"Have You Not Read?" Matthew 22:23-33 Sunday Evening Worship Service

Well, would you turn in your Bible to Matthew chapter 22 as we continue our study on the clarity of Scripture?

Matthew 22 · chapter mention

Matthew chapter 22, we're going to be in a bunch of different texts this evening, but this is just to set our thinking on it.

Matthew 22 · chapter mention

Matthew 22, beginning in verse 23.

The same day, Sadducees came to him, that is Jesus, who say that there is no resurrection, and they asked him a question, saying, Teacher, Moses said, If a man dies having no children, his brother must marry the widow and raise up offspring for his brother.

Now there were seven brothers among us.

The first married and died, and having no offspring left his wife to his brother.

So to the second, and the third, down to the seventh.

After them all, the woman died.

In the resurrection, therefore, of the seven, whose wife will she be?

For they all had her.

But Jesus answered them, You are wrong, because you know neither the scriptures nor the power of God.

For in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven.

And as for the resurrection of the dead, have you not read what was said to you by God?

I am the God of Abraham and the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob.

He is not God of the dead, but of the living.

And when the crowd heard it, they were astonished at his teaching.

So read the word of the living God.

Ezekiel was a retired Israeli general and millionaire who saw the light at a homeless shelter.

Ezekiel was one of the most famous generals in Israeli, modern Israeli history, won several battles.

He was brilliant.

He started memorizing most of the Old Testament when he was six, and used a number of the tactics that he found in Old Testament battles in his own military planning.

Eventually he retired from being a general and also the chess champion of all of Israel and decided to go into business as an entrepreneur and made millions and millions of dollars because he was so brilliant.

But unfortunately, he developed a bit of a gambling habit.

And so he would fly all over the world to cities with resorts and casinos and spend upwards of one, two, three million dollars a night.

Lost a ton of money.

Eventually he had a heart attack, and his wife told him, Listen, if you keep this up, I'm divorcing you.

I can't stay in with this.

And as a good faith pledge to her, he said, Okay, I'm gonna stop, I'm gonna put all of my assets in your name.

So he did.

Sure enough, came back around, and here he is in Atlantic City gambling again.

And his wife finds out she cuts off all of his funds, and instantly he has nothing to his name except for a couple thousand dollars in his pocket and a plane ticket to Israel 17 days later.

He thought about killing himself, tried to jump off the 22nd floor of a hotel, but uh got too sick on the way up, and so they took him to a hospital where he had pneumonia and uh recovered for about a week, and then they kicked him out of there, and he said, Where am I supposed to go?

And they said, Well, you could go to the Atlantic City Rescue Mission, I guess.

So there he is, this former general, former millionaire, chess champion of the world, showing up in a homeless shelter with only the clothes on his back.

Someone had stolen the rest of his money at that point.

And wouldn't you know it?

A Christian was there and met him and talked to him and told him you should read the Bible.

And he handed him a Bible.

And so he did.

He went to his room and he read the gospel of Matthew twice.

And by the second, the end of the second reading, he knew Jesus Christ as his Savior.

Later, when he was asked about that event, he said, When I read Matthew and I met Jesus, I understood the whole Bible.

And I saw Jesus everywhere.

I think Ezekiel's testimony, though extraordinary in some ways, is really not all that out of the ordinary.

Your testimony probably in some ways sounds similar, doesn't it?

That at some point in your life, the Bible was presented to you, you met Jesus, and then you could see.

And that's because of the power of the clarity of the Word of God.

What we've been learning as we've been studying the clarity of Scripture is that the Bible is clear because God is good.

That God isn't trying to speak in a cryptic way.

He wants to be known, and so he's made himself known to his people.

He speaks clearly because he's good.

And then we learned last week that the Bible is clear, but only if you obey it, only if you have a heart that's submissive towards it, because that's the kind of God that he is.

He demands obedience before giving understanding.

But that, in and of itself, begs a question, doesn't it?

How would someone go from being totally opposed to God, we're born in sin, hating God and not having eyes to see and understand his clear word?

How would someone go from that condition to a condition where all of a sudden they can?

Where they can understand the Bible and it makes total sense to them and it's clear as day.

How would that happen?

How do we go from sin-darkened God haters to obedient lovers of the light?

How do we change from willful blindness to clear sight?

And the answer is so simple, isn't it?

It's Jesus.

It's Jesus.

Jesus is called in the Bible light all over the place, isn't he?

A light to the Gentiles?

He's the light of the world.

He's the light of life.

He's the radiance of the glory of God.

John even says he is so full of light and explanation that he tells us what God himself is like.

He explains God to us.

And the only way that anyone can have a right understanding of the Word of God is to go through the one door, is to go through Christ, to meet Jesus, to find the light, and to be illumined by that light.

