Regeneration

The first condition is indispensable and fundamental; indeed it is not so much a condition as a prerequisite, and that is regeneration. You must be born again before you can understand the Bible. It is absolutely necessary. (Matt. 13:11.) What Daniel says of prophecy is true of all Scriptures—“The wise shall understand, the wicked shall not.” He means that character rather than culture is the condition of understanding prophecy. If you would understand the prophecies of God’s Word correctly, it is not necessary to graduate at a University or Seminary, and read Greek and Hebrew, but it is necessary to be good, to be pure, to be holy. The heart makes the theologian. The heart is the organ of spiritual vision, and character rather than culture becomes the key to unlock the mysteries of prophecy. That is true of all Scripture. (1 Cor. 2:14.) Suppose a man is sitting beside you on yonder mountain top, and you are describing to him the glories of a sunset. The west is brilliant with prismatic hues of iridescent rainbow beauty. The man is indifferent, and unconcerned. You grow indignant until you discover that the man is blind. What cares he about the sunset? What knows he about your words? You do not scold him, you do not blame him, you pity him. No unregenerated man can know anything about the mysteries of God and the meaning of the Bible. A man must be a Christian before he can open the Bible with any possibility of arriving at its meaning. It is spiritually discerned. Suppose I say to you that on the back of your hand there are scales like those of a fish, and you look at your white hand and laugh in scorn, and say that is nonsense. Suppose I take you out in yonder street and look up into the sky and say there are four moons revolving around the planet Jupiter, and you look up at that great white planet in the evening sky, and you say the man is crazy, it is no such thing. Suppose I take your razor and say it has a corrugated edge like a cross-cut saw, and you hold the razor up to the light, and you say it is not so. Put your hand under a microscope; it looks like the back of an alligator. Put the sharpest razor you ever saw under a miscroscopic lens; it looks like a circular saw. Put the telescope on Jupiter, and you see the four satellites in their appointed order. That former statement was foolishness to your natural eye, because it was miscroscopically discerned. That latter statement was foolishness to your natural eye, because it was telescopically discerned. The axioms of the Bible are foolishness to the natural mind because they are spiritually discerned. A man must be born of the Spirit before he knows what the Bible teaches.