You Search the Scriptures . . .

“It is Christ, not the Bible, who is the true Word of God. The Bible, read in the right spirit, and with the guidance of good teachers, will bring us to Him. We must not use the
Bible as a sort of encyclopedia out of which texts can be taken for use as weapons.”
- C. S. Lewis

My greatest joy is talking about Jesus who all of the Scriptures point to him. The Bible is a witness to the perfect revelation of Jesus Christ in the words of human writers. Scripture only becomes sacred Scripture when we encounter Christ in the Bible’s story. Scripture is like an icon, a sacrament where one can re-experience the presence of the living God in Christ. I do not sit over Scripture but under Scripture to teach me the deeper truths of God’s presence in the world around me.

The Scriptures are not written for my private devotions or personal reflections but they are written for the church, a community of believers whose tradition of voices go back thousands of years. The Bible is not full of contradictions like some skeptics claim but it does have different voices competing for different understandings at different times in history because the Bible is a historical book. Some of its history may seem too distant or too messy and real for some of our modern tastes.

          I mentioned earlier when I mentioned Soren Kierkegaard that we need a recovery of the Scriptures from the biblical scholars who try to tame, tone down, and silence God’s Word for those who desire to follow Jesus way of radical discipleship. If I was to give my own translation of Luke 11:52, It would go something like this:

“Woe to you Scholars! For you have taken away the key of knowledge; you did not enter yourselves, and you hindered those who were entering.”

The Bible in the way it is read and misread today is in dire need of an exorcism. The spirit of the age has so consumed so many specialists and those who think they have mastered the Scriptures, they have forgotten that it is the biblical texts that are to master them. The Bible is God’s love letter to you but you will neither feel the love nor see the love if you do not read it with your eyes on Jesus throughout its entirety.

          Maybe we need more poets and artists to dance to the heavenly rhythm of the Scriptures? The Scriptures are full of heavenly delights, mysteries, and stories marked with intrigue and suspense. The Scriptures are also marked with people with feet of clay, fallible memories, cultural oddities, and nationalistic zeal. The Bible can seem too messy for some people and is just one big beautiful mess to others. Scripture is to be read and lived in a community of faith under the direction of the Holy Spirit with Jesus as head and supreme authority over God’s people.

          When a follower of Jesus reads the Bible, it is not through some kind of proper method that one arrives at understanding but by a distinctive way of seeing Christ through gospel lens imagination. There are biblical patterns and interpretive clues to follow in Scripture but Jesus is the interpretive lens to understanding all of it. Will we read the Scriptures like Jesus did or will we read them like they are some kind scientific precise book?

          Some biblical scholars trying to make the Bible conform to modern assumptions of precise accuracy of all details will take problems texts in the Scriptures like 2 Sam.10:18 that says David slew seven hundred men and 1 Chron.19:18 where it says David slew seven thousand men and say that’s a scribal error even though knowing there are no ancient manuscripts with the correct wording and there are no known textual variants within the textual manuscripts themselves.

          There are cultural accommodations, obscurity between prescriptive texts and descriptive ones which by the way, are simply modern inventions to explain the unusual way Scripture sometimes draws out of the lines or do not play by our modern rules. The earliest Christians saw no problem with this because they understood that some Scriptures were hard to understand and others were allegorized to get to the real deeper meaning of the biblical text. It was not the structure or details of Scripture that mattered at times but the spiritual meaning that mattered most.

          We have been duped by the scholars who suggest that the most important issue for understanding the Scriptures have to do with historical evidence, archaeological data, literary genre and the like. These are important but they are not most important. The deeper underlying issue of all of Scripture is to know Christ. How can a person have the heart of Christ? It’s not about gaining more and more biblical information but it all about transformation in the likeness of Jesus.

          The earliest Christians insisted that their faith in Christ was rooted in the witness of the Old Testament. Rather than ignoring or reading the Bible in a flat-one-dimensional way, we need to read all of Scripture with a heart transformed by the Living Word--Jesus Christ. One of Matthew’s fulfillment Scriptures is Hosea 11:1, “Out of Egypt I have called my Son.” Some biblical scholars are quick to point out how this text was never read as Messianic text and is in the specific context about Israel, not Jesus (Matt.2:14-15).

          Egypt was a place of oppression and exile for Israel’s memory. It was a place that Israel needed to be rescued from which God provided Moses as a deliverer. Here Matthew views Egypt as a place of refuge in which Jesus and his family can escape the murderous plots of King Herod.

For Mathew, even if many Jews would not follow Matthew’s line of reasoning, Matthew is reading the whole of Scripture with Christ at its core meaning. Matthew sees a spiritual connection between Israel as son and Jesus as son. Jesus for Matthew is the true Israel that remained faithful to the end even when historical Israel did not remain faithful.

          These kinds of typological connections link the whole unity and continuity of the Scriptures together like a beautiful quilt with many pieces but they make one grand beautiful design in Jesus. Even Matthew’s claim that Hosea’s reference to “my son” (Ex.4:22-23; Ps.2:7) is not based upon the Old Testament alone but possibly on other letters in the newer Testament like Romans 1:1-4 and Hebrews 1:1-9? When it comes to understanding Scripture, we need to be reminded that “without Christ, you can do nothing” (Jn.15:5).