In the first article on Scripture (Face to Face vol. 5 no. 3), we considered how Scripture is a gift of the living and speaking God.
But this gift is not one that becomes separated from the giver. By the Spirit, God spoke through the prophets and then the apostles. And God continues to speak by the same Spirit through those God-breathed written words.
If God fell mute and ceased to actively communicate with us in and through those written words, we would not have the true and authoritative word from God that he uses to make himself known. But the living and speaking God of the Bible does not remain at a deistic distance, winding up his Bible and then sending it out to mechanistically convey information about God. The very nature of God is to communicate himself, make himself known so that we might communicate with him as his children and so share in holy loving communion.
Scripture points to Jesus
One further point made in the previous issue confirms all this. Gods personal act of communication is in and through his Son, the Living Word. The whole of the written words of the prophets and apostles direct our attention to the Living Word, Jesus, the incarnate Son of God. This Jesus is Gods own self-communication, his own self-revelation to us. Jesus does not give us words from God, he is himself Gods Word to us. He expresses the very character of God as a speaking and communicating God. To hear Jesus is to hear God himself speaking to us, directly, in person, face to face.
So Jesus is at the center of the written Word, Scripture. But he is also behind all the words, the whole of the Bible, as its source, as the speech of God to us. He is the original Word and the final Word of God, the Alpha and Omega. In other words, by the incarnation of the Word of God, the author of the written word of God has come into the play, he has shown up in the person of Jesus. And as the author, Jesus himself indicates that he is at the center and behind it all.
When the Pharisees attempt to use Scripture (and their interpretation of it) against Jesus, he confronts them and says: You search the scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that testify on my behalf. Yet you refuse to come to me to have life (John 5:39-40, NRSV throughout). Jesus has to tell them that he is the Lord
of the Sabbath (Luke 6:5) and that they are in no place to judge him by their pre-understanding of the Sabbath. When the author of Scripture shows up, we have to stop interpreting Jesus in terms of our pre-understandings of Scripture and interpret the written words in terms of Jesus, the Living Word.Through his interaction with the men on the road to Emmaus after his resurrection, Jesus instructs us how to approach the written word of God. To help these disciples understand who he was and what he had gone through, this is what he did: Then beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them the things about himself in all the scriptures (Luke 24:27). A bit later he explained to them: These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with youthat everything written about me in the law of Moses, the prophets, and the psalms must be fulfilled. Then he opened their minds to understand the scriptures (Luke 24:44-45).
The mystery unveiled
The written Word of God is to be interpreted in the light of the Living Word, for the purpose of the written word is to direct us to the Living Word so that we might know who God is and what he has done for us. When we approach all of Scripture with Jesus himself as the interpretive key to it all, then we hear the word of God as it was meant to be heard.
Thomas F. Torrance used to explain it this way. Its like reading a murder-mystery for the second time. The first time were looking for clues as to who-done-it. But not everything is clear. Some things make sense and others dont. Some things seem significant; others seem trivial. But in a well-crafted murder mystery, there will be plenty of clues. So many clues, in fact, that when it finally is revealed who committed the crime, we are somewhat surprised but also satisfied that it makes sense. We say, Yes, there were clues all along. We just didnt know which ones to pay attention to and didnt see how they added up.
Now, what would happen if we were to read the murder mystery a second time? Knowing who-done-it, those early clues would not be irrelevant. Rather, we would see how really significant they were. We would be able to sort out the irrelevant clues from the meaningful ones. Those clues would stand out as even more extraordinary. No wonder suspect A said X. No wonder suspect B did Y. We would see what they mean, how they point to who committed the crime. We would end up valuing those clues and foreshadowings even more than on the first reading.
And thats much what its like when properly reading the Bible. Knowing it all leads to what God has done in Jesus Christ, we dont set that recognition aside. Rather, we interpret the whole of the written Word in terms of its center, the Living Word of God. In that way the whole of Scripture is properly interpreted, the gift of God is properly received.
