By Not Known
Some people have a life-long and deep-seated fascination for the Bible. Whether as amateur sleuths or professional scholars, they love to spend time digging deeper and deeper into the background, language and meaning of the Bible. This is good, and we can all benefit when they share the fruits of their fascination.
But is the Bible given just for our fascination? Is the Bible more like a textbook for our learning or a road map for life?
2 Timothy 3 addresses these questions. The God-breathed Scriptures are intended to guide our thinking and behaviour in order to make us complete people who are ‘ready to go’ for God (v16).
However, first things first.
The greatest and first human need is to reconnect with our Maker through faith in his Son Jesus (Rom 3:23). And so, before the Bible teaches us what to believe and how to behave it points us to Jesus for the wisdom of salvation (2 Tim 3:15). This is a message that we will never discover in creation, or in our conscience or by our own thinking. It is a message that is revealed in Scripture (Rom 3:21) and which must be revealed because our hearts are darkened and our thinking is foolish (Rom 1:21). This is wisdom: to see our need of salvation, to know that we cannot save ourselves and to trust in Jesus as Saviour.
Notice where this message is found – it’s the Old Testament. The lsquo;scripture’ referred to in 2 Timothy 3:15; Rom 1:2; 3:21 and 1 Corinthians 15:3 is the old Bible of the Hebrews. This einforces a point that Jesus made to his disciples after his resurrection (Lke 24:25-27, 45-49). We must learn to read the Old Testament in the light of Jesus and as all pointing to Jesus in one way or another.
Whatever else we learn from the Bible, this is the start point. It’s one thing to be learned in the languages and literature of the Bible and able to discuss it for hours – but have we believed in Jesus?
In this sense, the Bible is a road map for life. We are not all able to study it with intellectual wisdom, but we can all read the life-wisdom of reconnecting to God through his Son Jesus.
In ORPC we put a big emphasis on Bible learning in many of our ministries. Let’s be sure that we have made the Bible a road map for life by putting our faith in Jesus.
David Burke