Chapter 6 The Speaking Voice
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
John 1:1
An intelligent plain man, untaught in the truths of Christianity, coming upon this text, would likely conclude that John meant to teach that it is the nature of God to speak, to communicate His thoughts to others. And he would be right. A word is a medium by which thoughts are expressed, and the application of the term to the eternal Son leads us to believe that self-expression is inherent in the Godhead, that God is forever seeking to speak Himself out to His creation. The whole Bible supports the idea. God is speaking. Not God spoke, but God is speaking. He is by His nature continuously articulate. He fills the world with His speaking voice. One of the great realities with which we have to deal is the voice of God in His world. The briefest and only satisfying cosmogony is this: For he spoke, and it was done. The why of natural law is the living voice of God immanent in His creation. And this word of God which brought all worlds into being cannot be understood to mean the Bible, for it is not a written or printed word at all, but the expression of the will of God spoken into the structure of all things. This word of God is the breath of God filling the world with living potentiality. The voice of God is the most powerful force in nature; indeed, it is the only force in nature, for all energy is here only because the power-filled Word is being spoken. The Bible is the written word of God, and because it is written, it is confined and limited by the necessities of ink and paper. The voice of God, however, is alive and free as the sovereign God is free. John 6:63, It is the Spirit who gives life, the flesh profits nothing, The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and are life. The life is in the speaking words. God’s word in the Bible can have power only because it corresponds to God’s word in the universe. It is the present voice which makes the written Word all-powerful. Otherwise, it would lie locked in slumber within the covers of a book. We take a low and primitive view of things when we conceive of God at the creation coming into physical contact with things, shaping and fitting and building like a carpenter. The Bible teaches otherwise: Psalm 33:6 – 9, By the word of the LORD the heavens were made, and by the breath of His mouth all their host. For He spoke, and it was done; He commanded, and it stood fast. And By faith we understand that the worlds were prepared by the word of God. Again, we must remember that God is referring here not to His written Word, but to His speaking voice. His world-filling voice is meant, that voice which predates the Bible by uncounted centuries, that voice which has not been silent since the dawn of creation, but is sounding still throughout the far reaches of the universe. Hebrews 4:12, The Word of God is quick and powerful…. In the beginning He spoke to nothing, and it became something. Chaos heard it and became order; darkness heard it and became light. And God said . . . and it was so. These twin phrases, as cause and effect, occur throughout the Genesis story of the creation. The said accounts for the so. The so is the said put into the continuous present. That God is here and that He is speaking – these truths are the backing for all other Bible truths; without them there could be no revelation at all. God did not write a book and send it by messenger to be read at a distance by unaided minds. He spoke a book and lives in His spoken words, constantly speaking His words and causing the power of them to persist across the years. God breathed on clay and it became a man; He breathes on men and they become clay. Psalm 90:3, “Return ye children of men”, was the word spoken at the fall, by which God decreed the death of every man, and no added word has He needed to speak. The sad procession of mankind across the face of the earth from birth to the grave is proof that His original word was enough. We have not given sufficient attention to that deep utterance in the gospel of John 1:19, There was the true Light which, coming into the world, enlightens every man. Shift the punctuation around as we will and the truth is still there: The Word of God affects the hearts of all men as light in the soul. In the hearts of all men the light shines, the Word sounds, and there is no escaping them. Something like this would of necessity be so if God is alive and in His world. And John says that it is so. Even those individuals who have never heard of the Bible have still been preached to with sufficient clarity to remove every excuse from their hearts forever, which show the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience bearing witness and their thoughts alternately accusing or else defending them. Rom 1:20, For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse. This universal voice of God was by the ancient Hebrews often called wisdom, and was said to be everywhere sounding and searching throughout the earth, seeking some response from the sons of men. Proverbs 8 – 5 begins: Does not wisdom call, And understanding lift up her voice? The writer then pictures wisdom as a beautiful woman standing on top of the heights beside the way, where the paths meet. She sounds her voice from every quarter so that no one may miss hearing it. To you, O men, I call, and my voice is to the sons of men. Then she pleads for the simple and the foolish to give ear to her words. It is a spiritual response for which this wisdom of God is pleading, a response which she has always sought and is but rarely able to secure. The tragedy is that our eternal welfare depends upon our hearing, and we have trained our ears not to hear. This universal voice has ever sounded, and it has often troubled men even when they did not understand the source of their fears. Could it be that this voice distilling like a living mist upon the hearts of men has been the undiscovered cause of the troubled conscience and the longing for immortality confessed by millions since the