Which means if you don't have Jesus, then the Bible will not be clear to you.

It is clear in and of itself, as we've already learned, but it won't be clear as you read it.

No Jesus, no light, no light, no clarity.

Which is why in false systems that have false versions of Jesus, they have to come up with some other way of explaining how they have right or wrong interpretations.

You think of the Mormon church, their doctrine of the burning in the bosom.

That's how I know that this is true, or I know that I understand this correctly, is because I had a feeling inside of me.

Or you think of the Roman Catholic Church, which has done away with the idea of the clarity of Scripture altogether and just said, you know what, we've replaced the person who makes Scripture clear with a Pope.

And he now can tell you what this thing really means.

He is the authoritative interpretation.

You don't have Jesus, you don't get light.

You don't get light, the scripture is not clear.

Which is to say that Jesus is the key to the clarity of Scripture for all.

Christ is our clarity.

How does he do that?

Well, theologians use a term, and we're going to talk about it for just a few minutes here, called illumination.

Illumination.

And that is something that Jesus does in order to give us this spiritual sight.

And I want to show you in Scripture where it teaches us that Jesus is central to the work of illumination, which is so necessary for our clear reading of the Bible.

If you want to really read and understand the Bible, this is why you need Jesus.

First of all, all throughout his ministry, go read the Gospels with this in mind, and you'll see it everywhere.

People hardly ever understand what he's doing.

Do they?

They're constantly saying, why is he talking like that?

What did he mean when he said that?

Even Jesus' own disciples are baffled on the reg because of what Jesus has to say about Scripture and Himself.

Jesus gives them glimpses here and there.

But turn with me to Luke chapter 24.

Luke 24 · chapter mention

I want you to see this.

At the end of Jesus' time here on earth, after the resurrection, of course, he speaks to those who are on the road to Emmaus, and he opens the scriptures to them.

But then he goes to all of his disciples, then he appears before them, he eats some fish, proves that it's him, and then Luke chapter 24, verse 44, then he said to them, These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you, that everything written about me in the law of Moses and the prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled.

Luke 24:44

And then, listen to this, he opened their minds to understand the scriptures.

And he said to them, Thus it is written that the Christ should suffer and on the third day rise from the dead, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins should be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem.

Apparently he's getting all of that from the Old Testament.

He's saying, You should be able to get this from the Scriptures.

So let me open your mind.

You have a closed mind.

Let me open it so that you can see what's really there and that it's about me and forgiveness offered through me.

You continue reading in the Chronicle of Jesus' work through the church, and you get to Acts chapter 16.

Acts 16 · chapter mention

Paul's here in Philippi, he meets a woman named Lydia, and it says in Acts chapter 16, verse 14, one of us heard a woman named Lydia from the city of Thyatira, a seller of purple goods, who was a worshiper of God.

Acts 16:14

And the Lord opened her heart to pay attention to what was said by Paul.

Again, I think the reference here, Lord, is probably a reference to Christ.

Jesus opens her heart.

Or a verse that we looked at last week, Romans chapter 10, verse 17, where it says, Faith comes by hearing, and hearing from the Word of Christ.

Romans 10:17

I take that to be a subjective word of Christ.

It's Jesus' word.

Jesus is the one speaking as the preaching of the gospel happens, and he gives sight by that.

Or if you're not convinced, another passage that we looked at last week, 2 Corinthians chapter 3, verses 14, where Paul speaking about the Jews who have been blinded and still can't read the Old Testament correctly, he says this, 2 Corinthians 3, 14, but their minds were hardened, for to this day when they read the Old Covenant, that same veil remains unlifted, because only through Christ is it taken away.

2 Corinthians 3:14

If you want spiritual sight, if you want light to be able to read this Bible and understand it and obey it, you have to know Jesus.

There's no other way.

Only through Christ.

That's what it says.

Only through Christ is that veil taken away.

Or he says later in 2 Corinthians chapter 4, verse 6, for God who said, Let light shine out of darkness has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God where?

2 Corinthians 4:6

In the face of Jesus Christ.

Jesus is central to the work of illumination.

That might be kind of surprising to hear because usually when we talk about illumination in the church, we attribute it as a work of the Holy Spirit, which it obviously is.

But in some ways it just depends on what angle you take it from.

Ephesians chapter 1, verses 17 to 18 is a verse that features all three members of the Trinity and appeals to all of them in some way as active in the work of illumination.

Ephesians 1:17–18

The Spirit is the agent of illumination, but experientially, it's not like when you get a new sight from the Lord of the Scriptures, it's not like you sit there for a second and you feel like a pulse in your heart, like, oh, the Spirit did something.

I felt a physical thing.

No, that's not how that works.

Experientially, what do you see?

You see Jesus.

