General Conference Bulletin, vol. 5

STUDY OF EDUCATION

E. J. Waggoner

By E. J. Waggoner, Tuesday, April 7, 8:00 A. M.

Take, for instance, Deuteronomy 4:5, 6. Moses said, “Behold, I have taught you statutes and judgments, even as the Lord my God commanded me, that ye should do so in the land whither ye go to possess it. Keep therefore and do them; for this is your wisdom and your understanding in the sight of the nations, which shall hear all these statutes, and say, Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people.” GCB April 13, 1903, page 189.12

It is not any mere “piety,” as it is called in the worst sense of the term,—it is not any mere sentiment,—that you get in understanding the Bible, and taking the precepts of the Bible; but it is such wisdom as the nations of the world will recognize as wisdom. The Lord said that if His people kept His precepts,—and that means the whole Word,—the nations of the whole world would say, “This great nation is a wise and understanding people.” GCB April 13, 1903, page 189.13

“The Lord giveth wisdom; out of His mouth cometh knowledge and understanding.” You have the demonstration of that in the case of Solomon. He got his wisdom from the Lord, and kings sent ambassadors, and came themselves, from the ends of the earth, to hear the wisdom that Solomon got from the Lord. GCB April 13, 1903, page 189.14

But do not think that Solomon lay down to sleep one night, and dreamed, and woke up in the morning a wise man. Wisdom does not come that way. The verses in Proverbs that I just read to you tell you how he got it. He cried for it; he inclined his ear for it; he searched for it as men search for silver and gold. You know how men search for silver and gold. They dig for it; they lie awake nights to plan how to get it. That is the one thing they are after, and they get it. Now the Lord says, whosoever will search for wisdom the same way, he shall know it, and he shall know every right way; he will know the right thing; he will not make mistakes. GCB April 13, 1903, page 189.15

The first Psalm tells us that the man who meditates on the law of God day and night, and who delights in it, shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water. I wish you would all go into the gardening business, even in your houses, where you can watch the plant growing, and see how it grows by the water. You can do it. You will be surprised how much education you can get out of seeing a single plant grow. Take some beans, some peas, some wheat, or some Indian corn, and put it in a moist place where it is reasonably warm. In two or three days it will sprout. Then take a glass jar or a tumblerful of water and tie over the top of it a little thin cloth, like cheese-cloth, that is not too tight in its meshes, and lay the seeds on that, and then keep it moist. Through the scent of water that is below it, it will grow. It will send its stock upward, and its roots downward. It is really wonderful to see the intelligence displayed, to see how methodically and how regularly that plant goes about its business of growing. You may find—you certainly will, if you have a lot of seeds together—that in some of the seeds the root end of the sprout will be uppermost, and the stalk will be below, so that it must go down; and yet the root, that must supply the stalk with nourishment, and which can get it only in liquid form, will turn, and will invariably go downward to find the water; and the stalk will turn and go upward. GCB April 13, 1903, page 190.1

And then, if you should have it in soil, and let it be in dry soil, and the moisture is upon one side only, you will find that those rootlets will make no mistake. They do not make any experiments, either; but, just as true and as certain as the needle will point to the pole, they will go directly to where the water is, and they will not go over the other way. GCB April 13, 1903, page 190.2

When we get this in mind, then we read the first Psalm. He that meditates on the law of God day and night “shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water, that bringeth forth his fruit in his season; his leaf also shall not wither; and whatsoever he doeth shall prosper.” That is, he will not be making experiments, and he will not be making mistakes. There is instruction in the Bible that will direct the man in the right way every time. GCB April 13, 1903, page 190.3

Now the reason men do not believe this (and most do not) is that we have not enough knowledge of the Bible; we have not done that thing enough yet to demonstrate it. But if we believe it, we shall find that it is so, just to the extent that we become familiar with the Scriptures—not merely technically, not merely with the head, but with the whole being. GCB April 13, 1903, page 190.4

I will take another scripture: “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom;” or take another still; you have it in the last verse of the twenty-eighth of Job: “The fear of the Lord, that is wisdom; and to depart from evil is understanding.” In the Psalms is another: “A good understanding have all they that keep His commandments.” That agrees exactly with what we read in Deuteronomy,—that the keeping and doing of God’s statutes and judgments “is your wisdom and your understanding.” With this connect another scripture, found in the one hundred and thirtieth Psalm: “There is forgiveness with Thee, that Thou mayest be feared.” Now, since the fear of the Lord is wisdom, we find that a knowledge of God, and a knowledge of the Word of God, comes through the forgiveness of sins; and that brings us back to our original statement that it is in the cross of Christ that we get knowledge. The cross of Christ is to be the science and the song of the redeemed now and throughout eternity. GCB April 13, 1903, page 190.5