dawn of recorded history? We need not fear to face up to this. The speaking voice is a fact. How men have reacted to it is for any observer to note. When God spoke out of heaven to our Lord, self-centred men who heard it explained it by natural causes: They said, it thundered. This habit of explaining the voice by appeals to natural law is at the very root of modern science. In the living, breathing cosmos, there is a mysterious something, too wonderful, too awful for any mind to understand. The believing man does not claim to understand. He falls to his knees and whispers, “God.” The man of earth kneels also, but not to worship. He kneels to examine, to search, to find the cause and the how of things. Just now we happen to be living in a secular age. Our thought habits are those of the scientist, not those of the worshipper. We are more likely to explain than to adore. “It thundered,” we exclaim, and go our earthly way. But still the voice sounds and searches. The order and life of the world depend upon that voice, but men are mostly too busy or too stubborn to give attention. Every one of us has had experiences which we have not been able to explain: a sudden sense of loneliness, or a feeling of wonder or awe in the face of the universal vastness. Or we have had a fleeting visitation of light like an illumination from some other sun, giving us in a quick flash an assurance that we are from another world, that our origins are divine. The voice of God is a friendly voice. No one need fear to listen to it unless he has already made up his mind to resist it. The blood of Jesus has covered not only the human race but all creation as well. Having made peace through the blood of His cross, whether things on earth or things in heaven. We may safely preach a friendly heaven. The heavens as well as the earth are filled with the good will of Him that dwelt in the bush. The perfect blood of atonement secures this forever. Whoever will listen will hear the speaking heaven. This is definitely not the hour when men take kindly to an exhortation to listen, for listening is not today a part of popular religion. We are at the opposite end of the pole from there. Religion has accepted the monstrous heresy that noise, size, activity, and bluster make a man dear to God. But we may take heart. To a people caught in the tempest of the last great conflict, God says, Psalm 46:10, Be still, and know that I am God, and still He says it, as if He means to tell us that our strength and safety lie not in noise but in silence. It is important that we get still to wait on God. And it is best that we get alone, preferably with our Bible outspread before us. Then if we will, we may draw near to God and begin to hear Him speak to us in our hearts. I think that for the average person the progression will be something like this: First a sound as of a presence walking in the garden. Then a voice, more intelligible, but still far from clear. Then the happy moment when the Spirit begins to illuminate the Scriptures, and that which had been only a sound, or at best a voice, now becomes an intelligible word, warm and intimate and clear as the word of a dear friend. Then will come life and light, and best of all, the ability to see and rest in and embrace Jesus Christ as Saviour and Lord and all. The Bible will never be a living book to us until we are convinced that God is articulate in His universe. To jump from a dead, impersonal world to a dogmatic Bible is too much for most people. They may admit that they should accept the Bible as the Word of God, and they may try to think of it as such, but they find it impossible to believe that the words there on the page are actually for them. A man may say, “These words are addressed to me,” and yet in his heart not feel and know that they are. He is the victim of a divided psychology. He tries to think of God as mute everywhere else and vocal only in a book. I believe that much of our religious unbelief is due to a wrong conception of and a wrong feeling for the Scriptures of truth. A silent God suddenly began to speak in a book, and when the book was finished, He lapsed back into silence again forever. Now we read the book as the record of what God said when He was for a brief time in a speaking mood. With notions like that in our heads, how can we believe? The facts are that God is not silent, has never been silent. It is the nature of God to speak. The second person of the Holy Trinity is called the Word. The Bible is the inevitable outcome of God’s continuous speech. It is the infallible declaration of His mind for us, put into our familiar human words. I think a new world will arise out of the religious mists when we approach our Bible with the idea that it is not only a book which was once spoken, but it is also a book which is now speaking. The prophets habitually said, Thus saith the LORD. They meant their hearers to understand that God’s speaking is in the continuous present. We may use the past tense properly to indicate that at a certain time a certain word of God was spoken, but a word of God once spoken continues to be spoken, as a child once born continues to be alive, or a world once created continues to exist. And those are but imperfect illustrations, for children die and worlds burn out, but the Word of our God endures forever. If you would follow on to know the Lord, come at once to the open Bible, expecting it to speak to you. Do not come with the notion that it is a thing which you may push around at your convenience. It is more than a thing; it is a voice, a word, the very Word of the living God.
Prayer
Lord, teach me to listen. The times are noisy and my ears are weary with the thousand raucous sounds which continuously assault them. Give me the spirit of the boy Samuel when he said to thee, “Speak, for thy servant heareth.” Let me hear thee speaking in my heart. Let me get used to the sound of thy voice, that its tones may be familiar when the sounds of earth die away and the only sound will be the music of thy speaking voice. In Jesus’ name, Amen.