You see the glory of Christ coming through the page, like a lamp shining in a dark place.

The glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.

We look at Him.

Christ is the light of the world and the light of the Word.

Which means if you want to rightly understand this book, if you really do, and I've talked to non-believers who would say in earnest they're trying to understand the Bible.

They want to know what it means.

If you want to, there is only one door that you can go through.

There is only one light that will make this book light up.

There is only one source that will gild this page with such light and illumination that you will be able to understand it for all of eternity, and that is Jesus Christ Himself.

It is only through the gospel of Jesus Christ that you can come to understand God's word.

So if you want to read the Bible, you need Jesus.

Now, a clarification here about illumination.

Illumination is not saying that when you become a Christian, the Holy Spirit takes up resonance in you and starts whispering in your ear.

Little still small voice.

Maybe you can't quite decipher it and you have to learn over.

No, that's not it.

It's not new revelation, it's not new data, it's not new information.

It's Christ turning the light on so you can see what's already obvious and clear in the text.

What is already here in the Bible, Jesus just turns the light on so you can read it.

You ever try to read in the dark?

Turn the light on, and then you just see what's actually there.

It's not new information outside of the Bible, it's just helping you understand what's actually there.

And just a couple verses to show you that.

Psalm 119, verse 18, open my eyes that I might behold wondrous things out of your law.

Psalms 119:18

It's a prayer for illumination, and it's not saying, help me to behold wondrous things somewhere else.

Here in this book.

Or 1 Corinthians chapter 2, verse 12, Paul writes, Now we have received not the Spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, that we might understand the things freely given to us by God, meaning Scripture.

1 Corinthians 2:12

We have the Spirit, and the Spirit helps us understand the things given to us by God.

The Spirit given by Christ for us so that we can see Christ.

And that essentially is all I want to convince you of this evening.

Is that in order for you to rightly understand this book, you need Christ.

And when you do, all he's gonna do is just show you what's obviously here.

That there's no tricks to illumination, it's just him showing you what's actually on the page.

And I want to illustrate this in a couple ways.

First of all, turn with me to 1 John.

1 John chapter 2.

1 John 2 · chapter mention

John gives us a biblical illustration of this.

Stumbling around in the darkness.

John writes in 1 John 2, verse 7, Beloved, I'm writing to you no new commandment, but an old commandment that you had from the beginning.

1 John 2:7

The old commandment is the word that you have heard.

At the same time, it is a new commandment that I'm writing to you, which is true in him, meaning in Jesus, and in you, because the darkness is passing away, and the true light is already shining.

Whoever says he is in the light and hates his brother is actually still in darkness.

Whoever loves his brother abides in the light, and in him there is no cause for stumbling.

For whoever hates his brother is in the darkness and walks in the darkness and doesn't know where he's going because the darkness has blinded his eyes.

Do you see how this works?

You're in Jesus, you have the light, you can look around, you don't stumble.

You understand this book.

Or you hate your brother, which is evidence you're not in Jesus, and you're one, in the darkness, two, you walk around in the darkness, and three, you don't even know where you're going.

Because you're blind, you can't see anything.

Have you ever been stumbling around late at night in your house?

Someone left a let's say a Lego on the floor.

You couldn't see it, you step right on that thing.

Is it because it wasn't obviously there?

No, of course it was there.

You could have seen it if the lights were on.

You just were in the darkness.

That's John's illustration of what it's like not having Christ and approaching this book.

Let me give you another illustration.

This was from my own life.

Uh a number of years ago, Darlene and I went to Mexico and we stayed at a hotel there, and we arrived at night.

And when we arrived, uh, we got into our room and we looked out on the balcony, and it was a nice scene.

There were uh lamps and torches flickering all about, and you could see the kind of reflection of the pool, and there was a nice uh, you could see the other rooms and the rest of the hotel.

But we were told that this was supposed to be right next to the ocean, right?

Beachfront property, and we couldn't see anything.

We looked where the ocean was supposed to be, and it's just blackness, and we were far enough away we couldn't actually hear it either.

So I'm just kind of having to guess that that's true at that point.

Can't really see it.

And then we wake up the next morning and the sun has risen.

And because of the sun rising, all of a sudden, the ocean, it's there.

Now, did the ocean go anywhere at night?

Did it leave and scurry away and then come back in the morning?

No! It was there all the time.

I just needed a light that was strong enough and powerful enough to show me that it was there.

And so it is with the sun of life.

Only one light is powerful enough to light up this word.

And that light only revealed what was obviously already there.

That is the way that it is with the illumination of the light of Christ.

When Jesus turns on the spiritual light, you see by his light, and you only see what has been clearly written there on the pages of scripture all along.

Maybe some of you can remember when you first became a Christian.

I know I certainly can.

