A Message From God - Reading Planنموونە

Start with prayer, asking God to meet and speak to you. Then watch the film clip below.

Read John 5:36-47, stopping to think and pray about anything that strikes you.

In the midst of a clash with some Jewish leaders about his identity and authority, Jesus gives us a brilliant lesson in how to understand scripture. First and most importantly we need to recognise that it all points to him. He is clear that 'the scriptures testify about me' (v39), a comment which echoes the verse we explored in the film that 'all the scriptures’ are about Jesus (Luke 24:27).

Secondly Jesus makes clear that the Bible is a means to an end, not the end itself. He criticises the Jewish leaders for thinking that ‘in them you have eternal life’ (v39). Instead, they should have realised that the purpose of scripture was to ‘testify about me’ (v39), so that they would ‘come to me to have life’ (v40). I sometimes wonder whether John took this passage as his inspiration for his gospel, because he tells us that he wrote ‘so that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.’ (John 20:31).

Thirdly, Jesus’ words can help us avoid making the same mistake. It can be very easy to start reading the Bible just for its own sake, and tragically over the years countless people have fallen into that trap. These men used to ‘diligently study the scriptures’ (v39), and yet they had missed their whole point. Sadly, knowledge of the Bible is no guarantee of faith or knowledge of God.

Intriguingly, Jesus suggests that if they had let God’s word ‘dwell in you’ (v38), things would be different. That brings us back to the relational heart of scripture that we have looked at again and again in this devotional. Jesus sums that up here by saying that ‘if you believed Moses, you would believe me, for he wrote about me’ (v46). The core of Moses’ message was to love and seek God in everything (e.g. Deuteronomy 6:5), and Jesus is saying that if they had done that, they would have ‘heard the Father’s voice’ (v37) and recognised him. When we read the scriptures we can trust that if we truly seek God in them, he will speak and draw us to himself in Jesus.