Let me bring it before your minds, so that you can see that this is reasonable. You can see it yourself, just as plainly as you can see the sunshine to-day. Suppose you take a man who is wise in all the knowledge of the schools of this world, but who does not know and believe the Lord. He has not the one thing that is needful, but he is “cultured.” You take another man who is illiterate. He can barely spell his way through the Bible, but he knows the Lord; he knows Jesus Christ, the Saviour from sin. Now let the Lord come; the one man goes into the pit of corruption; he is cut off just where he is; the other man goes into the kingdom of God, and studies there. And what will he study? What will be the subject of his study in the kingdom of God? GCB April 13, 1903, page 190.6

Voices: The science of the cross. GCB April 13, 1903, page 190.7

E. J. Waggoner: He will study the cross of Christ. That will be the only thing he will have to teach him to sing and to teach him all knowledge. GCB April 13, 1903, page 190.8

A thousand years and a little more will expire, and then those two men will stand on the earth together again. How will they then compare in knowledge? Which of the two will know the more, the man who has had all the wisdom of the schools, or the man who studied only the cross of Christ? Which do you think would stand the best examination?—Surely the man who was accounted ignorant in this world, but who knew the one thing needful. He had the key of knowledge, and then he had a thousand years of free access to all the treasures of knowledge; and you would find that he would stand the best examination, on whatever subject you might question him. GCB April 13, 1903, page 190.9

“But then,” you will say, “that is too simple a proposition, because this man who was educated in the schools and went to the grave could not have been more than seventy or eighty years old, at the most, and the other man has had a thousand years. It is not a fair comparison at all. Any man ought to be able to learn more in a thousand years than another man could in fifty.” GCB April 13, 1903, page 190.10

Well, then, suppose you place the two men several thousand years ago, when men lived a thousand years on earth. Let one man for a thousand years attend the worldly schools, studying and acquainting himself with all the knowledge of the schools, but not knowing God. Let the other man, accounted illiterate, know God and salvation by faith so well that the Lord is pleased with him, and takes him to heaven, as He did Enoch. Now one man goes to heaven a reputed ignorant man, and remains there a thousand years, studying only the cross; the other man remains on the earth, studying everything but God. At the end of the thousand years, who will be the better educated man?—Unquestionably the one who has had the better opportunities, the one studying the cross. He has had the wider range. He has had the key of knowledge. He started in the right way, at the beginning, for Christ is the beginning. And the wisdom of that second man will be wisdom that is recognized by the world as sound wisdom. He obtained it through the cross; but the world does not take that into the account. They simply recognize the fact that he has it. Then they will ask, as they did of Christ, “Whence hath this man wisdom?” Where did he get his knowledge? No matter how wise the scribes and Pharisees and doctors of the law were, they found that Christ knew more than they. “How did this Man get wisdom? He never went to our schools. We never had Him enrolled in the school at Jerusalem? How did He learn these things?” Brethren, do you know how He learned them? He meditated on the Word of God day and night, and that is the way He learned them. GCB April 13, 1903, page 190.11

I know the question that comes up in your minds. When you read about the Bible as the foundation and the sum of all science, some one will ask me: “How can you study physiology from the Bible? How can you study botany from the Bible?” Well, that is a very shortsighted question, and the question itself shows that the person does not know the Bible: he does not have the key of knowledge. GCB April 13, 1903, page 191.1

A. T. Jones: He does not know how to study botany. GCB April 13, 1903, page 191.2

E. J. Waggoner: No: he does not know how to study botany, and he does not know how to study physiology. GCB April 13, 1903, page 191.3

“Well, where in the Bible do you find out how many bones a man has?”—Nowhere. “Where in the Bible do you find out how many petals a lily has?”—Nowhere. “Where in the Bible do you find the description of different plants?”—Nowhere at all. “Where in the Bible can you find out how far it is to the sun?”—Not anywhere. “Well, then,” you say, “how are you going to know science? How are you going to learn astronomy? How are you going to study botany or physiology from the Bible, when it does not tell these things?” The answer is simple: Use your eyes. GCB April 13, 1903, page 191.4

How many times is it necessary for the Lord to write a thing down in order that we may understand it and know it? If you have a book to tell you certain things, a scientific book, for instance, how many times in that book do you want a certain thing repeated in order that you may know it? Why, if it says it once, that is enough, is it not? You do not have to have it on every page. You can turn to the one page where it is found, and find that statement as often as you need to, until you have it thoroughly learned. You would say that it would be a useless repetition to have the same thing told over and over and over again. You can go to the one place and find it. GCB April 13, 1903, page 191.5

