Consider the Work of Calvary

I was drafted into the British Army in World War II, a professor of philosophy without any knowledge of God. I had been a member of the Anglican Church, I had done all that the church required of me and I have to say without any criticism of anybody I had not met God. I am not questioning that God is in the Anglican Church somewhere but I have to say he and I never met. When I went up to Cambridge University at the age of 18 I felt I had done all of the churchgoing I needed to do in the early years of my life because we used to have to go to church eight times a week. So I thought that’s the end of Christianity. I viewed Christianity as a kind of crutch that weak minded people used to hobble through life with and I decided I wasn’t that weak minded, I didn’t need the crutch and so I threw the crutch as far as I could throw it and set out to find my own answer to life’s problems.

That’s why I became a philosopher. I felt somewhere must be a meaning and a purpose to life and if it wasn’t in Christianity the obvious place to look was philosophy. I was successful academically but I hadn’t found the answer when World War II came. When I was drafted into the British Army I was faced with the fact that I would no longer have access to a large library right at my back door and books were really the central thing in my life. I was faced with the question what will I take to read when I go into the Army? I sat down in a philosophic way and reasoned it out and I said to myself, “Here you are, you’re supposed to be a teacher of philosophy but there’s one book of philosophy in the world which is more widely read and more influential than any other book and you know very little about what’s in that book. It’s your philosophic duty to study it.” You have probably guessed that the book I had in mind was the Bible. I’m glad that I was sensible enough to recognize its unique influence.

So I bought myself a nice new black Bible and took it with me into the Army. I had no idea how to study the Bible so I said to myself, “How do you study the Bible?” I said, “Like any other book, start at the beginning and read it through to the end.” My first night in an Army barrack room with about 24 other soldiers I sat down on the bed, opened my black Bible and started reading at Genesis 1:1. I didn’t realize that reading a Bible in public in the Army made you very conspicuous! I still recall the uneasy hush that fell on the whole barrack room when they saw somebody reading a Bible.

However, when I wasn’t reading the Bible I didn’t live the least bit like people who read the Bible. I don’t want to go into all my many sins. Let me say two things: I was a heavy drinker of whiskey and I was a hopelessly confirmed blasphemer. Being in the Army made that much worse. I was incapable of speaking without using some kind of blasphemous word. I always remember that with shame but that was the way it was.

So there I was for nine months reading my Bible, drinking my whiskey, blaspheming, baffling everybody including myself. The Bible was the first book I’d read that defeated me. I had always been able to say this is where the book is right and this is where it’s wrong and this is where I agree. I couldn’t do that with the Bible, I couldn’t classify it, I didn’t know what it was. Was it philosophy, was it mythology, was it poetry, was it history, what was it?

And at that point God put in my way some people unlike any I had ever met in my life. My religious background was very staid, I mean, I had grown up in the Anglican Church. I knew there were Roman Catholics and you ought to stay away from them! I had two friends who were Jews and I knew there were Methodists; some people who had made trouble in British history way back! Believe it or not I had never heard of Baptists. I didn’t know there were such people. It’s difficult for Americans to believe that. The people I met were not Anglicans, they were not Methodists, they were not Baptists, they were not Jewish. They were Pentecostals. Now, if they had told me that it wouldn’t have meant anything to me. I had never heard of Pentecostals. But, I can’t go into the details, being together with them I realized they had something I didn’t have.

First of all, the Bible was meaningful to them. They talked about the Bible as if it was the morning’s newspaper, as if everything in it had just happened. I said to myself, “This isn’t reasonable, these people — actually they were people of very humble origin and very limited education. I said, “They have never even been to a university. I’ve spent seven years at Britain’s largest university, they understand it and I don’t.” And they tried to explain it to me and I could not understand the language that they used. Actually, if they had spoken Greek I would have understood it better.

I came to a point of desperation. I’m not going to go into the background but I decided one night in the Army barrack room, which I shared with one other soldier, to pray until something happened. So I let him go to sleep and about 11 P.M., a fine night in July I started to pray. I discovered I couldn’t pray. I didn’t know what to say, I didn’t know who to pray to, I was totally baffled. I spent probably about one hour just trying to say something that could be called prayer. And then something changed in a way that I was not able to account for and I found myself saying to some unknown person, “Unless you bless me I will not let you go.”

