Have you ever considered that you can be pharisaical in your study of the Bible? It’s true! In John 5, for instance, Jesus acknowledged the Pharisees’ commitment to studying their Old Testaments, but with an important caveat: “You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me, yet you refuse to come to me that you may have life” (John 5:39–40). The Pharisees knew their Scriptures well—but they missed Christ in them and so missed the point entirely.
Even for believers in a faithful, Bible-preaching church, it is possible to be meticulously, vociferously, painstakingly committed to the Bible and yet to be unconverted. What can we do about this problem? Unlike the Pharisees, we need to come to the Bible understanding the most important thing about it: that it is a book about Christ. And knowing it is about Christ, we can then study it with the confidence of someone who has “looked up the answer at the back of the book.” Christ is the answer! And so we ought to teach Christ in all the Scriptures so that we may come to know and love Him better.
Teaching Christ from Scripture
For those who have the privilege of preaching or teaching the Bible (whether from the pulpit, in a Sunday school class, or at a child’s bedside), the great danger is that we would do so without presenting Christ. We may pride ourselves on the systematic and consecutive nature in which we move through the Scriptures. We may spend hours and hours of our week in quiet study or opening the Bible’s pages alongside other believers. Yet we may at the same time be so close to the text that we fail to stand back from it and see the big picture of redemption through the Lord Jesus.
The apostolic pattern, right from the day of Pentecost on, is to present the Lord. In Acts 2, when Peter addressed the crowd, he began, “Men of Israel, hear these words: Jesus of Nazareth…” (v. 22). He didn’t begin with the benefits of the Gospel or appeal to their felt needs: “I know a number of you are unhappy, your marriages are falling apart, you’ve had difficulty with your finances, some of you are in deep dilemmas with your teenage children,” and so on. No, he began by confronting them with the Savior, telling them who He was and what He did (Acts 2:22–36).
It’s much easier to tackle the how-tos and present little moral messages than to present Christ. It’s similarly easy to adopt a political posture or to condemn everything and everyone. The hard thing to do is the right thing to do: to demonstrate how every iota and every dot of God’s Word (Matt. 5:18) points ultimately to God’s Savior. What a dreadful waste of creative energy it would be to provide instruction about almost everything rather than the saving story of Jesus!
Knowing Christ in Scripture
Of course, if the Bible needs to be taught properly, it also must be learned properly—and that will mean studying it with a desire to know Christ better.
In Luke 24, following Christ’s death and resurrection, two disconsolate disciples do not realize they are walking and talking with the risen Lord Jesus. They explain to this “stranger” that the salvation story has come to a grinding halt in a Palestinian tomb. But before Jesus reveals Himself, the text says, He “interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself” (v. 27). And when He finally makes Himself known, what do the two disciples latch on to? “Did not our hearts burn within us while he talked to us on the road, while he opened to us the Scriptures?” (v. 32). They came to know Christ in the Bible.
R. Hudson Pope wrote a little prayer that teaches us how we ought to come to the Scriptures:
Make the Book live to me, O Lord,
Show me Thyself within Thy Word,
Show me myself, and show me my Savior,
And make the Book live to me.
In other words, when we approach the Scriptures, whether in our quiet times, at a Sunday morning service, or elsewhere, we shouldn’t treat it as simply another task on the to-do list: “Teeth brushed? Check. Hair combed? Check. Bible read? Check.” That would be to miss the glory and wonder of what Scripture really offers us: an opportunity to know the Savior of the world through His Word.
The real test of whether the Word of God is dwelling in us richly (Col. 3:16) is not going to be our ability to articulate a storyline or turn to the right reference. It is going to be that, as a result of having Christ taught to us in all the Scriptures, we come to know Christ in them.
Loving Christ Through Scripture
In 1 John 4:8 we read, “Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love.” It stands to reason, then, that to know God is to love—not only to love our neighbor but also to love God Himself as revealed to us in Jesus (Matt. 22:37–39). When we come to know Christ in the Scriptures—truly know Him—then we will also love Him.
We should beware of any approach to the study of the Bible that doesn’t issue in a growing love for Jesus. And how may we know that our love is genuine? Not through a certain surge of feeling when we sing on Sunday morning! No, Jesus tells us: “If anyone loves me, he will keep my word. … Whoever does not love me does not keep my words” (John 14:23–24).
Love for Christ, in other words, shows itself in our obedience to His commands. We don’t need a growing list of rules to keep; we need a love for the Savior who bought us with His own blood and a growing desire to honor Him with our thoughts, words, and deeds. As we come to love Christ in the Scriptures, we will come to see that “his commandments are not burdensome” (1 John 5:3).
As with the Pharisees (and the genuine disciples!) of Jesus’ day, God searches our hearts. He knows who we are and where we are. Some of us are very proud of our heavily annotated Bibles—so much so that we’ve come to look to them, rather than to Christ, for assurance of our faith. What a tragedy it would be if all that study filled us with information but failed to bring us to Christ! Let us rather seek to be people who teach Christ, know Him, and love Him through the Word that He has given us.
This article was adapted from the sermon “The Heart of the Matter” by Alistair Begg.
