home together I sensed he was uncomfortable, but I said nothing until he asked me outright what I thought of his performance. ‘Well,’ I replied, ‘I thought you’d been neglecting Paul’s Epistles lately.’ ‘What do you mean?’ said he. I answered, ‘I don’t think that one could be much in the company of such an exquisitely courteous gentleman as the Apostle Paul, without learning not to criticize one’s fellow-Christians.’

c. Bible study feeds and fortifies the faith, thus making it sane and robust. We live in a time when fresh, fancy religions flourish like poison fungi. These systems owe their success to the fact that Christians do not know their Bibles, and are easily caught in the toils. It is the absence of fixed beliefs and spiritual landmarks that make men an easy prey to error.

d. But after all, Scripture is only a road. The home of the heart is God, known and loved as Christ knew and loved Him. If we follow the light, it will lead us to our resting place, which perhaps we had forgotten (Jeremiah 50:6). Here is the glory of Bible Study: that if we learn God’s will, and then do it, we shall grow like God. But its peril is that we rest content with a knowledge of the text and go no further, like travelers who sit down in the road and imagine they have reached the king’s palace.

The Bible became the atmosphere in which he lived and breathed, nor had he any other atmosphere to recommend to those who wanted to grow in grace. “I shall always remember with gratitude your indulgent love to me as a new-born babe in Christ,” wrote a young architect. “I shall never forget your last advice as we parted at the head of the main stairs that Easter—never to neglect the daily reading of the Scriptures, and to take time to meditate upon some portion.”

And Mr. Eric Hutchings, the well-known evangelist, wrote the following testimony: “Mr. Harold St. John has been one of the greatest spiritual influences of my life. It was he above all others who inspired me to get down to a detailed study of the Bible as the Word of God, to seek the plain and obvious meanings of the words, rather than to attempt to see typical meanings, sometimes abstruse and remote, in everything. By this sane, prayerful approach the true typical teaching of Scripture emerged. In other words, he taught me that it was necessary to go to the Scripture first and let the Word of God unfold itself rather than get hold of some dispensational or typical outline and force the interpretation of such a meaning. He stayed with us in Manchester many times during the years 1935-1945, and even when he was not staying with us, we would lunch together once or twice a week to discuss the things of God. My last meeting with him was typical. He boarded the train at Crewe, at the time when the Billy Graham Crusades were on, and came into the compartment where I was. He talked of the evident working of God through Billy Graham, and his true catholicity of spirit, and burden that all should have the Word of God was once again glowingly evident. It was the last time I saw him. . . his face radiant with the glory of God.”