End of Religion Part 2
August 29th, 2009. Published under religion, thoughts and questions. No Comments.
Another great point Bruxy Cavey makes centers around the fact that Jesus is the Word become flesh. John 1:14, “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.”
This is a defining characteristic of Christianity. Only in Christianity does God’s revelation come in a person. In Judaism and Islam, Moses and Muhammad received revelations from God, but they themselves weren’t the revelation, it was the words they wrote down in the Torah and Qur’an. Even Buddha as a person is not the revelation, it is his teachings that disclose the path to enlightenment and compassion. But for Christ-followers, the revelation is a person.
Jesus said I am the truth. Follow me. Trust me. Come to me. Cavey says, “The implication is important. Reading, studying, and understanding the Bible is not the goal of a Christ-follower. Bible knowledge is just a first step toward the goal of following Jesus. According to Thomas Adams, ‘The Bible is to us what the star was to the wise men; but if we spend all our time in gazing upon it, observing its motions, and admiring its splendor, without being led to Christ by it, the use of it will be lost on us.’”
I think this distinction is important. So many times we have “Bible studies” with the focus of learning and gaining a deeper understanding of the original meanings of what was written. But we are to be reading and studying the Bible for the specific purpose of growing closer to Christ, the living Word, the Holy Spirit. I once mentioned to a mentor of mine my desire to start a Bible study and his response shocked me. He said, Yuck, Bible study? Why would you want to study it? If you see a girl across the room and you analyze or study her, you see that she has brown hair, she’s five foot whatever… Why would you want to analyze her? Go over and talk to her and engage, but don’t study her from afar. The same way with the Bible, don’t study it, engage it and live it, the Word is Jesus and he’s active and waiting to do life with you. Now obviously he was just trying to make a point, he is a big advocate for reading the Scriptures. But at the heart of the issue, why are we reading? To learn and have more knowledge about God and Jesus? Or to participate in an active life with Jesus?
William Barclays writes:
There was one mistake into which the early Church was never in any danger of falling. In those early days men never thought of Jesus Christ as a figure in a book. They never thought of Him as someone who had lived and died, and whose story was told and passed down in history, as the story of someone who had lived and whose life had ended. They did not think of Him as someone who had been but as someone who is. They did not think of Jesus Christ as someone whose teaching must be discussed and debated and argued about; they thought of Him as someone whose presence could be enjoyed and whose constant fellowship could be experienced. Their faith was not founded on a book; their faith was founded on a person.
Now I’m not saying we shouldn’t read the Bible, because the Bible points the way to Jesus. I am saying we should follow Jesus and not the Bible. We still read the Bible, but Jesus is our goal. And if that is true, it will radically change the way we read, interpret and apply the Bible. Jesus always taught that the Hebrew Scriptures, the Bible of his day, always pointed to Him. Twice in Luke 24 it says Jesus explained to them what was said about him in the Scriptures and he opened their minds to understand.
Cavey says, “So God’s written Word is not a substitute for the Word made flesh, Immanuel, “God with us”. God’s precepts are not a substitute for God’s Spirit who continues to be God with us and within us.”
The Bible is like a treasure map with the treasure being Jesus. But we often treat the treasure map as though it’s the treasure itself and when we do this we miss the treasure completely. To the religious people who did this Jesus says, “You search the Scriptures because you think they give you eternal life. But the Scriptures point to me! Yet you refuse to come to me to receive this life” (John 5:39-40)