The Bible is a book about Jesus Christ

We said in our last blog that the gospel is the power of all of our salvation, not just our conversion.  Part of the reason many of us in the church fail to make the gospel the central hub around which we build our lives is because we’ve been taught a wrong understanding of the Bible.  Today, most believers have been conditioned to think about the Bible primarily as a handbook for spiritual transformation.  It’s a manual for being like Jesus.  If we can just get enough of the Bible into us—in some mysterious way, we will be more and more like Jesus, so we must read a lot of it so we can be like Jesus.  For many believers—that is more or less the way they view the Scriptures.  In fact, that is horribly misguided.  We must see the Bible through this lens and that is--the Bible is a book about Jesus Christ.

  It is a history of redemption and at every point it in some way points to Jesus—from the creation and fall, to the accounts of his second coming.  This is what Jesus taught about the message of Bible.  After his resurrection, when he encounters those two disciples on the road to Emmaus, he explains why it was necessary that the Son of Man be crucified.  In verse 27 Luke writes, “²⁷ And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself.”  All the Scriptures concern Jesus—they are about him.  In John 5:39, as Jesus is locked in conflict with the Pharisees he says, “³⁹ You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me,”  The Scriptures are all about Jesus. 

Michael Horton writes  in “The Gospel Driven Life” [p.19, “What distinguishes Christianity at its heart is not its moral code but its story…This is not a story that teaches us steps to spiritual maturity but it’s the recital of historical events of God’s incarnation, atonement, resurrection, ascension and return and the exploration of their rich significance.  At its heart, this story is the gospel:  the good news that God has reconciled us to himself in Christ.”  The Bible is not a manual for spiritual maturity; it’s a story about a person.  Horton continues, “…the more Christ [in the Scriptures] is held up before us as sufficient for our justification and sanctification, the more we begin to die to ourselves and live to God…the focus must not principally fall on what WE must do…”  but what God has done—“not on OUR stories, but God’s.”  Unless we are using that lens to read the Scripture through, you will be largely missing the point of the Bible!  A few years ago, the “What Would Jesus Do?” [WWJD] craze swept across American evangelicalism.  That is a sign that much of the church believes that living like Jesus is more important that trusting in what he has done for us and that living for him is rooted in trying harder by remembering what he would do.  Do you see how different that is from Peter’s point where he places the emphasis NOT on remembering what Jesus would do, but remembering what Jesus has done?  If you’re going to wear a wrist band, it should be NOT WWJD, but WHJD—what has Jesus done.