The all-knowing God draws us into conversation by asking questions like: “Where are you?” (Genesis 1:9). Remarkable!
Resembling his Father, Jesus also asks questions. Once, I invested a year of Sundays preaching about what Jesus wanted to know.
In this column, we’ll think about the questions Jesus posed about reading Scripture. Five times, Jesus probes: “Have you not read?” (Mt 12:3; 19:4; 21:42; 22:31) or, “Have you never read?” (Mt 21:16). Similarly, he queried a top lawyer: “What is written in the Law? How does it read to you?” (Lk 10:26).
Note, Jesus is grilling chief priests, scribes, Pharisees and Sadducees, chiding these scholars about their poor Scripture reading/comprehension.
Let’s be astonished that the educational elite needed to be rebuked for their shallowness. Let’s connect the dots between Scripture and life. Friend, let’s humbly, intelligently, regularly read the Bible.
Our access to the Scriptures
Have you not read that in 1999, “Time” Magazine featured Johannes Gutenberg (1400-1468) as the Man of the Millennium (1000-1999)? This former jeweler produced the Gutenberg Bible with revolutionary moveable type.
Gutenberg’s readily accessible printed Bibles rocked the masses. English Bibles went worldwide, making English, once spoken by only a handful, the world’s most-known language. Bible reading contributed more to world-wide literacy than any other book.
Perhaps, “Time” could have chosen William Tyndale (1494 – 1536) who, under much duress, translated the Bible from Greek and Hebrew into English. When English priests only had access to Latin Bibles, this Oxford/Cambridge educated priest, a gifted linguist, once told a priest: “I defy the Pope and all his laws. If God spare my life, ere many years I will cause a boy who drives the plough to know more of the Scriptures than you do.”
By boldly making God’s word available, Tyndale became a hunted man. After being on the run for years, but still always translating, he was found, imprisoned 500 days and then hung and burned.
Nevertheless, he had prayed: “Lord, open the King of England’s eyes.” God answered. Three years after Tyndale’s martyrdom, King Henry VIII authorized printing English Bibles. Some estimate that 90% of the phrasing in our English Bibles comes from Tyndale.
Missteps regarding Scripture
Deist Thomas Jefferson (1743 – 1826) altered Scripture by cutting out portions with a razor. Paul K. Conkin: “What resulted is a reasonably coherent, but at places oddly truncated, biography. If necessary to exclude the miraculous, Jefferson cut the text even in mid-verse.” Jefferson’s “Bible” ends with crucified/dead Jesus laid in a tomb. Period.
As evolutionism captured many during the early 1900’s, scholars focused on deconstructing Scripture they assumed evolved too. They sorted the Old Testament into pseudo-subdivisions where authors who called God “Yahweh” supposedly had to be different from those who knew him as “Elohim.” Still other groups were “Deuteronomistic,” emphasizing law, and the “Priestly” group majored on religious ceremonies.
Leaping to today, Barna tells us fewer than half of American adults can name the four Gospels. Twelve percent of adults believe that Joan of Arc was Noah’s wife. Over 50 percent of graduating high school seniors think Sodom and Gomorrah were married. Sixty percent of Americans can’t name five of the Ten Commandments.” Not surprisingly, in 2016, only 16% of Americans believed Scripture is a reliable guide for establishing morality.
Many find exposure to the Bible more and more limited. What will they do?
Perhaps, like Augustine, they will “Take up and read” the Bible and be found by Christ and find Christ. Perhaps somewhere, they’ll read a Scripture that the Holy Spirit will make come alive – giving them a hunger and a thirst to know God as he has revealed himself.
What about we who claim to follow Jesus? Have we read the Scriptures?
According to Barna: “Nearly six in ten adults believe the Bible has transformed their lives. But, many Christians cannot identify more than two or three of the twelve disciples.”
Why give Scripture such weight?
Jesus does. He taught: “The Scripture cannot be broken.“ “Your word is truth“ (Jn.10:35; 17:17). “It is written, ‘Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God’” (Mt 4:4). “I tell you the truth, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law” (‘the Scriptures’) “until everything is accomplished” (Mt 5:18). After his resurrection, Jesus told two followers: “Everything must be fulfilled that is written about me in the Law of Moses, the Prophets and the Psalms” (Luke 24:44).
The apostles could say, “This is what we speak, not in words taught us by human wisdom but in words taught by the Spirit, expressing spiritual truths in spiritual words” (1 Corinthians 2:13). Paul wrote: “What I am writing to you is the Lord’s command” (1 Cor 14:37). The apostles put each other’s writings on a level with the Old Testament (2 Peter 3:16).
In summary
The Bible has been subject to God’s special care, so that it has been preserved as no other writing on earth.
Jesus authorizes Scripture.
Some information, namely, creation and the future new heaven/new earth, could only have come from God,
The Bible contains many predictions concerning events which God later fulfilled.
Although written by many different prophets and apostles living in different times and places, under very different circumstances, and customs, the Bible teaches what human wisdom could not devise – God’s cohesive plan of love/salvation and his truth/ethics.
Scripture depends upon God.
“Friend, have you not read?”
As a young adult, my Dad heard a man tell a crowd he’d read the Bible 86 times. Taking up the unspoken challenge, Dad read the Bible multiple times yearly in his 91-year life. What a difference reading the Bible and knowing the Author made for Dad.
Although Dad never directly challenged me to read the Bible, his example fostered my lifelong passion for God’s word.
Friend, “take-up-and-read” Scripture. Ask God to show himself to you through his Word.
Ongoing spiritual awakening awaits!
