Jesus, the Key to Unlocking the Scriptures: Life's Source.

- This week I'm introducing a brief new series called, Jesus, the key to unlocking the Scriptures.

- In this series, we will be unraveling the mystery of how the ancients understood Scripture as prophecy, especially how Jesus, his apostles, & the early church interpreted the Scriptures.

- So we will come to understand a key approach that Jesus took to interpreting the Scriptures & which is found throughout the rest of the New Testament.

- We have just read all of John chapter 5, but we are especially going to focus in on the last few verses of this chapter.

- At the beginning of this chapter John recounts for his readers the story of Jesus healing the lame man at the pool of Bethesda who had no one to help him into the waters every time the water stirred.

- It was not uncommon in those days for the waters of that pool would be stirred up by an Angel, according to tradition, & sometimes people would receive healing if they were to enter the waters as they were being stirred up, but this lame man had no one to help him to get to the stirring waters of the pool.

- And because it was the Sabbath when Jesus told this man to "rise, take up his mat, & walk," then the Jews, presumably the scribes, Pharisees & teachers of the law, took issue with Jesus & a controversy was stirred up once again over the Sabbath & what was or was not appropriate to do on the Sabbath.

- To which Jesus said, "My Father is always working & so am I."

- Then the Jewish leaders take further issue with Jesus' claim to be equal with God by saying that God is his father, so he launches into a discourse explaining why the Scriptures testify to who Jesus is & why the Jewish leaders refuse to believe.

- And he tells them that the witness of God is available to us in two ways: first, if the works of Christ are properly understood at all, then they must be understood as divine works, the activity of God; second, the witness of God is given through the Scriptures which, if properly understood witness to Jesus Christ.

- But these divine witnesses of works & Scripture fail in the eyes of the Jewish leaders, & they fail because in order to accept their witness one must have the life-giving word living within! 

- The same is true today. If people do not have the word living within them by the person of the Holy Spirit, then they refuse to accept the witness of God's activity in the world & they refuse to accept the witness of the Scriptures to the person of Jesus Christ.

- If when we study the Scriptures, we study for purposes other than to discern the actions & character of God & especially how God has revealed himself in the person of Jesus Christ, then we study for a lesser purpose than God's purposes in giving the Scriptures.

- As Jesus said to the Jewish leaders, ³⁹ “You search the Scriptures because you think they give you eternal life. But the Scriptures point to me! ⁴⁰ Yet you refuse to come to me to receive this life.

- John is trying to teach his readers that Jesus is the source of life & that Jesus is the key to understanding the Scriptures.

- The Jews earnestly studied the Scriptures because they thought by them they could gain eternal life.

- But the witness of the divine works of Jesus & the witness of Scripture assure John's readers that Jesus is the source of eternal life.

- There is only one key reason to study the Scriptures.

- Study the Scriptures to meet life's source, Jesus!

- Now, how did Jesus, John, & the rest of the New Testament writers arrive at this understanding of the Scriptures?

- Well, to answer that question we need to make a couple of observations.

- The first observation we need to make is that the way Jesus interpreted the Jewish Scriptures to apply to him became so commonly used to interpret & apply the Scriptures that we do it automatically, without thought or awareness, virtually every time we open the Old Testament.

- Any time we read the Old Testament & apply it to our lives in the way Jesus did, then we are using the method that Jesus, his apostles & the early church used to understand the Old Testament.

- The second observation we need to make is that Jesus was not interpreting the Jewish Scriptures literally by applying them to himself as the fulfillment of prophecy & the law.

- For example, in Isaiah 7:14, we have the prophecy of the Virgin, who conceives & bears a son whose name is Immanuel, meaning God is with us.

- That prophecy literally applied to the historical situation in which it was given.

- King Ahaz was given a sign in Immanuel's birth that before the child knew what food he liked & didn't like, Judah would be saved from Syria & Ephraim.

- That mother would name her child Immanuel, meaning God is with us, because of God's deliverance of Judah from her enemies.

- If we are to "Study the Scriptures to meet life's source, Jesus," then the question remains: what method did Jesus use to understand the Scriptures? How did Jesus interpret the Scriptures to apply to him?

- The short answer is typology & that's a confusing theological word with a very simple explanation.

- Typology understands God's character, words, & actions as timeless; their message applies to every era, age, & time.

- Typology is the way through which the Scripture is interpreted to be typical of both the reader & the author.

