On the West Coast in the late 1950s, when she was just 8
years old, a girl named Storm began picking fruit as a full-time farm laborer
for less than $1 per hour. Storm and her family moved often, living in Native American
migrant worker camps without electricity or running water. She wasn’t allowed
to have books because they are too heavy to carry around when you keep moving
from place to place. She recalled:
The conditions were pretty
terrible. I once told someone that I learned to fight with a knife long before
I learned how to ride a bicycle. And when you were grinding day after day after
day, there’s no room in you for hope. There just isn’t. You don’t even know it
exists. There’s nothing to aspire to, except filling your hungry belly.
When she was 12, something arrived in camp that changed her
life: a bookmobile came to the fields. She approached it but hesitated. A staff
member waved her in and explained it was completely free to check out books for
two weeks – no strings attached. She tells about the books:
And I took them home and I
devoured them. I didn’t just read them, I devoured them. And I came back in two
weeks and had more questions. And he [the staff member] gave me more books and
that started it. That taught me that hope was not just a word, and it gave me
the courage to leave the camps. That’s where the books made the difference. By
the time I was 15, I knew there was a world outside of the camps. I believed I
could find a place in it and I did.
She eventually went to night school and worked in a library
for 30 years. [1]
There is a much more powerful book: the Scriptures. And it
tells not just of a wider reality beyond the place where we live, but of unseen Reality. And it leads us to a hope not just of improved living
conditions but of eternal life. The Gospel explains it in John chapter 5.
• What are the Scriptures?
In John 5, the Lord was in a lengthy discourse with the
religious leaders in Jerusalem.
During the talk he said he was the Son of God (equal with God, 5:19) and the
Son of Man. And he gave three witnesses to the fact of his divine nature
(having the same being and powers as God does) and divine authority (his role
of judge in the Day of Judgment when he calls the dead out of the graves and
some of the dead experience the resurrection for life and the others experience
the resurrection for judgment), 5:19-29. These are the three witnesses. Witness
one was John the Baptist (5:32-25). Witness two was the miracles Jesus was
performing (5:36). And witness three was the Scriptures (5:37-47), the voice of
God. Let’s look at number three in depth.
37And the Father who
sent me has himself borne witness about me. His voice you have never heard, his
form you have never seen, 38and you do not have his word abiding in
you, for you do not believe the one whom he has sent. 39You search
the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is
they that bear witness about me, 40yet you refuse to come to me that
you may have life. 41I do not receive glory from people. 42But
I know that you do not have the love of God within you. 43I have
come in my Father's name, and you do not receive me. If another comes in his
own name, you will receive him. 44How can you believe, when you
receive glory from one another and do not seek the glory that comes from the
only God? 45Do not think that I will accuse you to the Father. There
is one who accuses you: Moses, on whom you have set your hope. 46For
if you believed Moses, you would believe me; for he wrote of me. 47But
if you do not believe his writings, how will you believe my words?”
Behind everything we can see, feel, and touch, there is a
personal, absolute, invisible Reality – present with us and yet utterly
transcendent from us: God. He can be overlooked, he can be denied, but he
cannot be willed away. He is there. In the fullness of God, there is the
invisible Father. The invisible Father sent the second Person of the Deity, the
Word into the world to be seen, heard, and touched. The Word – the Son of God –
became a human being, the Son of Man.
However, the personal, absolute, invisible Reality has
always had a voice. He is there and he is not silent. That voice has taken
three notable forms. First, there is the creation itself:
The heavens declare the glory of
God,
and the sky above proclaims his
handiwork.
Day to day pours out speech,
and night to night reveals
knowledge….
Their voice goes out through all
the earth,
and their words to the end of the
world. (Psalm 19:1-2,4)
Historically, the third major voice has been the Word who became
flesh, known to us as Jesus Christ:
For the law was given through
Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God; the
only God, who is at the Father’s side, he has made him known. (John 1:17-18)
There has been a critical second way: the Scriptures. Notice
the words of the Lord from John 5. God the invisible Father does not have a
form that you can see with your eyes, nor does he have a voice that you can
hear with your ears (v 37). Nevertheless, he has a word (v 38) and that word is
the Scriptures (v 38). You can hear him by reading and listening to this
written word.
The Scriptures are the voice of God. Are we listening?
• Which are the Scriptures?
And how can I identify that written word, the Scriptures? In this
section of our exploration, the reader becomes a gatherer of evidence. This
requires the patience of a scientist in a laboratory.
