Meat and Bones - Glenn Conjurske

Meat and Bones

by Glenn Conjurske

The excellent biographer of John Newton relates the following occurrence, which took place while Newton was visiting a friend. “This friend was a minister, who affected great accuracy in his discourses; and who, on that Sunday, had nearly occupied an hour in insisting on several laboured and nice distinctions made in his subject. As he had a high estimation of Mr. N.’s judgment, he enquired of him, as they walked home, whether he thought the distinctions just now insisted on were full and judicious. Mr. N. said he thought them not full, as a very important one had been omitted.—-`What can that be?’ said the minister: `for I had taken more than ordinary care to enumerate them fully.’—-`I think not,’ replied Mr. N. `for, when many of your congregation had travelled several miles for a meal, I think you should not have forgotten the important distinction which must ever exist between MEAT and BONES.”’

We much admire this faithful admonition, and believe there is as much need of it in the present day as ever there was. This dealer in bones is too apt a picture of thousands who fill the pulpits all over this land today. Their preaching is intellectual, speculative, and doctrinal, addressed all to the head, with nothing for the heart. It is dry and lifeless. No warmth, no unction, no feeling, no breath of God in it. It may present a little of sound instruction, but presents it in such a way that it can scarcely take root, for there is nothing in it to move or engage the heart.

I believe the deadest, driest, emptiest preaching I ever heard came from a man who had graduated some years before from the Bible institute at which I was then a student. He was then assistant pastor at a large and influential church in the area. He preached about the gospel (no harm in that), and told us—-with a three-point alliterated outline, of course—-that it was a gospel of peace, a gospel of pardon, and a third point which I cannot remember. The only reason I remember any of it is because it was so good an example of such bad preaching. Here was a neat little pile of bones, for it is certain there was no meat on them. Whether the preacher was alive or dead, awake or asleep, was hard to tell, but one thing was certain: he was not called of God to preach. The fact is, he had nothing to say. Nothing even to teach, for I am sure enough that every one of his hearers knew the things which he preached as well as he did.

These homiletical outlines are often served up as intended meals for the people of God, by preachers who have nothing else to offer. I have nothing against a meal of spare ribs, if there is meat on the bones, but some of these ribs are spare indeed, for the preachers know nothing of the difference between meat and bones, and meat is a commodity which they do not possess. They are not taught of God, though they have been well enough taught of men. They have been taught how to get up a sermon, and carry it into the pulpit with them, and dish it up cold and dry, when they have no rivers of living water flowing out from their belly. While I was a student at Bible school I attended a large city church, pastored by a graduate of a prominent seminary which emphasizes what is called “expository preaching.” This man preached through the book of First Thessalonians, with a minute and meticulous alliterated outline of the whole book, every word of it beginning with the letter “P.” Yet there was precious little meat on the bones. The preacher spent much of his time repeating and reviewing this outline, and some of his infatuated hearers avidly penned down every word of it, doubtless supposing their souls were being fed.

And here, indeed, lies one of the great evils in the church of the present day. We have a great multitude of intellectuals who are actually hungry for bones. They relish bones, and congratulate the preachers who feed them with bones. Of spiritual experience they know little, and want less. Their Christianity consists of little else than learning and knowing, or knowing and teaching. Intellectual pabulum just suits them. Give them Greek tenses and Hebrew roots, ancient customs, wire-drawn distinctions, technical definitions, subtle contrasts, fine-spun theories, and they are as happy as bees in clover. I say nothing of the fact that many of those distinctions and definitions are false. Even if true, they are bones, when divorced from the religion of the heart. All is in the mind, while the hearts and souls of the people remain cold and dry and withered and shallow. Meat they care little for.

Yet it is the business of shepherds to feed the sheep, whatever the sheep may want. It seems to be a fact that the sheep have little hunger for spiritual food, but that may be because they have never tasted much of it. The old proverb which says “Appetite comes with eating” is true, and I dare suppose that some of those sheep who have been fed all their lives with dry hay might easily enough be taught to relish green grass, if they but had a shepherd who could lead them to it. But when the pastors are in the same condition as the people, there is little hope of this.

