Acting According to What We See

Yesterday we’ve seen how God’s Word is a mirror which shows us our inner being. Someone has summed this up by saying: “Remember that while you are reading your Bible, your Bible is also reading you.”

I can still recall, after the lapse of many years, how vividly I proved this in my own experience. I first began to study the Bible as a sceptic and an unbeliever – with the background of a student and teacher of philosophy. I approached it as being merely one among many systems of philosophy in the world. However, as I continued to study it, I became conscious, even against my own will, of certain strange and deep-seated changes taking place within me. My attitude of intellectual superiority, my sense of self- confidence and self-sufficiency began to crumble.

I had adopted the attitude of the ancient Greek philosopher who said, “Man is the measure of all things.” I had assumed that by my own intellectual and critical faculties I was capable of measuring any book or system of wisdom that I cared to study. But now to my own surprise, as I studied the Bible, even though I could not fully understand it, I became conscious that I was being measured by some standard that was not my own nor that of any human being. Like Belshazzar in the hour of his feast, there seemed to open up before my unwilling eyes the words “You have been weighed in the balances, and found wanting.”

Without any special change of outward circumstance, I became inwardly restless and dissatisfied. Pleasures and activities which had previously attracted and occupied me lost their power to divert or to entertain. I became increasingly conscious of some deep need within my own being which I could neither define nor satisfy. I did not clearly understand it, but through the mirror of His Word, God was showing me the truth concerning my own inner need and emptiness.

After several months this revelation of my need caused me, even in my spiritual ignorance and blindness, to seek God with humility and sincerity. Finding Him in this way, I discovered that He who had thus revealed my need through His written Word was able also to satisfy it completely through the Person of His living Word, the Lord Jesus Christ.

Yes, the Bible is a mirror of the soul. But in this, as in its other operations, the result it produces in us depends to a large extent upon our reaction to it.

In the natural order, when we look in a mirror, we normally do it with the intention of acting upon anything which the mirror may reveal to us. If we see that our hair is untidy, we brush it; if we see that our face is dirty, we wash it; if our clothes are in disorder, we adjust them; if we see the evidence of some infection, we consult the doctor for suitable treatment.

To receive the benefits of the mirror of God’s Word, we must act in a similar way. If the mirror reveals a condition of spiritual uncleanness, we must without delay seek the cleansing which comes to us through the blood of Christ. If the mirror reveals some spiritual infection, we must consult the Great Physician of our souls, the One “who forgives all your iniquities, who heals all your diseases” (Ps. 103:3).

Only by acting practically and without delay upon that which the mirror of God’s Word reveals to us can we receive the forgiveness, cleansing and healing and all the other blessings God has provided for us.