Must is a good Four Letter Word!
Meditation for the week of March 18, 2012
Mark 14:48-50 Then Jesus answered and said to them, "Have you come out, as against a robber, with swords and clubs to take Me? I was daily with you in the temple teaching, and you did not seize Me. But the Scriptures MUST be fulfilled." Then they all forsook Him and fled.
MUST! It is a good four letter word. Do we know what MUST means? In John 3:7 the Lord says we MUST be born again. In John 3:14 the Lord says He MUST be lifted up or crucified. In Acts 4:12 Peter says that we MUST be saved.
Now if the Scriptures MUST be fulfilled, what Scriptures would the Lord be talking about? It would have to be the old testament Scriptures that the Jews knew and studied. Psalm 22, Isaiah 53 and other Scriptures told of the suffering and rejection of the Messiah. Those Scriptures MUST be fulfilled. One of the great proofs that God Inspired men to write the Scriptures is that they speak so vividly and accurately about the birth, death and resurrection of the Lord. But these passages were written years before they were fulfilled.
Saying we are Christians while not knowing what the Scriptures say is like saying we are lawyers without knowing what our constitution says. We are fortunate that we have the Bible translated into our own language. We have many scholars who have researched the manuscripts we have available in the original languages who tell us that we can rely on these manuscripts. Now while the Lord may be referring to old testament Scriptures in our verses for today, obviously the new testament Scriptures also MUST be fulfilled. I am sure that it is possible to be a Christian without having a good knowledge of the whole Bible; but, in our day, should we be Christians who do not have a grasp of the basic truth of the whole Bible? It is impossible to be saved without depending on the promises of the Scriptures. Many people have depended on those promises through the oral testimony of others. Some have depended on those promises while knowing only a few promises of the Bible, but ultimately, if we are saved, we are depending on the promises of the Bible so we need to know those promises.
Ignorance of the Bible by people who are educated and have numerous Bibles in their homes and who go to churches of some sort regularly is a real problem today. People used to know what John 3:16 meant and nearly every child could quote it. That is not true today. And even when people can quote it, many do not know that John 3:16 is “the Gospel in a nutshell.” One would not need to know more than John 3:16 to go to heaven, but should we be satisfied to only know John 3:16? No!
No matter how we came to faith in Christ and no matter how confident we are that we are saved, Satan at some point will try to get us to question the truth of the Bible concerning our eternal destiny and our current relationship with God. When Satan puts doubts in our minds, we have to have know the Scriptures well enough to rebuke Satan with promises that God has made. That is what the Lord did when Satan tested him after being 40 days in the wilderness. The Lord rebuked Satan with quotations from the old testament and started every rebuke with “it is written.” He was the original Bible Banger.
People are often discouraged from reading the Bible for themselves because they are exposed to so many different interpretations of the Scriptures. We need not be confused, however, because our teacher is the Holy Spirit; and He is going to reveal Christ to us through the Bible. In the old testament Christ is coming, and in the new, He came and is coming again. In the old testament God had an earthly people called the Jews. They are an object lesson for the church, the spiritual people that God has chosen to represent Him in this age. The old testament helps us understand Who God is and the principles by which He works. But the old testament is written to the nation of Israel and its ceremonies are not the church’s in the new testament. While those old testament ceremonies speak of Christ, today we have Christ Himself and worship Him according to new testament teaching. When reading the Bible, we need to stick to three principles of interpretation. 1. Context. 2. Context 3. Context. And remember, if you have never trusted in Christ as your Savior, then there is another principle that must be remembered. That principle is that what you think is right is probably wrong. God does not think like we think. That is why we must repent (have our thinking changed) in order to believe.
There are too many MUSTS in the Scriptures for us to be careless in our study of the Bible.
Bruce Collins