The first stage of Moses’ prayer-training was wearing the noise of Egypt out of his ears so he could hear the quiet fine tones of God’s voice.  He who would become skilled in prayer must take a silence course in the University of Arabia.  Then came the second stage.  Forty years were followed by forty days, twice over, of listening to God’s speaking voice up in the mount.  Such an ear-course as that made a skilled famous intercessor.

Samuel had an earlier course than Moses.  While yet a child before his ears had been dulled by earth sounds they were tuned to the hearing of God’s voice.  The child heart and ear naturally open upward.  They hear easily and believe readily.  The roadway of the ear has not been beaten down hard by much travel.  God’s rains and dews have made it soft, and impressionable.  This child’s ear was quickly trained to recognize God’s voice.  And the tented Hebrew nation soon came to know that there was a man in their midst to whom God was talking.  O, to keep the heart and inner ear of a child as mature years come!

Of the third of these famous intercessors little is known except of the few striking events in which he figured.  Of these, the scene that finds its climax in the opening on Carmel’s top of the rain-windows, occupies by far the greater space.  And it is notable that the beginning of that long eighteenth chapter of first Kings which tells of the Carmel conflict begins with a message to Elijah from God:  “The word of the Lord came to Elijah:  ...  I will send rain upon the earth.”  That was the foundation of that persistent praying and sevenfold watching on the mountaintop.  First the ear heard, then the voice persistently claimed, and the eye expectantly looked.  First the voice of God, then the voice of man.  That is the true order.  Tremendous results always follow that combination.

Through the Book to God.

With us the training is of the inner ear.  And its first training, after the early childhood stage is passed, must usually be through the eye.  What God has spoken to others has been written down for us.  We hear through our eyes.  The eye opens the way to the inner ear.  God spoke in His word.  He is still speaking in it and through it.  The whole thought here is to get to know God. He reveals Himself in the word that comes from His own lips, and through His messengers’ lips.  He reveals Himself in His dealings with men.  Every incident and experience of these pages is a mirror held up to God’s face.  In them we may come to see Him.

This is studying the Bible not for the Bible’s sake but for the purpose of knowing God.  The object aimed at is not the Book but the God revealed in the Book.  A man may go to college and take lectures on the English Bible, and increase his knowledge, and enrich his vocabulary, and go away with utterly erroneous ideas of God.  He may go to a law school and study the codes of the first great jurist, and get a clear understanding and firm grasp of the Mosaic enactments, as he must do to lay the foundation of legal training, yet he may remain ignorant of God.