First, the Scriptures
had a contemporary portion, as Jesus was speaking. It consisted of the writings
of the Hebrew law-giver, Moses (v 45-47). As passages in the Gospel show, it
also consisted of the Hebrew prophets (both history and prophecy) and the
Hebrew poetical writings (chiefly the Psalms). To marshal the data from the
four-fold Gospel and from contemporary sources would require an article of
significant length. We will need to be content with sampling. Here are three
examples each from prophets and poets:
At that hour Jesus said to the crowds, “Have you come
out as against a robber, with swords and clubs to capture me? Day after day I
sat in the temple teaching, and you did not seize me. But all this has taken
place that the Scriptures of the
prophets might be fulfilled.” (Matt 26:55-56)
And he began to say to them, “Today this Scripture has been
fulfilled in your hearing.” (Luke 4:21 citing the prophet Isaiah 61:1-2)
He [Jesus] said to them [the disciples], “. . . . For
I tell you that this Scripture
must be fulfilled in me: ‘And he was numbered with the transgressors.’ For what
is written about me has its fulfillment.” (Luke 22:36-37 citing the prophet Isaiah 53:12)
Jesus said 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’?” (Matt 21:42 citing Psalm 118:22, 23)
Jesus answered them, “Is it not written in your Law, ‘I said, you are
gods’? If he called them gods to whom the word of God came—and Scripture cannot be broken— . .
.” (John 10:34-25 citing Psalm 82:6)
When Jesus had spoken these words, he lifted up his
eyes to heaven, and said, “. . . . I have guarded them [the disciples], and not
one of them has been lost except the son of destruction, that the Scripture might be
fulfilled.” (John 17:1,12 citing Psalm
109:8)
In Alexandria,
Egypt, the
Hebrew Scriptures (or Old Testament) were translated into Greek (3rd
to 1st centuries BC) called the Septuagint. In Alexandria the codex (pages sewn together
into a book) became popular. In the Septuagint the Old Testament ran from
Genesis to Malachi. However, in Jerusalem, where scrolls continued to be used,
the scrolls of the Hebrew Scriptures were typically stored in three bins and regarded as
three categories: (1) the law, (2) the prophets and (3) “the rest of the books”
(Prologue to Sirach 1:1). Sirach (also called Ecclesiasticus) dates to about
180 BC with the prologue by his grandson dating to about 132 BC). The broken
fragments of 4QMMT (2nd century BC) from the Dead Sea Scrolls seem
to imply an arrangement similar to the threefold arrangement of Sirach (Moses,
prophets, David & events):
[And] we have [also written] to you so
that you may have understanding in the book of Moses [and] in the book[s of the
Pr]ophets and in Davi[id and in the events] of ages past . . . [2]
Regardless of the precise arrangement of the books among
Jewry in the ancient world, the words of Jesus signify the contents of the
Hebrew Scriptures/Old Testament. First:
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)
In the standard “scrolls” arrangement for the third division
of the Hebrew Scriptures, the Book of Psalms was placed at the beginning and
could therefore serve of the name of the whole division.
[Jesus said,] “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees,
hypocrites! . . . . Therefore I send you prophets and wise men and scribes,
some of whom you will kill and crucify, and some you will flog in your synagogues
and persecute from town to town, so that on you may come all the righteous
blood shed on earth, from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah
the son of Barachiah, whom you murdered between the sanctuary and the altar.
(Matt 23:29,24-25)
Zachariah was not the last martyr. But in the standard
“scrolls” arrangement of the Hebrew Scriptures, Abel (the
first martyr) was slain in the first book, Genesis (Gen 4:8), and Zacharias (the
last martyr) was slain in the last book, Chronicles (2 Chronicles 24:20 -23).
Our brief survey shows that the Scriptures had an existing
portion during the ministry of Jesus and that it comprised what Christians call
the books of the Old Testament. Questions about precise composition cannot be
answered here. (Examples: Were Esther and Ezekiel regarded as canonical by
rabbis during the ministry of Jesus? What books did the Dead Sea Scrolls
community regard as Scripture? What about the deutero-canonicals recognized at
two church councils in North Africa?)
The Scriptures also
have a future portion beyond when Jesus was speaking in Jerusalem. Jesus said, “I am the way, the
truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6).
But he himself did not write any letters or books. Instead “he appointed twelve
(whom he also named apostles) so that they might be with him and he might send
them out to preach . . .” (Mark 3:14). “Apostle” was a personal envoy, a
special and exclusive representative. [3] Jesus told this group, “Whoever
receives you receives me, and whoever receives me receives him who sent me”
(Matt 10:40; cf. John 13:20).
