Seeing Jesus in The Bible

Our previous post looked at the danger of presumption, and concluded that relationship with God must be the goal of our reading, just as it is the goal of God’s writing.

This is why Jesus came: to reveal the Father and bring us into the divine dance. Jesus is the source of relationship with God. John 14:6: “I am the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”

John‬ ‭1:1‬ & 14 ‭“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.”

‭‭We do well to develop the ability to see Jesus in Scripture. Whatever the portion of God’s inspired library that we are reading, we can find Jesus in it. This is the approach we take in the One Year reading plan: the whole Bible is One Story. God’s Story. HisStory.

Many of the comments on the passages we read through the year look at prefiguring the central event of history: the life, ministry, death and resurrection of Jesus, the first human in the godhead.

And in response to our reading, whatever we believe has to be compatible with Jesus. The technical term for this is that Jesus is our hermeneutic. He is the lens through which we read EVERYTHING in our Bibles. He is also the lens through which we must read anything else (from apocryphal scripture to modern Christian writing). If it doesn’t look, sound, or act like Jesus, it’s not a true revelation of God. By this measure, much of our modern, western “understanding” of God’s ways needs refreshing or renovation. Too much of what we have been taught as “truth” does not look like Jesus.