How Do You Read?

Begin where the accusation is sharpest, and notice what Jesus does not say. He is speaking to men who have given their lives to the Scriptures. He does not tell them they have read too much.

Read that slowly, because almost everyone quotes it wrongly. Jesus does not say the Scriptures are worthless, or that searching them was a waste, or that they were mistaken to expect life there. He says the Scriptures are the witnesses to Him — “it is they that bear witness about me.” The text was doing its job perfectly. The men were the ones who stopped early. They arrived at the signpost, read it with immense care, and made camp under it.

That is the Pharisee’s knowing in one sentence: the Word held as a possession rather than travelled as a road. And it produces a recognisable set of habits.

And yet — hold this next fact against the temptation to despise them. When Jesus opens His most withering chapter against the scribes and Pharisees, He begins by telling the crowds to do what they say.

Their content was largely sound. Jesus attacks the fracture between what they knew and what they were. He says the same thing again about their scrupulous tithing of garden herbs — and the sentence people always leave off is the important one:

Now the other side. Why can a person not begin to be known by God without the Word? Because in Scripture, being known by God is a covenant relationship, and covenants are made of words. God has bound Himself to make Himself available by speech. Remove the speech and you have not got a purer religion; you have got silence, and then you have got whatever you happen to imagine.

Paul makes the chain explicit and runs it backwards until it terminates in a word being spoken:

The Shepherd says the same thing from the other end. His sheep are identified not by a feeling but by a recognition — and you cannot recognise a voice you have never heard:

And notice where the accent finally falls. The goal of all this is not the size of your knowledge. Paul catches himself mid-sentence to say so:

Here is the verse that should decide this argument for anyone who thinks study is the danger. The most frightening sentence in the Gospels is not addressed to scholars. It is addressed to people with a ministry résumé.

Look at the résumé they read out: prophecy, deliverance, mighty works. Not one line of it is study. These are the most active, most demonstrative, most obviously Spirit-credentialled people in the room — and the verdict falls on them anyway. So “I never knew you” is not a warning against learning. It is a warning against being unknown, and a busy man can be unknown just as thoroughly as a bookish one. The Pharisee and the activist arrive at the same door by opposite roads.

If anyone still suspects that the answer to misused Bible knowledge is less Bible knowledge, the wilderness settles it. In Matthew 4 the devil quotes Scripture at Jesus — and he quotes it almost perfectly. We compared his citation word-for-word against the Greek Old Testament on our own shelf. Here is exactly what he did.

Here is a measurable fact that should end the debate on its own. The Shema, as Moses gave it, names three faculties. We checked the Hebrew and the Greek on our own shelf, and both have three.

Now count the faculties in the Gospels every time that commandment is quoted. We pulled all four citations from the Greek New Testament:

Jesus’ last recorded instruction to the eleven settles the question of whether learning is optional, because it commands the church to teach — and you cannot teach what you have not learned.

Take that final clause apart, because both errors die inside it.

This section is written plainly and on purpose, because it is the part most often gotten wrong — and gotten wrong by sincere people who are trying to avoid hypocrisy.

Four texts get used to argue that study is unnecessary. Each of them says something true. None of them says that.

And set against them, the plain testimony runs the other way:

If the answer to Pharisaism were ignorance, God would not have built the New Testament’s theology through a man trained at the feet of Gamaliel. Paul is the living proof that the fault was never the education.

And at the very end of his life, chained, having been caught up to the third heaven, having written most of the letters we now study — what does he ask for?

Scripture’s own picture for right knowing is not the study carrel. It is a meal. You do not master food; you let it become you.

And this is precisely what God promised to do in the new covenant — note carefully how the Hebrew and the Greek each put it, because they are not identical:

So the practices below are not a programme for advanced Christians. They are how a person gets the Word inside, where being known happens.

On the road to Emmaus, Jesus gave two men the longest Bible study in the Gospels — Moses, then all the Prophets, then all the Scriptures. It was, by any measure, an academic exercise: texts, in order, expounded. And here is what it produced.

Same scrolls the Pharisees had. Same verses. Same careful exposition, in order, at length. The difference was that the One the text was about was present, and they let Him do the opening. That is the whole distinction this study has been drawing, and here it is in one afternoon on a road: exegesis and burning hearts are not rivals. They were the same event.

Abide — μείνητε. Not visit. Not master. Stay there, until you are the one being known.

Scripture set in the Septuagint (LXX) / Greek and the ESV per the practice of Pleasant Springs Church. Greek New Testament from MorphGNT/SBLGNT; Greek Old Testament from CATSS (Rahlfs); Hebrew from the Masoretic text. The language of discipleship as apprenticeship follows Dallas Willard (1935–2013).