Christ & the Scriptures: There is no higher subject than Christ, and no surer testimony of Christ than the Scriptures. If we desire to know the mind of God, the will of God, the truth of God, or the salvation of God, we must stand where Christ Himself stood, upon the written Word of God. When we ask the question, “what is the Bible,” the safest answer is found in another question, “what did Christ say about the scriptures?” His view of the Bible stands alone; every other view will, in the end, either bow before it or be crushed beneath it. Matthew 21:24.
From the wilderness temptation to the Emmaus road, from disputing with Pharisees to comforting His disciples, Christ never once detached Himself from the Scriptures, never once contradicted the Scriptures, and never once corrected the Scriptures. Instead, He submitted to them, appealed to them, fulfilled them, and declared them unbreakable. In a world wandering aimlessly through spiritual night, indifferent to truth, steeped in religious deception, and captivated by pagan myths, Christ directs His people to the one sure lamp that cannot be extinguished; to the one sure and unchanging foundation: “It is written.” By His example, Christ establishes the Scriptures as the one infallible authority for all who seek to follow Him.
This is why the question: “What is your view of the Bible,” can never be answered independently from the question: “What is Christ’s view of the Bible?” To follow Christ is to follow Him in His own reverence for the Scriptures. To honor Christ is to honor the Word He honored. To love Christ is to love the book that testifies of Him. And to believe Christ is to believe every line of that book as divine truth. The ground beneath our feet is firm only because the Scriptures are firm; and the Scriptures are firm only because Christ declared them so. Isaiah 40:8.
The first and clearest testimony Christ gives concerning Scripture is that it is divinely inspired. He never treats the Bible as the word of man, but always as the very breath of God. Again and again, He attributes the words of Scripture directly to the Father or to the Spirit, grounding every argument and every doctrine in the certainty of its divine origin. Christ declares that David spoke “in the Spirit,” Matthew 22:43, anchoring the Psalms in the Spirit’s own testimony of Himself. He attributes the words spoken to Moses in Exodus as the very voice of God, “but as touching the resurrection of the dead, have ye not read that which was spoken unto you by God.” Matthew 22:31. In Matthew 15:4, and numerous other places Christ equates the written text with God’s own utterance, “for God commanded saying…,” showing that the voice of Scripture is the voice of the Almighty. And in John 10:35, Christ utters the ultimate affirmation of Scripture’s authority, “the Scripture cannot be broken.”
Nor is this all. Christ repeatedly interprets prophecy as God’s infallible speech fulfilled in Himself, declaring in Luke 4:21, “this day is this scripture fulfilled in your ears.” He teaches that the Spirit who inspired the prophets also testified beforehand of His sufferings and His glory. Luke 24:25-27. He quotes Jonah, Daniel, Isaiah, and the Psalms as the unerring words of God. Whether appealing to creation, Mark 10:6, the commandments, Matthew 19:17-19, or the prophets, Matthew 24:15, Christ leaves no room for doubt. When Scripture speaks, God Himself is speaking. This is the foundation stone beneath every doctrine of Scripture, the absolute certainty that the entire Bible, down to its very words, bears the breath of God. Christ believed it, taught it, lived it, fulfilled it, and sealed it with His own divine authority.
When we turn to the gospel accounts, we find something striking, Christ uses the phrase, “it is written” about a dozen times. This was His constant appeal. Whether teaching in the temple, silencing the Pharisees, or withstanding the tempter in the wilderness, He continually brought everything back to the written Word of God. This continual appeal to “it is written” reveals something far deeper than reverence for Scripture, it reveals the identity of Scripture itself. The voice citing the Scriptures is the same divine voice that originally breathed them forth. Yet astonishingly, He does not set His own authority beside the Word or apart from it; He binds Himself to it in perfect unity. The living Word and the written Word speak with one voice, one truth, one authority. Reject the Scriptures, and you reject the Christ who authored them. Turn from one, and you turn from both.
One of the most compelling demonstrations of Christ’s view of Scripture is the sheer breadth of Old Testament history He openly affirmed. There is no guesswork here; the Gospels record this testimony plainly. Christ believed in the creation of Adam and Eve as recorded in Mark 10. He affirmed the murder of Abel in Luke 11. He bore witness to the corruption and judgment of Noah’s day, and not only the wickedness, but the flood itself, as true history. Luke 17. He acknowledged the fire that consumed Sodom, the peril of Lot’s wife, and the depravity of those cities. To Christ, these events were neither parables nor allegories; they were the actual judgments of God upon real sinners in real time.