And maybe like the first time or two you read the Bible after becoming a Christian, and you were like, how did I not see that?

Do you have that experience?

I had that experience, I've shared this story once or twice before.

Uh when I was a new Christian, uh, I thought I was kind of a literary genius or something, and so uh I descended into my parents' basement where all good uh post-college grads live, and uh decided I was gonna do an experiment, and I got my favorite work of literature, Moby Dick, and I got a Bible that my mom had just bought for me, and I thought, okay, I'm gonna compare these two and see which of these is is really legit.

And so I took a whole day and I read one chapter in Moby Dick that's really cool, and it's got this awesome image about faith is like jackals haunting the graves, and it's it's a neat text.

And I read it and I took a bunch of notes and was done after a day of studying it.

And then the next day I went to the Bible and I did the thing you should never do when you go to study the Bible for the first time.

I just opened it in the middle and started reading, and lo and behold, the Lord led me to uh Psalm chapter 19, is where I happen to open.

Psalms 19 · chapter mention

The heavens are telling the glory of God.

The sky is declaring the work of his hands, day to day pours for speech, night to night reveals knowledge.

And so I said, Okay, I'll start studying this, and I'll just make notes.

And however many notes I make, I'll then I'll compare the two and see which is better.

So I start studying Psalm 19 and I'm making notes.

Oh, that's cool.

I hadn't seen that before.

Okay.

And then I close it.

I get up the next day and I open my Bible back up.

There's Psalm 19.

And I start reading it again, and I realize, oh, I hadn't seen that before either.

And so I start taking more notes and more notes.

And then the next day I get up and I read Psalm 19 and I'm taking more notes.

And three months later, I'm still reading Psalm 19.

And still taking notes.

Why?

What had changed?

I'd read the Bible before.

What was different?

Illumination.

The light of Christ had given me sight.

Carl F.

H.

Henry says it this way: quote, the Spirit illumines the truth.

Not by unveiling some hidden inner mystical content behind the revelation, but by focusing on the truth of revelation as it is.

The Spirit illumines and interprets by repeating the grammatical sense of Scripture, and in so doing, he in no way alters or expands the truth of revelation.

Can I say it this way?

Illumination makes the obvious obvious.

Illumination makes the clear clear to us.

That's what Jesus does when he lights up our eyes to read his word.

And I think that's why, now we're transitioning into the rest of the actual sermon.

I think that's why Jesus says six times in the Gospel of Matthew, have you not read?

Or one time, have you never read?

What he's saying when he says, Have you not read, is he's affirming God spoke clearly.

And you should be able to read this and understand it.

Like it's so obvious.

It's right there.

The conclusions I'm drawing from this thing are right there on the page.

If you're not seeing it, it's almost like you haven't even read it before.

And of course, Jesus always says this to the Pharisees or the Sadducees, who are probably the most well-read opposition he could face.

Have you read that?

Yes, we've read the book.

We memorized the Old Testament.

And Jesus says, it's almost like you have never seen it before.

He's saying, God has been good enough to speak this text clearly, and it's right there, so it should be obvious.

And if you don't get it, it's just because the lights are off.

You have so little understanding, it's like you've never read it.

When Jesus, then at the end of Luke's gospel, illumines his disciples, he's just causing them to see what they should have seen all along.

Another way to say this is illumination just helps us to do plain Bible reading.

Jesus himself shows us what that's like.

And what we're going to do is we're going to look just in the Gospel of Matthew, because that's what Ezekiel did, just in the Gospel of Matthew, and try to see if we can glean some principles from Jesus about how we ought to read the scriptures now that they're illumined for us.

If we've met Christ and we've received him, how ought we to read it?

And I think what we'll find is that Jesus not only gives us light to see what the Bible says, like content, but he also helps us to see how it says it.

Jesus, effectively, if we read him well, teaches us hermeneutics.

Hermeneutics is just a fancy theological term for how you read the Bible, the lenses that you use through which you read the Bible, the principles and the rules that you use as you approach a text.

And if we look at Jesus and look carefully, I think we'll find that he can teach us how to read our Bibles when the light is on.

And so that's what we'll do with the rest of our time.

Very quickly, we're going to run through seven different adverbs about how Jesus teaches us to read our Bible with the light on.

Turn with me to Matthew chapter 22.

Matthew 22 · chapter mention

Matthew 22.

These texts are going to be familiar to you, so I'm not expositing all these texts, I'm just making little observations from each of them.

Matthew chapter 22, verse 41.

Matthew 22:41

Jesus, being confronted by the Pharisees, now turns it around on them and asks his own rebuttal.

Now while the Pharisees were gathered together, Jesus asked them a question, saying, What do you think about the Christ?

Whose son is he?

And they said to him, the son of David.

