Here at Genesis, we believe in the authority of the Bible as God’s divine revelation of Himself. So we teach the Bible and encourage followers of Jesus to have a steady intake of Scripture. But one of the fundamental issues we must tackle when reading the Bible involves the question of who the Bible is really about. For most of my life I have sat under teachers and preachers who saw the Bible primarily as a set of moral stories and codes seeking to teach us how to live. Laws were there to give us a set of rules to govern life. Stories are told and interpreted much like Aesop’s fables, with an underlying moral that if we can grasp somehow our lives will be better. For example, I often heard the story of David and Goliath and was told to have faith like David and I too can slay the giants in my life. All things told, the basic framework was that the Bible is about me, teaching me how to live.
In the past couple years my study of Scripture has led to a pretty significant shift in the way I understand the Scriptures. Several times in Jesus teaching he informs people that the Bible is not functionally about them, it is about Him. He tells the religious leaders that the search the Scriptures thinking that in them they will have eternal life, but the main point of the Scriptures, Jesus says, “Is (that) they bear witness about me (John 5:39-40).” Immediately after his resurrection, Jesus walks with two disciples on the road from Jerusalem to the village of Emmaus. These men do not recognize Jesus, and He uses the opportunity to converse with these men, “Interpreting to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself (Luke 24:27).” When speaking about the Law of God, Jesus said that he did not come to abolish the Law, but to fulfill it (Matthew 5:17). In other words, the Law was given by God in the Old Testament to demonstrate to us that we are guilty, but then to show us the only One who kept it completely, thus pointing us to Jesus. What Jesus is teaching in these and several other passages is that we should read with a Christocentric lense, an approach that realizes that everything in the Bible is ultimately about Jesus, pointing to Jesus, and showing us our need for Jesus. Therefore the big story in the Bible is not moral reform, but the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
What sparked this post was seeing this video from Tim Keller on this topic, so I wanted to post it for you.