And when I started to say I will not let you go I couldn’t stop. I went on saying, “I will not let you go, I will not let you go, I will not let you go.” And then some strange power began to take control of my body and my arms started to go up in the air and I noticed that the palms were upwards. One part of me was analyzing this experience all the time. In the middle of everything the analytical philosopher was still there. Why were the palms upward? And I got an immediate answer without reasoning: power from on high. And I saw in a way that I could have never reasoned that there were two sources of power: one from on high and one from below. And I knew that I had been in touch with the one from below because I had been heavily involved in the occult but I had never been in touch with the one from above.

That power came over me cast me on my back on the floor and I spent more than one hour on the floor with my arms still up in the air which is not possible naturally. And I had a total transformation in my whole being. I don’t want to try to describe it in detail but from that day to this, and that is now 46 years ago, there are two things that have been absolutely clear to me. One is that Jesus Christ is alive. The other is that the Bible is true. And so I concluded that I was wasting my time studying philosophy when the Bible was the book with the answers. So at that moment I ceased to be a philosopher and I decided I would give myself to studying the Bible. Later the Lord called me to teach the Bible.

Very shortly after that experience the British Army sent me overseas with my unit and I spent the next two years in the deserts of North Africa in Egypt and in Libya. During that time I became sick with a condition of the skin which was called by all sorts of long medical names, ultimately was diagnosed as chronic eczema. And I spent one year on end in a military hospital in Egypt—which is not the place to spend a year in the hospital, believe me.

As I lay there in that hospital bed I knew God, I was baptized in the Spirit, I believed the Bible but I didn’t have an answer. I kept saying to myself, “If I had faith I know that God would heal me.” But the next thing that I always said was, “But I don’t have faith.” And when I said that I was in what John Bunyan calls the slough of despond, a long, deep, dark valley of despair. But one day through a book by a former medical doctor, Lillian Yeoman, a piercing ray of light
penetrated that valley and the light came from Romans 10:17 which says in the version that I was then reading:

So then faith cometh by hearing and hearing by the word of God.

And the word that I laid hold of was this: Faith cometh. If you don’t have it you can get it. I want to tell you, each one of you, that’s true. Faith comes. You don’t need to be without faith. You may be without faith right now but you don’t need to stay that way. Faith comes how? By hearing. Hearing what? The word of God.

So I decided that I would devote myself with new intensity to studying my Bible which was the only book I had with me except that little book by Lillian Yeoman. So I was very simple. Having been a philosopher I appreciated simplicity. I armed myself with a blue pencil and I said, “I’ll read through the whole Bible and underline in blue everything that relates to four themes: healing, health, physical strength and long life.” Well it took me quite a number of months to do that but I worked all the way through the Bible and at the end do you know what I had? A blue Bible. But I was still not healed.

And then when I was in a hospital at a place called Al Balagh on the Suez Canal a most unusual lady came to visit me. I had met her briefly before. She was a brigadier in the Salvation Army. She was a brigadier because her husband had been a brigadier, he died and she automatically took his rank. But she was a very unusual Salvationist, especially in those days, because she was an ardent tongue speaker. She had heard about this Christian soldier in this hospital in Al Balagh and, Lord, may her memory be honored, she was 76 years old at the time. She got hold of a small four-seater car, a British soldier to drive her and took her American coworker with her, a young woman from the State of Oklahoma and they made this rather tiresome journey to the hospital where I was. She marched into the hospital ward fully attired as a brigadier of the Salvation Army: bonnet, ribbons and all the other things, overawed the nurse and obtained permission for me to go out and sit in the car with them in the hospital compound.

So I found myself sitting in the back seat of this very small four-seater car. The British soldier was in the driver’s seat, the Salvation Army brigadier was next to him. Beside me in the back seat was this young woman from Oklahoma. There was no preliminaries, the brigadier said, "Let’s pray." So we started to pray. After a little while the young lady from Oklahoma began to shake all over. I wasn’t frightened, I knew it was the Holy Spirit. Then I began to shake. Then all of the people in the car began to shake. Then the car began to shake. The engine was not running but it was vibrating and rattling as if it was going about 50 miles an hour over a rough road. Now I knew that was the presence and power of God. And what humbled me was I knew God was doing it for my sake.