But His affirmations stretch even further. He acknowledged the faith of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; the burning bush in Moses’ day, Mark 12:26; the heavenly manna, John 6:31-32; and the brazen serpent lifted in the wilderness. John 3:14. He affirmed David eating the shewbread, Matthew 12:3-4, Solomon in all his glory, Matthew 6:29, and the Queen of Sheba’s visit in Matthew 12:42. He referenced Elijah and the widow of Zarephath, Luke 4:25-26, Elisha and Naaman, Luke 4:27, the murder of Zechariah, Matthew 23:35, and Daniel with the abomination of desolation. Matthew 24:15. He spoke of Jonah swallowed by the great fish and of Nineveh’s repentance. Matthew 12:39-41. On the night of His betrayal, He quoted from Psalm 35; and on the cross, He prayed from Psalm 22 and Psalm 31. After His resurrection, walking with the two disciples to Emmaus, He opened the Scriptures and “beginning at Moses and all the prophets,” showed them how everything written was ultimately about Himself. Luke 24:27. In other words, Christ placed His divine seal upon the full history, prophecy, poetry, and narrative of the Old Testament, name by name, event by event, chapter by chapter.
And beyond this, Christ is not merely the great interpreter of Scripture, He is the great subject of Scripture. The Old Testament saints saw Him in types and shadows: the Seed of the woman, the Lamb of God, the Prophet like unto Moses, the Shiloh of Judah, the Redeemer of Job, the Shepherd-King of David, the Immanuel of Isaiah, the Lord our Righteousness of Jeremiah, the Son of Man of Daniel, the Ruler from Bethlehem of Micah, the Desire of all nations of Haggai, the pierced King of Zechariah, the Sun of Righteousness of Malachi. Every page declares HIS glory!
(I have to pause here for a moment, to catch my breath. After tracing through those passages, checking and re-checking them, and realizing how much more could be added, I all of a sudden feel overwhelmed. My heart wants to cry out with Peter, “we have not followed cunningly devised fables.” This Word is so certain! This Book is absolutely true! And if any of it were unreliable, our Lord would have told us so. John 14:2. And then it hits me afresh, this is all we have. Think of that, brethren. Without the Scriptures we would have no revelation of God’s mind, no certain knowledge of Christ, no light for our path. In essence no hope whatsoever! Everything hinges on this! Take away the Scriptures, and every beam of hope is extinguished, and we are left in total darkness. No hope of salvation, no assurance of grace, no knowledge of a Redeemer, no promise of eternal life. Remove the Scriptures, and you remove the Christ of Scripture, and the whole world becomes a complete wasteland, and life essentially becomes meaningless. “Having no hope, and without God in the world.” Ephesians 2:12. And without Christ, there is no hope at all. I Timothy 1:1. It’s such an astonishing reality when you pause long enough to take it in. Without this Book all is darkness and we are lost. But God has given us His Word, and His Word reveals His Son, and all our hope is bound up with the Christ they reveal. The Scriptures bring us to Christ, and Christ brings us to the scriptures, again and again and again in a blessed, never-ending circle of grace. John 5:39. This is glory of the highest order, a glory that only Christ can reveal! Nothing less than the glory of God shining in the face of Jesus Christ! II Corinthians 4:6. The Scriptures unveil Christ, and Christ illuminates the Scriptures; and together they form one single and unbroken chain of divine revelation. I don’t know about you brethren, but I’m left “speechless.”)
Christ also taught Scripture as the only rule of faith and practice. Never once did He cast suspicion upon the sacred text, never once did He speak as though the Scriptures were uncertain, corrupt, or unreliable. And here is another profound truth, the Scriptures Christ used were not the original autographs, but copies, and in many cases, translations, yet He referred to them as the very words of God. We see this so vividly in the synagogue at Nazareth. “And he closed the book, and he gave it again to the minister, and sat down; and the eyes of all them that were in the synagogue were fastened on him. And he began to say unto them, this day is this scripture fulfilled in your ears” Luke 4:20-21. What was he reading? Scrolls copied by human scribes, preserved through centuries of transmission, and He quoted them as the unquestionable voice of God. Whatever form of Scripture Christ held, He treated it as fully authoritative, divinely preserved, and utterly trustworthy.
Christ built His arguments upon Scripture, grounded His doctrine upon Scripture, and sifted all matters through Scripture. Concerning marriage, resurrection, the sabbath, worship, faith, or righteousness, &c., the answer was always the same: What saith the Scripture? Have ye not read? It is written. He yielded wholeheartedly to every command, trusted every prophecy, and honored every line as divine authority. No voice of tradition, no authority of priest or elder, no cherished human opinion had any standing beside the Word. For Christ, the Word of God alone was the final court of appeal in every matter: pure, perfect, and utterly beyond dispute.
Let the world mock the Bible, cast doubt upon it, or dismiss it as myth; Christ has spoken, and His voice is final. For myself, this settles everything. I want no other foundation, no other authority, no other voice than the voice of Christ in the Scriptures. Here I rest; here I stand; here I live; and by His grace, here I will die. For in this Book I find Christ, and in Christ I find all. Colossians 2:9. MPJ