And he said to them, How is it then that David in the Spirit calls him Lord, saying, The Lord said to my Lord, Sit at my right hand until I put your enemies under your feet.

If David calls him Lord, how is he his son?

So Jesus is quoting Psalm 110 here in order to produce a stumper of his own, and to show how the Messiah relates to David according to that text.

And all I'm wanting to observe here is that this whole argument totally falls apart if you do not read the Bible authorially.

Authorially, meaning that you care what the author intended when he originally wrote it.

Look at the text, verse 43.

How is it that David in the Spirit calls him Lord, saying, yada yada, if then David calls him Lord, how is he his son?

Do you see how the argument doesn't make any sense if one, David isn't actually the author, or two, we don't care what David thought, even though he was the author.

And I'm sure you've been exposed to this before.

This is rampant in higher education, the idea that nobody really cares what the original author of a text thinks.

We just care what it means to me.

That's so foolish and totally apart from any normal way of reading any text.

And that's not at all how Jesus reads the Old Testament.

Jesus says, no, when I read David, I care about what David thought.

That's the only way this makes sense.

The Lord said to my Lord, that that pronoun, my, only makes sense if it relates to David.

Otherwise, this wouldn't be confusing.

And also note that Jesus says, how is it that David in the Spirit calls him Lord?

Isn't that interesting?

He's affirming there the dual authorship of Scripture, that there's inspired by the Holy Spirit and written by men.

And yet there's still one intent for the author.

So if you're reading the Bible with lights off, one way that you could get this wrong is just by saying, well, what does this mean to me?

Now, I do care about what the Bible means for you, for your life, how it applies, but what it means to you is really insignificant, isn't it?

What's significant is what the Bible meant to the author.

When they wrote it, what did they intend?

Because that's what it means forever.

Never changing.

That's what it means to read the Bible authorily.

We care about what the original authors intended, and that's how Jesus read his Bible.

Secondly, Jesus teaches us to read the Bible grammatically.

Some of you are shuddering, having flashbacks in seventh grade.

Grammatically.

Matthew chapter 22, the passage that we read at the beginning about the man who dies and the woman who marries the seven brothers, and who are they going to be married to in the resurrection?

Matthew 22 · chapter mention

Look at Jesus' response.

Matthew 22, verse 29.

Matthew 22:29

You are wrong because you know neither the scriptures nor the power of God.

Wow.

What a statement to those who are supposed to be the experts in the scriptures.

He's saying you don't get it.

For in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven.

But then listen to this.

He's going to address the actual issue.

You don't even believe in the resurrection, but I'm going to tell you that it exists.

Verse 31.

As for the resurrection of the dead, have you not read what was said to you by God?

I am the God of Abraham and the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob.

He is not God of the dead, but of the living.

How does that argument work?

And Jesse taught this recently, so I'm sure you all remember.

The way this argument works is that Jesus, quoting Exodus chapter 3, verse 6, bases the argument for the resurrection on the tense of a verb.

Exodus 3:6

I am, and always will be, by implication, the God of Abraham and the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob, who have by Exodus passed away.

But I'm still their God right now.

The tense of a verb.

Just think about the precision that Jesus has as he reads his Bible.

Isn't that incredible?

But also the import of something as mundane and yet so critical as grammar, the rules of language.

You know, like nouns and pronouns and verbs and all the rest.

All of that matters.

Without grammar, there is no meaning.

Language is totally useless without grammar.

You have to read grammatically.

You know, Paul makes a similar kind of grammatical argument in Galatians chapter 3, verse 16.

Galatians 3:16

He's talking about the seed promise, and he says it's not offsprings, it's offspring.

It's not plural, it's singular.

That's a grammatical argument.

And that matters.

It matters to Jesus, it matters to our understanding of the text.

That's why Jesus will say in Matthew chapter 5, not one jot or tittle is going to pass away from the law.

Matthew 5 · chapter mention

You can't get rid of any little mark because all of it matters to the meaning of the text.

If you want to read it rightly, with the lights on, then you pay attention to those kind of things.

Third, you read the Bible historically.

Historically.

Turn with me to Matthew chapter 19.

Matthew 19 · chapter mention

Matthew 19.

Or Jesus, confronting the Pharisees, deals with the issue of divorce, and again goes to the text, Matthew 19, verse 3, and the Pharisees came up to him and tested him by asking, Is it lawful to divorce one's wife for any cause?

Matthew 19:3

And Jesus' answer was, Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh, so they are no longer two, but one flesh.

What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.

What's important, what I want to observe at least in this text, is when he says, He who created them from the beginning, male and female.

What's Jesus assuming about the Genesis account, Genesis 1 and 2, that he's quoting from here?

Well, he's assuming it happened.

He's assuming it really occurred.