- In other words, how we experience God is typical of how the ancient authors of Scripture experienced God.

- The ways in which God acted in the past, are typical of the ways God acts today & will act in the future because his character never changes.

- Since God is always holy, always just, always gracious, always loving, always merciful, then God will always act & speak in ways that are typical of the ways he has acted in the past.

- The application of Scripture is therefore timeless & typical to all of human experience.

- God's words, actions, & character foreshadow, figure, & typify our own experience even as they did Christ's.

- Let's go back to Isaiah 7:14 for a moment. If King Ahaz & the people of Judah understood Isaiah's prophecy to literally apply to them as they were delivered from Syria & Ephraim, then how did Jesus & the New Testament authors apply that Scripture to him?

- They understood that Jesus fulfilled that prophecy in a similar manner, in type, or Immanuel as a pre-figure of Christ.

- Get this, just as the first child, Immanuel, was a sign of Israel's salvation from her enemies, so also the second child, Jesus, is the sign of Israel's salvation from her sins.

- That's typology. God will act in the future in the way he has acted in the past.

- While Israel was the agent of God’s mission of redemptive love to the world, their Scriptures applied to them.

- Because Jesus became the agent of God's mission of redemptive love to the world, all the Jewish Scriptures applied to him.

- And now, because the church is the agent of God's mission of redemptive love to the world, all of the Jewish Scriptures apply to us because we are Christ's body.

- Jesus is our type. He typifies us. Israel typifies Jesus and the church. Here again is typology at work!

- I don't know about you, but I used to read John 5:39 or the story of the two disciples on the road to Emmaus, which we will look at in a couple of weeks, & ask myself: which Scriptures does Jesus mean? Which ones? There are so many of them!

- But that's not the point, that's the wrong question.

- The real question is: why should I study the Scriptures; what purpose does it serve to study the Scriptures?

- Study the Scriptures to meet life's source, Jesus!

- Listen again to how John presents the voice of Jesus at the close of this chapter:

³⁹ “You search the Scriptures because you think they give you eternal life. But the Scriptures point to me! ⁴⁰ Yet you refuse to come to me to receive this life.

⁴¹ “Your approval means nothing to me, ⁴² because I know you don’t have God’s love within you. ⁴³ For I have come to you in my Father’s name, & you have rejected me. Yet if others come in their own name, you gladly welcome them. ⁴⁴ No wonder you can’t believe! For you gladly honor each other, but you don’t care about the honor that comes from the one who alone is God.

⁴⁵ “Yet it isn’t I who will accuse you before the Father. Moses will accuse you! Yes, Moses, in whom you put your hopes. ⁴⁶ If you really believed Moses, you would believe me, because he wrote about me. ⁴⁷ But since you don’t believe what he wrote, how will you believe what I say?”

- The real tragedy in this passage is that the ones who painstakingly examined the Scriptures never found the clue that would lead them to eternal life.

- The rabbis later taught that the study of the whole law would lead to eternal life, but the authors of the New Testament insist that this life is found in the one who fulfills the law, Jesus.

- The Scriptures themselves are not the point because they are not the source of eternal life; Jesus is!

- Jesus warns them that their accuser is Moses because they don't believe what Moses had to say about him.

- Very likely, Jesus had in mind Deuteronomy 18:15, "The Lord your God will raise up a Prophet from among you, from your brethren– a prophet like me."

- Jesus is like Moses in that he is in constant communion with God, "face to face" as it were, just like Moses.

- According to John's Gospel, the witness of Moses & Jesus are so closely related that to accept the witness of one is to accept the witness of the other. That's typology at work!

- By rejecting the witness of Jesus, the Jewish leaders rejected the witness of Moses, whose witness concerns Jesus.

- When we understand a key method Jesus used & how he understood the Scriptures to apply to him, then we will understand that he meant whole thing, all the Hebrew Scriptures.

- Because God's character is unchanging, then his words & actions are timeless & their message applies throughout all generations.

- Our experience of life with God is not atypical, but typical of how the people of God have experienced him throughout all of history & in the Scriptures.

- Therefore, God's word always applies to us & we must Study the Scriptures to meet life's source, Jesus!

- As John records, ³⁹ “You search the Scriptures because you think they give you eternal life. But the Scriptures point to me!"

- Jesus is the key to unlocking the Scriptures. Study the Scriptures to meet life's source, Jesus!