For this purpose Jesus endowed the apostles with the Holy Spirit—the
Spirit of truth—who will
teach them all things and recall to mind what Jesus had
said, will guide them into fullness
of truth and will also explain the future (John 14:26;
15:26; 16:13-15). In Hebrews 2:1-4 the apostles are compared to the angels of the Old Testament as
transmitters of God's revelation. Heb 2:3 asks us, “How shall we escape if we
neglect such a great salvation? It was declared at first by the Lord, and it
was attested to us by those who heard,” the apostles.
“Last of all, as to one untimely born, he [Christ] appeared
also to me [Paul]” (1 Cor 15:8). This apostolic office gave Paul a peculiar
authority shared by all the apostles: “So then,
brothers, stand firm and hold to the traditions that you were taught by us,
either by our spoken word or by our letter” (2 Thess 2:15). The apostles handed
down sacred traditions from Jesus Christ explained and enlarged upon by the Holy Spirit. Their
authoritative writings are also Scripture. As Peter says of Paul,
And count the patience of our Lord
as salvation, just as our beloved brother Paul also wrote to you according to
the wisdom given him, as he does in all
his letters when he speaks in them of these matters. There are some
things in them that are hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable
twist to their own destruction, as they do the
other Scriptures. (2 Peter 3:15-16)
At the time of the Lord’s earthly ministry, the Scriptures
had a contemporary portion – the Old Testament – and they had a future portion – the New
Testament, the writings directly sponsored by the apostles. But . . .
• So what?
Unfortunately, Jesus had to tell his listeners, as recorded
in John chapter 5, “39You search the Scriptures because you think
that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me, 40yet
you refuse to come to me that you may have life.” It is possible to never hear
or read the Scriptures. It is possible to read and re-read the Scriptures but
allow personal prejudice to miss the point. It is possible to give diligent
attention to the Scriptures but miss the message by getting bogged down in the
minutiae of detail. Where do you stand?
Journalist Marvin Olasky's grandfather was born in the
Ukrainian town of Olyevsk,
the Anglicization of which became their American surname. The grandfather, Louis
Olasky, originally Lepke ben Yehoshua, escaped the Czarist army in 1912 and
ended up in Malden, Massachusetts.
Raised Jewish, as a teenager, grandson Marvin Olasky read
H.G. Wells’ History of the World and
Sigmund Freud’s Future of an Illusion.”
By age 14, he said, “I thought all this belief in God was just childish stuff.”
While in college during the Vietnam War, his non-belief in God led to embracing
communism.
However, as a doctoral candidate in American Culture at the University of Michigan, he needed to demonstrate
foreign language mastery. So he chose Russian "in order to speak to my
Soviet big brothers," he recalled. Along the way he picked up a New
Testament in Russian and started reading — very slowly “puzzling out the
words.”
“I started believing there was really something here. This
is not just a book written by man, there’s something inspired by God in this,”
he recalled. This is the power of the Book, the Scriptures. The Scriptures have
self-authenticating power and life-changing power. But it is not enough to have a vague belief, “Hey, there’s
really something here." You must find out what the Scriptures are all about and embrace that.
Then Marvin Olasky got an assignment to teach a course in early American
literature — which largely consisted of the sermons of leading Puritan
preachers Jonathan Edwards and Increase Mather, as well as authors such as
Nathaniel Hawthorne (dead men from 300 years ago). Wholesome books have uplifting power — and these books led the young Olasky to come to personal, repentant faith
in Jesus Christ. Marvin’s worldview and life were transformed. He received the
sure hope of eternal life in the age to come, and he received transforming, spiritual life now. [4]
Are you willing to search the Scriptures and come to Christ
that you may have life?
[1] “Once Forbidden, Books
Become A Lifeline For A Young Migrant Worker,” StoryCorps, NPR Morning Edition,
May 30, 2014. A conversation of Storm Reyes with his son, Jeremy Hagquist.
http://www.npr.org/2014/05/30/317035044/once-forbidden-books-become-a-lifeline-for-a-young-migrant-worker
[2] James VanderKam &
Peter Flint, The Meaning of the Dead Sea
Scrolls (London:
T&T Clark, 2002), pp 169-172.
[3] R. David Rightmire,
“Apostle,” Baker’s Dictionary of Biblical
Theology, (ed) Walter A. Elwell (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 1996).
http://www.biblestudytools.com/dictionaries/bakers-evangelical-dictionary/apostle.html
[4] Mark A. Kellner, “Marvin
Olasky preaches journalism through the lens of scripture, faith,” Desert News, September 18, 2014.
http://national.deseretnews.com/article/2371/marvin-olasky-preaches-journalism-through-the-lens-of-scripture-faith.html
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