It was a historical event.

It's not a myth, it's not a legend, it's not just a folk tale or a theological talk.

No, he's saying this actually happened.

God created them, male and female, Adam and Eve, male and female, from the beginning, and then he talked to them and brought them together, made them married, made them one flesh, and because he did that, he established the basis for how we should understand marriage going forward.

And that's how he answers this question.

Meaning, not only does Jesus see there being theological import to narratives in the Old Testament, he also sees them as being historical, as actually having happened.

And I'm sure you're familiar, there's all kinds of arguments that have been made in the last 200 years trying to discredit the historicity of the Bible, trying to make the argument that scripture is really just a collection of stories.

It's all made up.

That's not Jesus' approach to it.

You know, he says the same thing in Matthew chapter 12 when he's interacting with the Pharisees.

Matthew 12 · chapter mention

Have you not read how David, when he was hungry?

Or have you not read how the Queen of Sheba?

I mean, he assumes these are real people who really lived in time in this world.

And if you don't read it that way, then none of it makes sense.

And I just want to make a brief note here about Matthew 19.

Jesus' assumption is that the Genesis account of creation, Genesis 1 and 2, is totally historical.

That's actually how it happened.

It's not a fable, it's not a myth, it's not just like, well, we looked at the Epic of Gilgamesh and then we made our own version.

That's not how he thinks about it.

No, this actually happened.

And that is so critical for us as Christians, isn't it?

If you get rid of the creation narrative, if you get rid of creation as actual human history, you lose everything.

There is no theology if you get rid of creation.

If you say, well, it's just a story that was made up, don't pass go, don't collect 200.

You lose any ground to stand on for anything that God says afterwards, especially his claim to own the creation and to be able to make demands on it.

I mean, the gospel itself is undermined if you don't have a doctrine of creation.

If you don't believe it actually happened.

So Jesus is saying, listen, this thing is so obvious.

If you just read it, have you not read, then you would know this really happened.

Fourth, Jesus says to read the Bible contextually.

Contextually.

Turn with me to Matthew chapter 4, as we look at Jesus in the wilderness being tempted by Satan.

Matthew 4 · chapter mention

Remember, he's baptized, he's driven out into the wilderness by the Spirit to be tempted by the devil.

If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread.

He answers with the Bible.

But I'm interested here in the second of the temptations.

Matthew chapter 4, verse 5.

Matthew 4:5

Then the devil took him to the holy city and set him on the pinnacle of the temple and said to him, If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down, and then Satan quotes Scripture.

For it is written.

This is from Psalm 91.11.

He will command his angels concerning you, and on their hands they will bear you up, lest you strike your foot against the stone.

Do you get the argument?

He's saying, Listen, the Old Testament said, if you jump off the pinnacle of the thing, the angels are gonna catch you.

You're fine.

What's the problem with that?

Well, if you took these verses on their own, they may seem to say that.

Maybe.

But if you took them in context, they definitely do not say that.

Look at Psalm 91.

The whole Psalm is written to someone who has the exact opposite attitude of someone who presumes against God.

It's written to someone who trusts in God and looks to God as their satisfaction and joy.

It's not written to someone who presumes that God will give them some kind of weird prosperity blessing if they just lay hold of a promise in the way that they want to by ripping a text out of its context.

No, Jesus says you have to read this thing correctly, and so he corrects Satan in verse 7.

Again, it is written, you shall not put the Lord your God to the test.

He's saying, if you use that text in that way, it's using it wrongly, and you're trying to test God by doing so.

And you guys have heard this before, all kinds of weird prosperity perversions of different texts that are ripped out of their immediate context in Scripture, Jeremiah 29, 11.

I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, right?

Philippians 4.13, Tim Tebow on his face.

I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.

You guys have seen this, right?

You can take any text and you can rip it out of its context and make it mean whatever you want it to mean, right?

Is that how language works?

Is that how the Bible works?

Jesus would say no.

You have to see it in its context.

Understand it rightly in relationship to the words and the paragraphs and the books around it.

You read it contextually.

Now, all four of these principles are the kinds of principles for reading that you would find, you should find anywhere outside of the church.

These are kind of ubiquitous principles for reading and finding authorial intent.

But I'm going to give you three more, and these are a little bit more unique to Scripture itself.

But they're still just telling us what's clear and obvious when we read the Bible with the lights on.

So, fifth, read the Bible intertextually.

Intertextually.

Turn to Matthew chapter 21.

Matthew 21 · chapter mention

Matthew 21.

This is Jesus telling a parable about the tenants, the wicked tenants, and it is just chock full of Old Testament texts.

He says, here another parable, Matthew 21, 33.

There was a master of a house who planted a vineyard and put a fence around it, and dug a winepress in it, and built a tower, and leased it to its tenants, and went into another country.