It seems to me that the ministry of the church as a whole is very deficient at this point. Preachers aim generally at the wrong thing in their preaching. Many of them aim primarily to teach—-merely to impart knowledge. They themselves have been “prepared for the ministry” by going to school, the primary (or exclusive) purpose of which was to give them knowledge. They graduate from their course of preparation with a full head and an empty heart, and they enter the ministry with a false idea of what ministry consists of. They themselves have never learned to weep, nor to feel. They may have full heads, but they have no burning hearts. They do not so much as aim to warm the soul, to stir the spirit, to make the heart burn. For this reason they preach primarily from the didactic portions of Scripture—-the doctrinal portions of the New Testament epistles—-while they ignore the rest. The fact is, they do not know what to do with the rest. If they proceed to the historical portions of the Old Testament, it is usually only to extract a few bones, while they leave the meat alone. They extract a few doctrinal proofs from these portions, but have little interest in the human experience—-the vivid portraits of the human heart and soul—-the exquisite delineations of the ways of God—-which lie as nuggets on the ground throughout the Old Testament. All of this is lost upon them. They have no eye for it.

I need not here insist upon the fact that the educational courses by which men are “prepared for the ministry” commonly turn out more dealers in bones than anything else. What I do insist on is that they are powerless to turn out anything more than that. The general content of those courses is almost irrelevant to their aim. Doubtless some knowledge is required to be a good minister of Jesus Christ, but it is a certain fact that two men may know the same things and yet be worlds apart as preachers. One of them turns every bone he touches to meat, while the other turns all the meat to bones. The spirit of the man determines this, and it is certainly not knowledge which will give him depth or warmth or pathos or power.

The manner in which different sorts of men pass through the Scriptures may be likened to a man riding his horse over a range of mountains. The soul of the man is ravished with the view, while the beast beneath him sees nothing but the grass under his feet. What an immense difference, for example, do we find in the Old Testament commentaries of Keil and Delitszch, and the Old Testament Contemplations of Bishop Hall. Hall is nearly all meat, and Keil and Delitszch nearly all bones. We do not say there is no value in the bones—-only that they are nothing to the meat. Yet we live in a generation which prints and reprints and buys and reads and studies Keil and Delitszch, and which scarcely knows that Bishop Hall ever existed. We live, in short, in a generation which relishes bones, and has little taste for meat.

But my readers may wish me to be more specific. By bones I refer in the first place to such things as critical or linguistic studies, such as exercise the mind, but leave the heart unmoved and the conscience untouched. By meat I refer to those things which belong to human experience, and to walking with God. It is not that I hold the bones to be of no value. Not at all. Even the driest of them have some worth in refuting errors and establishing truth. But I have a few things to say of these bones:

First, they are of little value in comparison to the matters which belong to the heart and life.

Next, they become a positive detriment when they begin to occupy too large a place in a man’s thoughts or studies or ministry. A steady diet of these bones is death to the soul and death to the church.

Finally, a very great host of those men who have been of the greatest worth in the cause of Christ have been almost entirely ignorant of those things. I refer to such men as John Bunyan, Peter Cartwright, D. L. Moody, Sam Hadley, and Gipsy Smith.

To this I may add that the Bible has scarcely a word to say along the lines of these things. Yet intellectuals turn the Bible itself into a field of dry bones. The doctrinal and prophetic content of Scripture is made the tool of mere knowledge, or of mere controversy. Thus it is dried and salted to the point that if it can be called meat at all, it is certainly only jerky. A spiritual man and an intellectual man may handle the very same doctrines or portions of Scripture, yet in the hands of the one it is all meat, and in the hands of the other, all bones.

Take the precious book of Genesis. What an inexhaustible supply of food for the heart we find here! What a mine of the knowledge of God—-yea, and of the knowledge of man, and sin, and Satan, and the world. What a wealth of spiritual experience is here. What pictures of the soul of man—-and of woman. Here is meat indeed. But some men have little taste for these things. One man may traverse the book of Genesis, and find “seven kine, fatfleshed and well favoured,” feeding in a meadow. Another man passes through the same book, and finds “seven other kine, poor and very ill favoured and leanfleshed.” One finds “seven ears upon one stalk, rank and good,” while another finds only “seven thin ears, … blasted with the east wind.” The dealers in bones may traverse this precious book in the length of it and the breadth of it, and come out with nothing but bones. A chart of the bygone dispensations! It is bones which they seek, and bones they find. And dead and dry bones at that, for most of them know but little of the marrow of dispensationalism.

