John 5:47 “But since you do not believe what he wrote, how are you going to believe what I say?”
If you don’t know, I love the Scriptures. They are a source of life and understanding for me. They bring great comfort and increasing wisdom to my life. They also introduced me to the Author of Life, Jesus.
For the past forty five years I have been on a journey of discovery. It started on a street corner in Maastricht, Holland at about 9 PM local time. That moment radically changed the direction of my life. I have not been the same since.
You see, in that moment, I believed what Jesus had said. I began to believe the Scriptures. I didn’t know them yet, but I trusted what I did know. The path forward could not have been any clearer. I needed to trust Jesus with my life and my future. I needed to stand on His solid ground in a world that was shaking and crumbling.
In our text, Jesus has been attacking the religious leaders of His day because they refused to believe what Jesus was saying and doing. Jesus had healed a man who had been an invalid for thirty eight years. But He had the audacity to not do it at the prescribed time.
You see, Jesus had broken one of the leaders’ fundamental rules: Don’t do stuff on God’s day of worship. For them that was from sundown on Friday to sundown on Saturday. That twenty four hour period had a special set of rules, most of which were made up by the religious leaders over time.
They made up the extra rules in their attempt to make sure they didn’t break any of the rules the LORD had made about the day’s observances. They wanted to take away any doubt about what could or could not be done on that day. They wanted to make a black and white world, no fuzzy grey areas.
But Jesus healed this man, doing work according to their definitions. As He defended His actions, He said both He and His Father were working. They have gotten angry at Jesus for making Himself equal with the Father. And Jesus intensifies that claim by explaining that both He and the Father have life and judgement as common ground. Jesus has been given authority in these two areas.
In His attack on their understanding of the Scriptures, Jesus uses the authority of Moses, the writer of the first five books of the religious leaders’ Scriptures, to make His point. If they believed Moses, they would believe Him, is His assertion. He is the Promised One Moses wrote about.
This is why I love the Scriptures. From beginning to end they tell one coherent story. This story has the power to bring hope and life and healing to the world. But it must be believed in order for it to have this affect. Since they didn’t believe, they didn’t get the benefit of the promise being fulfilled in Jesus.
And we won’t get the benefit unless we trust what the Scriptures say. And I want the benefit. How about you?
The Arnold Journey 