Click here to hear an audio presentation of this material.
Personal Touch
As I related in a previous post, during the height of the COVID pandemic, my counselor friend said that in addition to good information, the other thing we need during periods of high anxiety is social support, or personal touch.
Really, the ultimate reason we can trust the Bible is because Jesus is the ultimate focus of the Bible. John 1:14 says that “the word” (that is, Jesus) “became flesh and dwelt among us.” Hebrews 4:15 assures us that “we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin.” In other words, the ultimate focus of the Bible is on a savior who has experienced life “in every respect.”
To put it another way, reading the Bible this way as opposed to just a book of rules and ancient stories is the difference between a person coming to be with you when you are suffering and offering trite platitudes and another person who has suffered in the same way coming to be with you and empathizing with your pain by being present, listening, relating, and then offering hope. That is what Jesus does for us in the Bible.
Therefore, in order to understand how the Bible personally touches, or connects, with us, we need to understand the central focus of the Bible who has experienced the life we experience.
There are at least four things we should know about Jesus who is the ultimate focus of all of Scripture.
- You can trust his character, so you can trust his word. Neither the highest Jewish court nor the highest Roman authority in Jerusalem found any character flaw in Jesus. Even a Roman centurion concluded after seeing all Jesus endured: “Certainly this man was innocent!” (Lk. 23:47). Jesus’ life as it is recorded in scripture leaves you with not just a dilemma, but a trilemma. Since he claimed to be the Son of God and worked undisputed miracles, he is either a liar, a lunatic, or the Lord.[1] If he is either of the first two, one would have to be a fool to trust in scripture. If he is the Lord, it is our greatest error not to trust in scripture. Though these are words no generation wants to hear, we can at least take comfort that the world is as Jesus said it would be: “In this world, you will have troubles” (John 16:33).
- His life is unparalleled in power, so you can trust his word. This one line in Scripture has proven to be undeniable proof of Jesus’ bodily resurrection to otherwise unbelieving Jews and Gentiles alike: “Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers alike, most of whom are still alive” (1 Co. 15:6). If the resurrection were going to be proven a hoax, this would have been the chance to do so, through cross examination of these five hundred witnesses. However, regardless of persecution and even martyrdom, no eyewitness of the risen Christ ever denied it.
- Jesus came to reveal the love of the Father, so you can trust the kind purposes of his word: In the gospel of John, Jesus says, “If anyone loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him” (Jn. 14:23). There are often experiences where our circumstances seem to be at odds with the goodness of God claimed in the Bible. The Bible does not claim to give us an answer as to why these things happen; in fact, it prioritizes trust in God’s sovereign goodness when the answer is unclear. But this is not blind trust. It is trust founded on what we do know, regardless of what we don’t know. Jesus said, “Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13). In other words, Jesus is the proof that God is good and that he loves us, because by dying in our place, he has demonstrated the ultimate act of love.
- Because he is still a sympathetic person, you may trust his word to comfort you in difficult times: Another reason we can trust Jesus and therefore trust the Bible is because he is not removed from our experiences. Hebrews 4:15 says, “For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin.” By becoming a man, Jesus subjected himself to “all the miseries of this life.”[2] So when we face the most difficult circumstances in our life, Jesus speaks to us in his word, saying, “I understand and I am with you.” And because he raised from the dead, he is still sympathetic, not in the past-tense as a historical figure but in the here-and-now as a living high priest interceding presently on behalf of believers (Hebrews 7:25).
There is a wonderful allegorical tale of the Christian life called Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), written by an English Puritan named John Bunyan (1628-88). At one point the main characters, Christian and his best friend Hopeful, are kidnapped, beaten, and imprisoned by Giant Despair. One night as the two men are in the throes of depression and praying desperately for help, Christian exclaims, “What a fool am I, thus to lie in this stinking dungeon, when I may as well walk in liberty! I have a key in my bosom called Promise that will, I am persuaded, open any lock in Doubting Castle.
Then said Hopeful, ‘That’s good news, good brother, pluck it out of thy bosom and try.’” So he did, and the “door flew open with ease”—then the outward door, and then the iron gate, and they escaped with speed. Awakened by the creaking of the gate, Giant rose to pursue them, but he “felt his limbs too frail, for his fits took him again, so that he could by no means go after them.” [3]
As we have revealed, the answer to the question, “Can we trust the Bible?” is ultimately answered by understanding who Jesus is. As we have seen, he is a savior who has taken on human flesh and experienced life in the broken world in which we live with all its heartache, temptations, and adversity—even death. Therefore, each time you pick up the Bible, Jesus is reaching out to you personally to say, “I understand; I’m listening; and here is the hope to bring you through what you are facing.”
To explore more on this topic, read, "Who is Jesus?", which summarizes some ways people have generally tried to answer that question and proposes a way we might go about answering that question you might find surprising.
–––
[1] C.S. Lewis.
[2] Westminster Shorter Catechism, Question #27.
[3] John Bunyan, Pilgrim’s Progress, (Norton, 2009), 92.