Another will traverse the same ground and produce only an analysis of Bible Chronology. Bones. Another may spend ten years studying the precious book, and emerge with nothing more than a few intricate theories of ethnology. Dry bones. A bone or two of this sort here and there may have its use, and we might even find a scrap of meat attached to some of them, but surely it was not for this bone-hunting that God gave us the book of Genesis.

And mere dead bones are not intriguing enough for some. It is fossils they want, and fossils they find. “Creation science” is their first love, and in their hands all the spirituality of the book of Genesis evaporates, and the whole is reduced to a sort of handbook to guide them in their scientific studies. When they traverse the precious book, they do not find the ways of God, nor the soul of man, nor the ways of faith. They have little taste for such things, their minds being occupied rather with “the young earth,” or theories of star-light, or with “the Nephilim,” or the nature and extent of the flood. Bones. They may have most interesting theories as to the meaning of the breaking up of the fountains of the great deep at the coming of the flood, but they know nothing of the breaking up of the fountains of the great deep of the human soul. That is entirely beyond them.

One of the earliest of these “creation science” men, Harry Rimmer, published a book in 1947 entitled Lot’s Wife and the Science of Physics. Lot’s wife! What a theme is she for the tongue of the preacher, the pen of the poet, the tears of the angels! But we wonder what “the science of physics” may have to do with this. We read the book and find a long-drawn-out theory concerning the body-shaped holes in the ruins of Pompei, caused by the leaching away of the salt into which those bodies were turned by the volcanic lava. Lot’s wife, we are told, lagged behind. The distance between her and her husband became greater and greater, till she was swallowed up in the cataclysm, and eventually—-over the course of who knows how many years—-turned by chemical transmutation into salt. And is this all the man can find in Lot’s wife? These are bones indeed. Does to look back mean to lag behind? And did Lot’s wife lag so far behind that she was still in the vicinity of Sodom when Lot and his daughters had entered the city of Zoar? Can a body lying buried in volcanic ash be called a pillar of salt? And who excavated the ruins of Sodom to discover this “pillar of salt,” and to attest that it was indeed Lot’s wife?

We hardly dare dignify such notions with the name of bones. Bones may have some use, but these notions are worse than useless. A dog might gnaw a bone, but who can eat fossils? Yet Rimmer was a good man, who wrote some good things, and at any rate served up his fossils with a little sauce—-a thing which some of his successors have quite forgotten. They give us fossils only, with no food for the soul.

But these fossils may actually do less damage than the dry bones which a great host of preachers habitually serve up to their poor congregations. The fossils are usually served only as a side dish, whereas the dealers in bones usually serve them for the whole meal. They feed their people with nothing else. They know nothing else. Not that their teaching is false—-only that it is dead, dry, and intellectual. There is very much in these bones which is true enough. A great deal of the doctrinal, dispensational, and prophetic teaching which comes from these pulpits is orthodox and unexceptional as far as it goes, but it is bones for all that, for it has little or no connection with the religion of the heart. There is nothing in it to stir the spirit or warm the soul. It feeds the intellect, and no more.

Some years ago I attended for a time a Baptist church, pastored by a well-educated man, whose preaching was dry and empty. An old and uneducated man at the church once said to me, after hearing one of this man’s sermons, “This place ought to be just like a restaurant. People ought to come here hungry, and go away full. But it isn’t so. They come here empty, and they go away empty.”

The people gather on the hillside to enjoy the beauty of the sunset, and the preacher gives them a technical lecture on the size of the sun, its distance from the earth, the manner in which these things are measured, the composition of the atmosphere, the properties of light, and the manner in which it is refracted. They come for food, and he feeds them with air.

It goes without saying that the church stands in need of revival. The revival which we need consists of many things. Among the foremost of them are certainly these, to recognize that orthodoxy is not Christianity, that doctrine is not religion, that knowledge is not wisdom, that heads are not hearts, that intellectualism is not spirituality—-in short, that bones are not meat.

There are some bones which have their uses—-some indeed which are absolutely necessary—-but a diet of bones is death to the church. The teachers of the church have need for some most solemn consideration in the presence of God and eternity, in the presence of sin and death and hell, concerning what is weighty and what is trivial—-what is worth their time and energy, and what is a waste—-what is meat, and what is bones.

Glenn Conjurske