Meeting God in His Word
Jesus and Jiu-Jitsu // Devotional #68
It’s been a week or two, and you haven’t picked up your Bible. You know you should, and part of you genuinely wants to, but you justify not reading by distracting yourself with something else that feels more urgent. Another email. Another meeting. Chores that need tending.
It sits on your nightstand, slowly collecting dust, a visible reminder of how much you’ve neglected time in God’s Word. I mean, sure, you’ve listened to podcasts about God’s Word, maybe even listened to a sermon or two. But opening the Scriptures for yourself feels like an occasion you’re just not ready for.
Every time you do, you’re confronted with how little you know about the Bible, your own questions about what it says, and the uncertainty of whether you’re even equipped to discern the truth embedded in the text. It’s as if you’re accessing something reserved for professionals who know far more than you ever will. Not only that, opening up God’s Word means spending time alone with God, and considering your track record that week, you tell yourself He wouldn’t want to spend time with someone like you anyway.
So it sits there, undisturbed, unmoved, and untouched, and we ourselves find our souls in much the same condition.
There’s a subtle lie we’ve bought into that goes something like this: unless I can know the Bible as well as ________, I have no business reading it for myself. The flip side of this lie is: I must know all the information in the Bible before I can interpret it for myself. Both lies are distortions the enemy uses to keep us away from God’s Word.
In the first instance, he tries to create a chasm too wide for us to cross, using the ever-moving target of another’s gifts. In the second instance, he deepens the chasm to an unfathomable depth, knowing there’s too much for any one person to ever fully unearth. Taken together, he successfully separates us from God’s Word, rendering it wholly inaccessible to people like us.
In either case, the underlying assumption of both lies is that the Bible is primarily about obtaining right information about God. As with most of the devil’s greatest inventions, there’s just enough truth to make either seem plausible. Wrapped around the rotten core of this false fruit is a fragment of truth: we do need right information about God. We need to know what God says about Himself so we don’t fill in the blanks with our assumptions or ideas about who we think God should be.
And yet, when we reduce the Bible to a set of facts or intellectual propositions, we’ve committed the same error the Pharisees made, who believed that the words themselves were most important, not the Word who spoke those words into being. It’s the Pharisees’ tendency to miss the Author for the text that Jesus laments in John 5:39-40 when He says:
39 You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me, 40 yet you refuse to come to me that you may have life. (ESV)
Make no mistake: for all the ways we try to avoid Jesus by not engaging with Him in the Scriptures, we can just as easily avoid Him by engaging only with the text of Scripture. Because, at the core of our hesitancy and reluctance to come to His Word is a refusal to come be with Jesus, the incarnate Word.
When we open God’s Word, the invitation isn’t just to learn more about God through an information download, but to learn more about Him by being with Him in His Word. As we read Scripture, we are reading God’s very words to us, in which He has recorded the stories, the histories, the wisdom, and the truths He has for us, written not only to impart right knowledge about Him but also to surrender ourselves to who He’s revealed Himself to be.
He’s given us His Word that we might not be changed simply by what we know, but by who we know.
Listen to what Paul writes to Timothy about the essence of God’s Word for us in 2 Timothy 3:16-17:
16 All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, 17 that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work. (ESV)
Don’t miss the first part of what Paul says. When Paul writes that all Scripture is “breathed out by God,” he draws on a specific image of God pouring forth the truth of Scripture as something drawn from His very being and essence. Scripture isn’t transformative because of how the words are arranged or simply because of the words used, but because God’s very being has brought them into being. He is the substance behind the text, not an idea to be considered or an ideal to appeal to, but a person to be known.
Because it is God who has spoken His Word to us, it is profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, so that we may be made complete and equipped for every work He’s prepared for us. Because we can know Him through His Word, by the illuminating work of His Spirit in us (John 16:13), we can know what He desires us to do. Just as a son can know what his dad wants because he knows his character and has listened to his words, so we can know our Father’s will in the same way and be equipped for what He wants us to do.
In John 6, after Jesus fed the crowds who followed Him, He invited them the next day to eat the bread that would not leave them hungry and to drink the wine that would lead to eternal life. Yet, once he reveals that the ingredients are His very flesh and blood, the crowd’s appetite subsides, and they decide it’s time to go home. Jesus then turns to the disciples, asking whether they want to leave too, to which Peter replies, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life…” (John 6:68 ESV).
Jesus is the Word in whom there is life, and when we come to the Scriptures, we should expect to meet with Him so that we might receive the life found only in Him. Today, come to the One in whom there is life by opening God’s Word written for you.
Take time to consider these questions:
Think about the last time you took an extended break from reading God’s Word. What were some reasons you stayed away from Scripture?
How can fixating on the information in Scripture keep us from focusing on the Author of Scripture?
What opportunities can you create this week to sit in God’s Word and meet with Him there?
As you end your time, thank God that He desires to meet with you through His Word. Ask for a heart able to resist the enemy’s lies that would keep us from the Scriptures, and for eyes to see and ears to hear the truth of God’s Word for us.
Extra credit: Spend time in God’s Word this week by sitting and soaking in Psalm 119, where the entire Psalm is an acrostic of the Hebrew alphabet designed to help us dwell on God’s presence in Scripture.