Then this young lady from Oklahoma spoke in a very clear, articulate, beautiful tongue. Then she gave what I understood to be the interpretation. Now you have to know in those days I was far more British than I am now. I had a background in the classics, I was a student of Shakespeare and I spoke very articulate English. I hardly need to tell you Americans that people from the State of Oklahoma are somewhat different! But when this young lady gave this interpretation it was in the most beautiful, articulate English. And it was absolutely designed for me because it contained things in it that other people wouldn’t appreciate.

Now I do not remember all of it but there’s one part I never will forget. It’s as vivid to me today as it was then. It said this:

“Consider the work of Calvary. A perfect work, perfect in every respect, perfect in every aspect.”

Now that is elegant English by anybody’s standard. But it was particularly meaningful to me because I had grown up studying Greek and instantly my mind went to the Greek New Testament and one of the last utterances of Jesus on the cross when he said, “It is finished.”

The Greek word is just one word tetelestai. But it’s the perfect tense of a verb that means to do something perfectly. I have said sometimes you could translate it this way: It is perfectly perfect or it is completely complete. I realized that the Holy Spirit was interpreting that statement of Jesus and applying it to what had been accomplished by his death on the cross at Calvary. I realized that the Holy Spirit was showing me if I could receive it, the answer to my need was there provided by the sacrifice of Jesus.

Now I got out of the car just as sick as when I got into it but I had direction, I knew where to look. I understood that I was to study what the Bible teaches about what was accomplished by the death of Jesus on the cross, the work of Calvary. That was 44 years ago. I have to say I’m still studying today. I have never exhausted that theme. I just thank God that he was so gracious and so merciful early in my Christian walk to direct me to the work of Calvary.

As I studied this I was confronted with what seemed a clear statement that on the cross Jesus not merely took our sins but he took our sicknesses and our pain. And partly because of my background as a philosopher which is essentially analytical and partly because of my background in the Anglican Church where I had formed the impression—and I’m not saying it was the correct impression but I had formed that impression that if you were going to be a Christian you had better expect to be pretty miserable and a failure. And here I was looking at something that seemed to say something totally different, that the Lord had provided complete healing and success.

As I went through the words I’d underlined in blue I couldn’t find anything negative. There was never a suggestion that God wanted his people to be sick or to fail or to be defeated. There was no suggestion anywhere. And in particular it seemed to me very clear that the Bible said Jesus, on the cross, bore our sicknesses just as much as he bore our sins. And he bore our sicknesses that we might be healed just as much as he bore our sins that we might be forgiven. I tell you, I searched the pages of the Bible, went backwards and forwards because it was totally contrary to my way of thinking to come to that conclusion.

So then I decided that I was going to believe this and I entered a period of spiritual conflict that would be hard to describe. The conflict was in my mind. You see, the more you have trusted in your mind the more struggles you’re going to have in your mind. My whole strength and my life was my mind. And I somehow felt God had provided this sacrifice, it’s for me. But I don’t believe there was a single objection to divine healing that wasn’t brought to my mind supernaturally because I didn’t discuss it with people. Every possible objection against the teaching of divine healing came to my mind in those months.

I found myself doing something that I saw patterned by Abraham and I want to just read one verse in Genesis 15. We’ll come back to this later on in these studies, it’s a covenant that God made with Abraham. The covenant was based on certain animals that Abraham had to sacrifice. After they had been sacrificed and the bodies had been exposed, the vultures came down to feed on those carcasses. Abraham was responsible for driving the vultures away and keeping the carcasses of the sacrifice intact. And in Genesis 15:11 it says:

When the vultures came down on the carcasses, "Abram drove them away."

I felt myself like that. Here was the sacrifice but there were all these dark vultures assailing my mind and trying to take away what had been provided by the sacrifice. I would speak of doubt and fear and depression and discouragement. I was particularly subject to depression. And I cannot in words describe the conflict that went on inside. You could look at me from outside and you wouldn’t know that anything was happening. But there was this turmoil in my mind. Every time a doubt was insinuated I would turn to the word of God and drive the vulture away with a scripture.