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.

TO PONDER

I detect some level of frustration in Jesus’s words to the religious leaders in our verses for today. Chapter 5 of the gospel of John begins with Jesus performing a healing on the Sabbath, the Jewish Holy Day. This initiates a long discussion with the Jewish religious leaders about who Jesus is and his authority to do the things He does, like not keeping all the religious rules. And this discussion takes up the rest of the chapter in John’s gospel.

Understanding the back story may help us understand better what is happening here. During the history of the Israelites from the exodus from Egypt to the time of Jesus, the people had regularly ignored the relationship God had wanted to have with them. And they suffered as a consequence – through the 70-year Babylonian exile and the subsequent Greek and Roman oppression. The religious leaders wanted the people to remain faithful to God so that He would free them from their oppression. But as with all good intentions, their knowledge of the Bible and obeying its rules became an end in itself, leading to their prestige, rather than to a deeper relationship with their God.

So when Jesus turns up, doesn’t grovel before their prestige nor obeys all their rules and regulations, they are so blinded by their distorted version of Judaism that they had developed, that there was no way Jesus could be the promised Messiah.

This raises the question for us: when we do read our bibles, what are we trying to achieve by our reading? If I have to be honest with myself, and with you, some of the reasons I have had for reading my Bible over the years are:

The challenge of reading the whole Bible from beginning to end, tick;

Gaining knowledge so that others can be impressed with my knowledge, tick;

Pastor telling us it is something we should be doing if we call ourselves a Christian, tick;

Searching for Bible passages that support a view I hold so that I can use the passages to refute someone with a different view, tick.

But even when we have the wrong motives, our loving God can still patiently work in our lives and break down our defences. For me, that meant learning that if I approach the Bible as God’s revelation to us, it becomes the means of learning how our Heavenly Family of Father, Son and Holy Spirit wants us to grow in our relationship with them. And it no longer becomes a matter of reading words, but becoming engaged in a conversation with a God right alongside us.

Prayer: Heavenly Family, thank you for revealing to us who you are through your word, as well as through other means. Please helps to always approach your word with the aim of growing to know you personally and your purpose for our lives. Amen

Today's devotion written by Charles Bertelsmeier, LifeWay Epping