Charles Spurgeon on How to Read the BibleSýnishorn

The scribes and Pharisees were great readers of the law. They studied the sacred books continually, poring over each word and letter. They made notes of very little importance, but still very curious notes—as to which was the middle verse of the entire Old Testament, which verse was halfway to the middle, and how many times such a word occurred, and even how many times a letter occurred, and the size of the letter, and its peculiar position. They have left us a mass of wonderful notes upon the mere words of Holy Scripture. They might have done the same thing upon another book, and the information would have been about as important as the facts they have so industriously collected concerning the letter of the Old Testament. They were, however, intense readers of the law.

They picked a quarrel with the Savior upon a matter touching this law, for they carried it at their fingers’ ends and were ready to use it as a bird of prey does its talons to tear and rend. Our Lord’s disciples had plucked some ears of corn and rubbed them between their hands. According to Pharisaic interpretation, to rub an ear of corn is a kind of threshing, and, as it is wrong to thresh on the Sabbath day, therefore it must be very wrong to rub out an ear or two of wheat when you are hungry on the Sabbath morning. That was their argument, and they came to the Savior with it and with their version of the Sabbath law.

The Savior generally carried the war into the enemy’s camp, and He did so on this occasion. He met them on their own ground, and He said to them, “Have you not read?”—a cutting question to the scribes and Pharisees, though there is nothing apparently sharp about it. It was a fair and proper question to put to them, but only think of putting it to them. “Have you not read?”

“Read!” they could have said, “Why, we have read the book through very many times. We are always reading it. No passage escapes our critical eyes.”

Yet our Lord proceeds to put the question a second time: “Have you not read?” as if they had not read after all, though they were the greatest readers of the law then living. He insinuates that they have not read at all, and then He gives them, incidentally, the reason why He had asked them whether they had read. He says, “If you had known what this means,” as much as to say, “You have not read, because you have not understood.” Your eyes have gone over the words, and you have counted the letters, and you have marked the position of each verse and word, and you have said learned things about all the books, and yet you are not even readers of the sacred volume, for you have not acquired the true art of reading. You do not understand, and therefore you do not truly read it. You are mere skimmers and glancers at the Word; you have not read it, for you do not understand it.