And just right there, if you're a Jew listening to this at this point in time, you already know what that's a reference to.

Jesus is intentionally connecting this story with Isaiah chapter 5.

Isaiah 5 · chapter mention

He's using almost the exact same language.

He's talking about a vineyard that's supposed to produce crops.

In Isaiah 5, it's a vineyard, Israel's the vineyard, and they won't produce fruit, and so God destroys them.

So here, similar, Israel's this vineyard.

And then he says, when the season for fruit drew near, he sent his servants and the tenants to get his fruit.

And the tenants took his servants and beat one, killed another, and stoned another.

These are just references to things that actually happened to God's prophets in the Old Testament.

Jeremiah 37, 15, Isaiah, Zechariah, 2 Chronicles 24, 20.

All of these things had happened.

And then again he sent other servants more than the first, and they did the same to them.

And finally he sent his son to them, saying, They'll respect my son.

But when the tenants saw the son, they said to themselves, This is the heir, come let us kill him and have his inheritance.

And they took him and threw him out of the vineyard and killed him.

When therefore the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those tenants?

And of course Jesus is laying the bait for them, and they fall right into the trap.

They said to him, He will put those wretches to a miserable death, and let out the vineyard to other tenants who will give them the fruits in their season.

And then here again Jesus appeals to the Old Testament.

Jesus says to them, Have you never read in the scriptures, the stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone?

This was the Lord's doing, and it is marvelous in our eyes.

Psalm 118, verses 22-23, saying, Listen, if you had read that and understood it, you would get, I'm talking about you.

Psalms 118:22–23

You're the one rejecting the cornerstone.

And then he goes on to quote even more Old Testament.

Therefore I tell you, the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people producing its fruits, and the one who falls on this stone will be broken to pieces, and when it falls on anyone, it will crush him, which is a reference to Daniel chapter 2, verse 35, and Isaiah 8, 14.

Daniel 2:35

Do you see how much Old Testament is just in this one little parable?

That's all over the Bible.

The Bible is constantly like that.

There's so many connections back and forth, even just in the Old Testament, referencing the Old Testament itself.

You get all the way to the end of the Bible, you get to Revelation.

Some say Revelation has more than 500 plus quotations or allusions to the Old Testament in it.

One man, Roger Nicole, says that he thinks 10% of the New Testament is just Old Testament.

The Bible's constantly referring to the Bible.

So if you're reading the Bible with the lights off, well then I think you just take every text as an isolated thing.

It's just a little daily bite for the day and has no relationship to the text around it.

That's not at all how the Bible works.

Jesus sees the unity of Scripture and God's united voice speaking together through all of it.

Six, Jesus teaches us to read the Bible fruitfully, fruitfully.

Matthew chapter 13, what Jesse read earlier, the parable of the sower, which we won't go into at length, but just notice a couple of comments that Jesus makes about the parable.

Matthew 13 · chapter mention

Matthew chapter 13, verse 18, he says, Hear then the parable of the sower.

Matthew 13:18

When anyone hears the word of the kingdom and does not understand it, the evil one comes and snatches away what's been sown in his heart.

So that's the problem, isn't it?

The sowing of the seed is the hearing.

You get this, you read it, you hear it preached.

The question is, who understands it?

Who appropriates it?

And the answer, down in verse 23, as for the one that was sown on good soil, this is the one who hears the word and understands it.

He indeed bears fruit and yields in one case a hundredfold, in another sixty, in another thirty.

Really, this is just what we've been saying last week that if you want to understand the Bible, you gotta obey it.

If you want to understand the Bible, you gotta bear fruit.

Bearing fruit is evidence that you have the Holy Spirit resident in you.

Is going to illumine this thing so that you can read it and understand it and obey it.

If you want to understand the Bible, you have to be willing to submit your life to it and bear fruit by it.

That's how understanding comes.

That's what Jesus says in John chapter 15.

John 15 · chapter mention

He says, if you abide in me and in my word, then you'll produce fruit.

And then lastly, I couldn't come up with a good word for this, so I used an arcane word.

We read the Bible Christianly.

Technically a word.

I found it.

The other terms that are good have been co-opted and used to mean other things, so I'm using Christianly.

What I mean by that is that you read the Bible and understand it's all about Jesus.

It's all pointing to Christ, it's all leading to him.

All scripture is pointing to Christ and to his glory.

And man, does Jesus get that?

Turn to Matthew chapter 26, where Jesus now, being arrested and about to be crucified, says over and over and over again, This book is about me.

Matthew 26 · chapter mention

Matthew chapter 26.

Matthew 26 · chapter mention

Peter takes out his sword, cuts off the high priest here, verse 52.

Jesus says to him, Put your sword back in its place.