It helps to know the Author
Another way to say all this is that the Bible itself tells us whose Scripture this is. We know who the author is. We know where the Bible came from. It is not anonymous. So another analogy would be: reading the Bible is like reading a letter from someone you know and who knows you, not like getting junk mail from someone you dont know and who doesnt know or care about you. Reading these two types of mail are entirely different experiences, arent they? Sometimes when Ive gotten letters (or even emails) from those I know well, I can almost hear their voices as I read what they wrote. I know just how theyd say it. It sounds just like them. Reading the Bible should be like that. The more we get to know the heart, mind, purpose and attitudes of Jesus, the more well hear his voice throughout all of Scripture and see how it points to him, the Son, and his mission as the self-revelation of the Father and the Spirit.
When reading and trying to understand Scripture out of the center of knowing whose scripture it is, another aspect of a proper approach becomes apparent. The primary purpose of all of Scripture is to reveal to us who this God is. That is, central to the message of all the biblical writers is to convey to us the nature, character, purpose and attitudes of our Creator and Redeemer God. They want us above all to know not just that some kind of god exists, but which God in particular and what this God is like. And they want their hearers to know who God is because the God they know wants to be known and is working though them to accomplish just that.
But the revelation that God is accomplishing is not just aimed at abstract, impersonal information. It reveals a God who has created us for relationship, communication, and holy love. Knowing this God involves interaction of faith, trust, praise, adoration, worship, and so we have fellowship and communion that includes our following in his ways; that is, our obedience. This knowing is not just a knowing about, but a knowing in a sense similar to how we hear of Adam knowing Eve and so conceiving a child.
By Gods acts of revelation, we come to know deeply who this God really is. Love for this God, the worship of this God, trust or faith in this God are responses to who God is. True knowledge of God that is accurate and faithful leads to true worship and living trust in this God.
Throughout the Old Testament, the most often and widely repeated description of Gods nature and character is his steadfast love. In the Psalms alone the Lords steadfast love is highlighted nearly 120 times. Psalm 136 uniquely proclaims Gods steadfast love in the refrain of all its 26 verses. An expanded and slightly more comprehensive description found across the Old Testament echoes what the Lord revealed of himself to Moses: The LORD, the LORD, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness. The Old Testament prophets constantly held out to their hearers the nature and character of God, the only one worthy of their faithfulness and worship. However, the fullness of what Gods steadfast love means does not come into full view until we see it embodied and lived out in the incarnation, life, death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus, with his promise to return.
Asking the who question
Jesus himself made inquiring about and knowing who he was, of paramount importance. His teachings and actions are designed to raise the question: Who then is this? His parables prompted his hearers to inquire more deeply. We find him confronting his disciples with this question at two levels: Who do people say that I am? and then even more pointedly Who do you say that I am? (Mark 8:27, 29). Jesus himself makes the question of who central. We must do the same if we are to hear the Word of God (Living and so written) as it was meant to be heard.
What is disclosed in Jesus and preserved for us in the responses of the apostles and their writings is that God is not just graciously loving towards us, but is Father, Son and Holy Spirit, who have their being by being in triune holy love from all eternity before there ever was a creation. For Jesus is who he is in his eternal relationship of holy love to the Father and eternal Spirit. That is the deepest level of Gods self-revelation, where we discover who God is in Gods inner and eternal triune life.
So in our Bible study we should approach it as if we knew whose word it is, but continue to make our central question to listen and learn from it who God is. We should listen to what Scripture tells us about who God is as we interpret all of it out of its centerGods self-revelation in Jesus. This means that other questions we might like to ask first, or about which we are anxious, must be made secondary. For Scripture with Jesus at the center not only provides us with certain answers, it tells us what the right questions are! So the questions of what?, where?, when?, why? or how? must be made relative to the question of Who? For it is the key to all these other questions.
We now have laid out the basic orientation for our understanding of Scripture and how best to approach it. We will consider some further implications for listening to the Word of God in our next installment.
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