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TranscriptWhat was Jesus's view of Scripture?

Today there are many different ways of looking at Scripture. Is it authoritative? Is it true? There are many different views on this, but you know what I find to be very interesting is that many people end up holding a view of Scripture that Jesus himself didn't even hold. They might be trusting in Jesus for salvation, that he's going to secure their place in the life after this one, and then they're going to go to heaven because of him, but his view of Scripture is not refined enough. It's not academic enough. It's not, well, true enough for them.

I want to spend some time looking at what Jesus believed and taught about the Scriptures. Now, I did title this episode How Did Jesus Read the Bible? It is true that Jesus didn't have the “Bible” as we have it today. I mean, some of the books weren't even written yet, and that's true, but I think this is not actually a problem when we dig into some of the reasons why we should trust Scripture. We can look at how Jesus looked at the Old Testament, at least today.

Scripture points to Jesus

The first point we're going to look at is that Jesus taught that all of the Scripture pointed to him. It ultimately finds its fulfillment in him, and in the details of his life, death, and resurrection, and the gospel. Why do we think this? Well, it's interesting. We read in Luke when some of the disciples are on the road to Emmaus and they're complaining, they're downtrodden, their messiah just got killed, and they don't understand that he has risen from the dead. Jesus is walking in their midst, and they don't recognize him. He's concealing himself from them, and here's what he says to them after they're lamenting their situation. He says,

”You foolish people. How slow of heart to believe all the prophets have spoken,"

He's saying here that the prophets spoke things that they did not believe and understand. He's going to go on to explain what those things were.

He says,

”Wasn't it necessary for the Christ to suffer these things and enter into his glory?"

Then Luke tells us,

“Then beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them all the things written about himself in all the scriptures."

He interpreted the Old Testament to them in light of who he was and in light of the fact that it all points to him and finds its fulfillment in him. The Old Testament teaches us how the sacrificial system worked in God's eyes, and why do we need to know that? Well, because it ends up telling us what we should expect and how the sacrifice of Jesus worked.

Jesus was the last sacrifice of the old covenant. It so happens that he was the sacrifice that actually perfected the people it was offered for, unlike the sacrifices and blood of bulls and goats, but nonetheless, we see how God dealt with sacrifices and sin in the Old Testament, and that's exactly how we should understand that he does it in principle in the New Testament, except for Jesus is the new and better sacrifice. He actually perfects those the sacrifice was offered for.

The Old Testament in many ways points to Jesus. We see this in the prophets. We see this in Isaiah, where Isaiah tells of one who will be bruised for our iniquity and crushed for our sin, and the chastisement that will bring us peace will be upon him. That points to Jesus.

Now, that's a little obvious, but so much of the Old Testament points to Jesus. The law points to Jesus. The law as an unmeetable standard pointed to one who needed to be able to meet the standard so we could be credited with his righteousness. There are so many of these parallels, but when we read the Old Testament especially, which were the scriptures Jesus had at the time, with Jesus-centered lenses, we will start to see these parallels…