Now that is the sort of common sense that the Lord uses. He has put in the Bible what with our dull minds we can not learn anywhere else. A man could get it somewhere else, if he had his eyes wide enough open; but our eyes are shut so tightly that we need to have the primary and fundamental truth revealed in the Bible. We can not see it anywhere else. But that which the Lord has plainly written everywhere, it certainly would be “vain repetition” to put in the Bible. Why, you can go to the lily itself, and find out how many petals it has. You can look for yourself, and see it. That is all that is needed. When a man arrives at the proper stage in the study of mathematics, he can see for himself, by parallax, how far it is to the sun; and he can discover easily enough, by looking at the skeleton of a man how many bones he has. Why should the Lord tell that, when you can go and find it for yourself? Even a man who does not believe the Lord, and who does not know anything about the Lord, can find out all these facts. But this Book, the Bible, gives us the key; this is the index; this lets us into the secret of learning. “The secret of the Lord is with them that fear Him.” Here in this book the Lord tells us where we will find the truth, and how to go to work to learn the truth about the things that we see. GCB April 13, 1903, page 191.6

Now let me give to you a statement by a scientist, taken from a scientific book that is recognized in all the world. a statement of the limitations of science as it is in the schools of the world. Kerner, professor of botany in the University of Vienna, in his “Natural History of Plants,” gives at the very beginning a little view of the workings of science and the manner of arriving at the “laws of nature,” as they are called, the theories of science. It runs something like this: Observers discover a certain number of facts and phenomena. They are a confused mass in their minds, until some master mind arises, and he generalizes; he collates all those facts and phenomena, and generalizes them, and announces the law. But time passes, and observations increase. Scientific instruments become more delicate, and men are able to make more minute investigations; and soon, as their range becomes wider, they find that there are exceptions to this law. It will not apply in every case. And these exceptions increase, until they find the law does not hold at all. They find that the reason why they thought that was the law was simply the limitation of their knowledge. Now they find that there is a wide range of facts outside of this little circle that will not come in under this law. The law is obsolete. GCB April 13, 1903, page 191.7

Then another man comes, and from this larger range of facts and phenomena he adduces another law. Before this, that first law, so called, was recognized by scientific men as scientific; now that is out of date, and they have another law. But no one, says Kerner, except a very narrow-minded person, will say that that is the end. “Thus it has ever been, and thus it will ever be.” They do not hope that they can ever come to finality; for they know that they can never know everything, and they know no other way of arriving at the knowledge of the truth. GCB April 13, 1903, page 191.8

How long would it take to arrive at a knowledge of all the facts, of all the things that there are to be known, so that from all the facts and all the phenomena, if a man were capable of grasping them all, they could deduce the true law? How long would it take? (Voices: Eternity.) What is the problem, what is the task, set them?—It is to know everything that there is in the universe. Take this one world alone, and leave out all the other worlds. In order to arrive at the knowledge of primary truth by the study of facts and phenomena, the man must know every plant that grows out of the ground. Not only that, but he must know all about every plant. And he must know every animal that lives, every bird that flies, every fish that swims, every insect that creeps, and everything that the microscope can reveal, as well as everything the telescope can make know. He must know all those things, and everything about each one of those things, before he can arrive at the law. How long will it take him to do that? Eternity would not be long enough for him to do it. In eternity there will always be something new for us to learn; that is what will make it interesting. If there ever could come a time that we should know everything God has ever created, from that time on eternity would begin to get monotonous; there would not be anything more to learn. We should simply sit still and says, “Oh, I have seen that; I have been there; it is nothing new.” Eternity would be monotonous to us, and we should get tired and want to go somewhere else than the kingdom of God. But the joy, the freshness, of eternity in the kingdom of God will be that there will be always something new opening up before us to learn, and that will be always in God, for in Him, in Christ, all things are. Don’t you see that, however much one is studying, he must be studying the Lord, even though he does not know it, because no one can learn anything either in this world or in heaven that is not in the Lord, in Christ. GCB April 13, 1903, page 191.9

I will put with this statement of Kerner’s one by another noted scientist, Lord Avebury, better known as Sir John Lubbock. He said: “There is not a single plant, even the commonest, of which the full history and habits of life are completely known. There is not one plant that would not well repay, I say not the devotion of an hour, but of a lifetime.” Now you have your problem. How long will it take a man in the ordinary way of scientific study to arrive at the knowledge of the truth? In order to arrive at the knowledge of the truth, at the secret of all things, to get at the very beginning, the germ, he must know all the things, all the facts, that there are in the universe. But the commonest plant that grows by the roadside is so marvelous in the variety of its phenomena that the devotion of a lifetime could be given to it, and we should not even then know it thoroughly. You see, you have there a perfect illustration of the words of the apostle Paul. “Ever learning, and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth.” GCB April 13, 1903, page 192.1

“But,” you will say, “there are wise men.” Yes, they are wise in this world; but “the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God.” He taketh the wise in their own craftiness.” Now it is interesting to study words as the Lord uses them. You can trace the thought of that word “craftiness.” Craft is work; a craftsman is a workman. That word “craftiness” in the Greek is a word that means “able to do everything;” it is the wise men who can do all sorts of work that God takes in their own craftiness; He takes the wise in their versatility, their ability to do everything. GCB April 13, 1903, page 192.2