My Two Great Windfalls of Understanding - Glenn Conjurske

My Two Great Windfalls of Understanding

by Glenn Conjurske

Solomon admonishes us, in Proverbs 4:7, “Wisdom is the principal thing; therefore get wisdom: and with all thy getting get understanding.” This I have made it my business to do for more than a third of a century.
I have inclined my ear to wisdom, and applied my heart to understanding. I have indeed sought her as silver, and searched for her as for hid treasures. I have compassed the land in quest of the best of books, denied myself many other things to buy them, labored day and night to read and digest them, and diligently sought for wisdom by prayer, by meditation, by observation, and by inquiry. I have studied God and studied man, studied sin and studied holiness, studied the world and the devil, studied what is, and what has been, and what will be, and what ought to be. And I may say without ostentation—-though painfully conscious of how little I know—-that God has blessed my endeavors, and the result of this course has been a gradual increase of understanding, so that I now have a good stock of the commodity which I have sought, the same as the man has who has spent the past thirty-five years in the pursuit of mammon—-though I have as little of money as he probably has of wisdom.

But in addition to the gradual increase of understanding which is the natural result of the course which I have diligently pursued, two real windfalls of understanding have come to me, both of which made my previous knowledge to appear to be mostly ignorance. It was as though I had been ascending a mountainside by slow degrees and great toil, my vantage point little by little growing larger, till I reached the peak, and suddenly there burst upon my sight such a prospect as I had not dreamed of before. This has happened to me twice, the first time when I was somewhere about twenty-five years old, and the second when I was forty.

The first was more than a quarter of a century ago. It was then that I saw plainly that the two statements of the apostle John, that “God is light” and “God is love,” are the two great pillars of revelation. They tell us what God is, and this is the foundation of all else that is. These are the two sides (and there are but two) of God’s moral nature, and the understanding of this made the Bible a new book to me. I saw that the whole book is in its essence an exposition and illustration of these two statements. Light is figurative, and stands for holiness, while love is literal, and self-explanatory. Law and grace, judgement and salvation, heaven and hell, “the goodness and severity of God,” all these are but so many manifestations of the light and the love which comprise the nature of God. His holiness mandates repentance, while his love elicits faith. The true religion which James describes is but a mirror of these two sides of the nature of God, “to visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world.” This is love and holiness.

I saw that much of the false theology in the church is the result of exalting either side of the nature of God, at the expense of the other, and that the truth is only to be learned by giving full weight to both sides. The Bible cautions us not to turn aside to the right hand or to the left. Those who turn aside to the right exalt the holiness of God at the expense of his love, resulting in a harsh, bigoted, or legal theology. Those who turn aside to the left exalt the love of God at the expense of his holiness, resulting in softness, compromise, and antinomian theology. I saw the great dilemma which sin has interposed between the holiness and the love of God, his holiness calling for the judgement of the sinner, and his love calling for his pardon. I saw that the holiness of God demands an eternal hell, while his love provides an eternal heaven, and that there never can be any middle ground between the two.

I saw too that as “God is light” comes first in order, before “God is love,” so the holiness of God is first revealed and first maintained. The law comes before the gospel. Repentance comes before faith. God labors in all his dealings with man to maintain both his holiness and his love, but where one of them must be sacrificed, it will always be his love. Holiness is a necessity, love a luxury. While love has desires—-and exceeding strong ones—-holiness has claims. Even the love of God, though it yearns to the last degree, cannot forgive without an atonement, nor without the repentance of the offender. God will never maintain his love at the expense of his holiness, but where he must, he will maintain his holiness at the expense of his love. Heaven is a place where the holiness and the love of God are both maintained. In hell his holiness is maintained, in the punishment of the obstinate, at the sacrifice of his love. There is no third place—-no place where his love is maintained at the expense of his holiness. There never can be such a place, and those who suppose heaven to be a place where the love of God is maintained at the expense of his holiness know nothing of the matter. The only place where the love of God will ever be given free reign at the expense of his holiness is here and now on this earth, and that only for a little season, while the Spirit of God strives with sinners to bring them to submission to the claims of his holiness, and the day of judgement will make right every wrong which is now passed over in the forbearance of God.

