Walking with Jesus through His Word

Discovering Christ in All the Scriptures

Dennis E. Johnson

• Publisher: P Publishing
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781629951218
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Systematic Theology & Ethics

Dennis Johnson introduces us to the clues embedded by God in Scripture that point us to Christ—revealing that the Bible is about a relationship between God and his people.

Part 1

Beginning the Journey

1

The Walk through the Bible That Sets Hearts Afire

The title of this book implies an audacious claim. The claim is that the sixty-six books contained in the Christian Scriptures, the Bible, which were written by dozens of people in many different centuries, are bound together by a central theme, a single plotline, and a unique Hero, Jesus the Messiah. Admittedly, two-thirds of these Scriptures were given long before Jesus was born in Bethlehem, and do not even mention him by name. To be sure, these documents come in different forms: historical narratives, law codes, wisdom aphorisms, theological discourses, poems, letters, symbolic visions, and more. Still, this study seeks to persuade you that Jesus is the central figure in the outworking of God’s plan for human and global and cosmic history, the divine agenda that unifies everything in the Bible, from Genesis to Revelation. Moreover, this study proposes a way of reading Scripture that is, I believe, rooted in Scripture itself and that will equip you to appreciate more fully how the whole Bible reveals Christ and his mission of rescue and renovation.

Readers might have several reactions to the claim on which this book is built. If you are a believer in Jesus, a follower of Jesus, you might be excited by the prospect of learning more about how to read your Bible in such a way that each text shows you more of his glory and grace. Yet you might have encountered approaches that connect the Bible’s diverse pieces to Christ in ways that seem far-fetched and unpersuasive, twisting texts in ways that suggest more about the interpreter’s creativity than about the meaning and message that the Holy Spirit intended to convey. Implausible links between far-flung Bible passages and Jesus’ person and mission make us justifiably cautious, even suspicious. I share your concerns, but invite you to explore a sounder way of connecting all the Scriptures—especially the Old Testament in all its diversity—to Christ, the approach that we see applied by the inspired authors of the New Testament itself. Since the Bible is God’s Word, we can and must let it teach us how to read its constituent books. Let’s learn from the Bible how to read the Bible.

If you are not a Christian, you might find highly dubious the claim that so many documents, produced by so many people in so many venues over so many centuries, could possibly have the sort of unity that I am affirming. But that is only one of many things about Christianity that you find hard to accept. Perhaps you question whether everything in the universe could have been created by an invisible, all-powerful, personal God. Maybe you have trouble with the Bible’s insistence that what is wrong in this world is attributable, in the end, to the fact that we and our ancestors have broken this God’s moral law. If these biblical teachings bother you, you probably balk at the Bible’s insistence that Jesus is the only way to find peace with God (John 14:6; Acts 4:11–12). I invite you to keep an open mind about all these aspects of the Bible’s teaching and to consider the possibility that they all—including the claim that the whole story finds integral unity in Jesus of Nazareth—actually fit together into a coherent view of reality and human experience. Let me go a step further and challenge you to compare your own way of making sense of life to the Bible’s perspective, which has captivated millions of people over thousands of years. I believe you will find that the Bible’s diagnosis of our human condition and the remedy it prescribes—Jesus’ sacrificial death on behalf of others and his powerful resurrection—are both intellectually cogent and personally transforming.

In this introductory chapter, we will ask the Bible to answer two questions:

(1) Should we expect to “walk with Jesus through his Word”—that is, throughout the whole span of the Scriptures?

(2) If we should, why is it important for us to expect to “walk with Jesus through his Word”?

In the last chapter, we will look more fully at the second question, why it is important to link the Bible’s every passage to Jesus. But you have every right to expect a preliminary answer to the “why?” question up front, before you invest your time in chapters 2 through 10. Happily, the answer to the first question will, in itself, begin to help us with the second. Why should we read the whole Bible, Old Testament as well as New, in connection with Christ? Because that is the way Jesus himself taught his closest followers to read the Bible.

As you see in the table of contents, we are using the metaphor of taking a journey from a point of origin to a destination to represent the process by which careful readers discover the routes that God’s Spirit embedded in the Scripture to lead us through the diverse terrain of the Bible toward its center, the person and saving mission of Jesus the Messiah. This analogy is suggested, in part, by an illustration given by Charles Spurgeon, the great nineteenth-century preacher, which will open chapter 2. It also echoes the way in which God’s Word evokes the Israelites’ forty-year pilgrimage from Egypt through wilderness to the Promised Land as an illustration of believers’ whole life in this world (Heb. 3–4), imagery that John Bunyan turned into one of the world’s all-time best sellers, The Pilgrim’s Progress. I am suggesting that learning to trace the lines, to follow the paths, that link passages throughout the Scriptures to Jesus at the center is comparable to a traveler’s task of finding the way to a desired destination. Sometimes the “navigation” is an easy matter of following clear and unmistakable road signs on highways. At other times, it will demand a more experienced explorer’s skills to discern “the lay of the land” and to identify landmarks that subtly signal paths to our destination.

In this first chapter, we join a group of three travelers as they walk together the seven-mile (11 km) journey from ancient Jerusalem to a small town called Emmaus. As we eavesdrop on their conversation, recorded in Luke 24, we will see that the answer to our first question must be “Yes, we should definitely expect to hear every text of Scripture as a witness that points us to Jesus Christ.” And one answer to our second question (“Why is it important?”) is simply: “Because that is the way Jesus taught his apostles to read the Word.” As we walk alongside Cleopas and a colleague—two disillusioned, downcast disciples—and a mysterious stranger, as we overhear him lead them through a survey of Israel’s ancient Scriptures, I hope you will find your heart, as they did theirs, burning with hopeful wonder.

Jesus’ Sluggish Students “Before” and “After”

Before we set out from Jerusalem with Cleopas and his companion and before the stranger joins them, we should take one step back for perspective. Consider the contrast between what we see and hear in Jesus’ disciples throughout the four Gospels, on the one hand, and the way they behave and speak in the book of Acts, after Jesus’ resurrection from the dead and ascension to heaven, on the other.

The Apostles’ “Before”

The apostle Paul wrote to the church in Ephesus that “the mystery of [God’s] will, according to his purpose,” was “set forth in Christ as a plan for the fullness of time, to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth” (Eph. 1:9–10). You can’t get much clearer than that: God has one plan for history. That plan finds its climax in “the fullness of time,” and its unifying focus in Christ. But the Gospels show that Jesus’ disciples simply did not get the point that he tried repeatedly to impress on them throughout his earthly ministry: that the whole Scriptures—the Old Test...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Part 1: Beginning the Journey
• Part 2: “You Are Here”
• Part 3: Reading the Road Signs
• Part 4: Getting the Lay of the Land
• Part 5: Recognizing the Landmarks
• Part 6: “Are We There Yet?”
• Appendix: Themes Linked to the Three Theocratic Offices
• For Further Reading
• Index of Scripture
• Index of Subjects and Names