For all who take the sword will perish by the sword.

Do you think I can't appeal to my father and he'll at once send me more than twelve legions of angels?

But listen to this.

How then should the scriptures be fulfilled?

That it must be so.

Or down in verse 56, but all this has taken place that the scriptures of the prophets might be fulfilled.

Or jump back to verse 24.

Jesus says in his Passover with the disciples, the Son of Man goes, it is written of him, but woe to that man by whom the Son of Man is betrayed.

He says, It was written, I was gonna go.

Of course I was.

Verse 31.

He says, You will all fall away because of me this night, for it is written, I will strike the shepherd, and the sheep of the flock will be scattered.

That's about him.

He's saying that prophecy was about me.

And then turn over to verse 64.

Jesus now on trial, high priest, demanding answers.

The high priest says, I adjure you by the living God, tell us if you're the Christ, the Son of God.

And Jesus said to him, You've said so.

But I tell you, from now on, you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of power and coming on the clouds of heaven.

He's quoting Daniel 7 there.

And Jesus is saying, All of that is about me.

This whole time, this book that you've been reading, that you think is about you, and how you get to heaven and you live your life, you missed it.

That's why he says in John chapter 5, verse 39, you search the scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life, and it is they that bear witness about me.

John 5:39

Verse 45, don't think that I'll accuse you to the Father.

There's one who accuses you, Moses, like the Old Testament, the Torah, on whom you have set your hope.

For if you believed Moses, you would believe me, for he wrote of me.

I mean, how could it be any clearer?

This book is a book about one man, and that man is God, and his name is Jesus.

And it if you read it without seeing that, then you really are reading it with the lights off.

I hope you appreciate what Jesus teaches us about reading the Bible here.

It's pretty obvious.

It's pretty plain.

It's really on the face of it.

Bible's about him.

He's all over the place.

You read it authorally, you read it grammatically.

A bunch of these is just how you're supposed to read anything and how most people read everything else that they read.

Jesus is just saying, turn on the light and see what's really there.

We are doing a Bible reading plan, and it requires us to read through the Gospels with my kids, and so I read a while ago the Gospel of Matthew with my son, Danielito, at night.

And we got to Matthew chapter 14, which has a number of different miracles in it.

Matthew 14 · chapter mention

Jesus hears that John the Baptist is dead, he feeds 5,000, he walks on the water, he heals some people.

And you know, I pretty much just read the text.

I didn't really explain anything, just making sure that my son's tracking with it.

He's four.

And then we get to the end of it, and I said, okay, Papas, what is this chapter about?

Remember, talking about Jesus walking on the water, Jesus healing people, Jesus feeding the 5,000.

You know what he said?

That Jesus is God.

I think a lot of the work that the Lord does when he illumines us and teaches us to read his word, it actually is teaching us to unlearn a lot of the bad ways we've picked up to read scripture, isn't it?

And that if we could just see with the eyes of a kid, it would be so obvious.

Jesus is God.

Friends, the Bible is so clear that a four-year-old can get it, and so dense that all of church history has been dedicated to its study.

And it only happens in Jesus' light.

I hope that gives you confidence.

I hope that makes you trust your Bible.

You can actually read this thing and understand it.

Jesus seemed to think you could.

Well then, friend, there's just one place you have to go.

It's him, it's the light.

He's the only one who can light this book up for you and show you the truth that's really here.

So would you go to him?

Would you receive him?

Would you say, I know that I have a darkened mind and a darkened understanding, and I need desperately, you, Jesus, to show me what's true.

And if you would, Jesus says, all who come to me, I won't cast out.

Let's pray.

Father, our hope is built on nothing less than Jesus' blood and righteousness.

It is on him and him alone that we cast our whole souls.

Everything that we are and everything that we have, we give to Christ.

In exchange, we get life and light.

We get him.

So we thank you and we praise you for writing a book so clear and giving us the light that we need to read it in Jesus Christ.

I pray that you would illumine the hearts and minds of the dear saints here.

And that their Bible study in the morning and in the evening would be rich and full of application and greater vistas of the glory of Christ every day.

Father, you are so great, and your greatness is unsearchable.

And yet we search the scriptures day after day because we want more and more of you.

So we pray, give us light, turn the lights on, so that we can see that which is real and eternal.

We pray all of this in Jesus' name.

Amen.

And now for parting word for Pastor Jesse Johnson.

Thanks for joining us.

If you're in the Washington, D.C.

area, I would love to see you at Emmanuel Bible Church.

For more information on our church or our current service times, go to iBC.church.

For more information about the Master Seminary and their Washington, D.C.

location, go to TMS.edu.

I hope this resource has been a blessing to you and it helps you seek the Lord daily, serve others around you, and share the gospel with folks.