Of course I did not see this foundation—-really could not have seen it—-until I first saw a great deal of the superstructure which rests upon it. Yet when I apprehended the two sides of God’s nature as holiness and love, more than a quarter of a century ago, it made the Bible a new book to me—-opened it up in all its fulness—-and since that time I have been as it were on a mountain peak, beholding the exquisite harmony and symmetry of the great panorama of truth, and never tiring of the view. Every nugget of truth falls naturally and effortlessly into its own place, with no straining of either the parts or the whole, and we positively pity those who must be always racking and straining, hacking and hewing, to try to make their systems hold together, or to try to reconcile them with the Bible.

All this may look cold enough on paper. We know indeed that it is elementary enough. This is not the realm of fine-spun theories or profound mysteries, but of the simplest of truths, and yet those simple truths never cease to ravish the soul, for here we learn what God is, and what can we know more than this? If all this appears cold on paper, I am sorry for it, and can only say that my own eyes flow with tears in the contemplation of it.

My second windfall of understanding opened up to me rather what man is. This came about at the age of forty, fourteen years ago, when I gained a clear perception of the difference between the soul and the spirit. I cannot say that this made the Bible a new book to me, but it shed a great flood of light on many things which I knew already. The only sound or helpful thing which I have ever read on the difference between the soul and the spirit was found in Facts and Theories as to a Future State, by the Plymouth Brethren F. W. Grant. I read this book of 600 pages through thirty years ago, and the few pages which it devotes to the soul and the spirit set my mind inquiring in the right direction. It was not, however, till I studied the soul and the spirit in the Bible itself, with the aid of the Englishmans’ concordances, that the matter became quite plain to me. This, as said, shed a flood of light on many other things, as the difference between personality (the soul) and character (the spirit), and the difference between inclination and volition, the former belonging to the soul, and the latter to the spirit. Jonathan Edwards, by confusing together inclination and volition (both of which are properly called willing) made out a make-shift proof for the bondage of the will, but the proof is a perfect nullity to anyone who understands the difference between the soul and the spirit. What Edwards in reality did was to reason that the spirit is bound because the soul is—-that our choices are necessary because our desires are—-that volition is outside our control because inclination is—-yet every child knows by experience that this is not true. But to proceed, the apprehension of the diverse natures of the soul and the spirit threw a flood of light on the difference between sin and sins, the nature of self-denial, the nature of repentance, the nature of love and hate, the nature of true religion. It taught me what it means to serve God in the spirit—-made plain what we can help and what we cannot—-taught me what we can do and what we cannot—-made plain why no flesh can be justified by the law—-and opened a grand vista of understanding on the difference between masculine and feminine natures, for the spirit predominates in the masculine nature, and the soul in the feminine.

Of course I say too little here to impart much light to my readers. I aim rather only to whet their appetites. Those who have read Olde Paths & Ancient Landmarks for the past ten years have already received, here a little and there a little, a great deal of the fruits of this understanding.

But I look forward, and press forward, in the same pursuit of wisdom which has occupied me for thirty-five years, and I wonder if another such windfall may come to me. God knows how much I have yet to learn.

I trust I know it in some measure myself, for I have a great many unanswered questions, and I feel deeply how little I know on many matters.

But one word of caution. Though I write to encourage my readers in the pursuit of wisdom, yet I dare not allow them to expect any easy acquisition. Let them observe, I never sought any windfall of wisdom. Such a thing never entered my mind. I shun as a delusive snare the idea of getting anything for nothing, and much less wisdom. I never sought it, and do not seek it now, but only continue on in my same old course of gradually and painstakingly acquiring the commodity which is more precious than rubies. Apart from that gradual increase of wisdom, by diligent study and hard experience, those windfalls which came to me would not have been possible. We cannot build upon nothing. And we fear that those who seek a windfall of wisdom are probably actually seeking vainglory more than they are wisdom. Unfortunately, such folks are very likely to imagine they have found a rich vein of pure wisdom, when in fact they have found only fools’ gold. That which is of slow building is solid, and no man who knows anything of the nature of true wisdom would dream of anything but a gradual acquisition. Yet the gradual and painstaking ascent of the mountain may put us in a good position to reach the peak, which may open to us a vista unknown and scarcely dreamed of before.

Glenn Conjurske

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