Do you have a “life verse”?
A particular verse or passage of Scripture that you have identified and latched on to as particularly meaningful or even formative for you?
I don’t. But I’ve recently found a couple of verses that are significantly impacting me: John 5:39-40.
“You study the Scriptures diligently because you think that in them you have eternal life. These are the very Scriptures that testify about me, yet you refuse to come to me to have life.”
For my vote, these are potentially the scariest words of Jesus.
In John chapter 5, Jesus is taking a group of Pharisees to task.
He had just healed a man who had been an invalid for thirty-eight years. A very typical Jesus thing to do.
But Jesus also instructed the man to pick up the mat he had been lying on and carry it away.
When the Pharisees saw a man carrying his mat, they took exception to such a flagrant violation of the law of Moses. Jesus had healed him on the Sabbath, the day in the Jewish week on which no work was to be done (see Exodus 20:8-11; Deuteronomy 5:12-15; etc.), and carrying a mat certainly qualified as work…at least in the view of the Pharisees.
Jesus had told him to get up, pick up his mat and walk. Once the man’s legs were strengthened, he was not about to ignore the rest of the instructions, so carry his mat he did. When the Pharisees confronted the man about his Sabbath law-breaking, he (eventually) pointed them to Jesus.
The exchange between Jesus and the Jewish leaders is rich with theological statements about Jesus’s identity and work. He goes back and forth with them about testimony and validity—who to believe, when, and why.
As they continue their debate, eventually, Jesus takes direct aim and fires a shot that goes to the heart of the problem. It would have been devastating and personal to the argumentative Pharisees.
“You study the Scriptures diligently because you think that in them you have eternal life. These are the very Scriptures that testify about me, yet you refuse to come to me to have life.”
The Scriptures were the center of life for the Pharisees. It was their job and their passion both to know the Scriptures and to teach them to others. An accusation that they didn’t know or understand the Scriptures was a serious thing (Jesus would accuse the Sadducees of the same thing in Matthew 22:23-33).
Jesus doesn’t say how or why they are missing the very thing they are looking for in Scripture. But the very idea that it happened to them should be a warning to us.
For all their faults (and to be honest, I think we may sometimes unduly malign the Pharisees), they were sincere students of Scripture. They knew the importance of the words of God and spent their entire lives studying them.
This accusation on Jesus’s lips should serve as a caution to all of us who read and study the Scriptures.
It is possible to diligently dedicate yourself to the words and still miss their central message.
It reminds us of Jesus’s words to the two travellers on the road to Emmaus after His resurrection (Luke 24:13-35). Jesus spoke to them of how all the Scriptures pointed to Him—something they had not seen before in whatever their study of Scripture had been.
If you will permit me, I’d like to suggest a possible reason the Pharisees missed Jesus in the very pages they studied.
And it’s a possibility that scares me.
It is plausible, and perhaps even likely, that the Pharisees’ very familiarity with Scripture was their downfall.
They studied and knew the words and the meanings of the writings. They were, as we all get from time to time, convinced that they knew exactly what the Scriptures meant. It’s possible that they had lost the ability to be open to new meanings and understandings of the passages they knew and loved.
They missed Jesus because they thought they knew what Scripture said and meant, and, to them, it did not point to an upstart rabbi from Nazareth.
We can “tsk, tsk” the Pharisees all we want, shaking our heads in pitying incredulity. But if their overfamiliarity was their downfall, I fear we may be vulnerable to the same threat.
Being positive that we know both the meaning and the application of a given passage of Scripture closes us off from being able to learn something new about it.
And it’s perhaps too easy to think of others we may like to suggest have fallen prey to this idea. Others who stubbornly misinterpret and misunderstand the message of Scripture. But this warning should be personal. We must ask ourselves if we are open to understanding the Bible anew each time we open its pages and spend time in its words.
If nothing else, the words of Jesus to the Pharisees should warn us to keep our humility, lest we, too, miss Jesus.
As we open our Bibles, we must be diligent in asking the Holy Spirit to open our hearts and minds to see Jesus—that in our familiarity with the Word, we remain pliable to the work and leading of the Spirit through the text of the Bible.
I pray that you and I may always humbly approach the words and wisdom of the Bible, knowing that its pages do indeed point us to eternal life, but that life is found in the person of Jesus. May we always find Him in the Scripture.
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