"Personal Experience written by Dr. E.J. Waggoner"

“Christ is primarily the Word of God, the expression of God’s thought; and the Scriptures are the Word of God simply because they reveal Christ.  It was with this belief that I began my real study of the Bible thirty-four years ago (1882).  At that time Christ was set forth before my eyes ‘evidently crucified’ before me.  I was sitting a little apart from the body of the congregation in the large tent at camp meeting in Healdsburg, one gloomy Sabbath afternoon.  I have no idea what was the subject of the discourse.  Not a word nor a text have I ever known.  All that has remained with me was what I saw.  Suddenly a light shone round me, and the tent was, for me, far more brilliantly lighted than if the noon-day sun had been shinning, and I saw Christ hanging on the Cross, Crucified for me.

 

“In that moment I had my first positive knowledge, which came like an overwhelming flood, that God loved me, and that Christ died for me.  God and I were the only beings I was conscious of in the universe.  I knew then, by actual sight, that God was in Christ reconciling the world unto Himself; I was the whole world with all its sin.  I am sure that Paul’s experience on the way to Damascus was no more real than mine….  I resolved at once that I would study the Bible in the light of that revelation, in order that I might help others to see the same truth.  I have always believed that every part of the Bible must set forth, with more or less vividness, that glorious revelation (Christ crucified).

 

(Written shortly before his death May 28, 1916)


"Personal Experience written by Dr. E. J. Waggoner"