To know Scripture you must know Christ. . .

Teaching a study on St. Paul I found a case study on the difference between knowing the Scriptures and knowing them through the lens of Christ.  Saul knew the Word of God but he didn't.  He knew the Word of God wrongly.  So wrongly, in fact, that he was completely blind to the One who spoke that Word into the minds of the writers and fulfilled that Word (both the promise of the prophets and the righteousness of the law).  The scales had to drop from his eyes and this happened only after an encounter with Jesus.  Then and only then did Saul become St. Paul know the Scriptures.  He admits this over and over again in his epistles.

The Bible is the most unknown book in the world.  Those outside the faith, presume that they know what Christianity is and what the Scriptures say.  They insist they know and have judged the Word according to their reason and experience and decided it is not for them or it is false.  They do not know what they are judging because Scripture can only be rightly known through Christ.  St. Paul knew the Scriptures differently when He knew Christ by faith.  What is true for St. Paul is true for all of us.  Yet the Scriptures might also be a stranger to the folks in the pew if we read them outside Christ.  As Luther once put it, the Scriptures cradle Christ -- Old Testament as well as New.  Apart from this, we are not reading the rightly and will miss what it means.  The great temptation for Christians is to read Scripture as if it were Aesop's fables -- stories with a moral to them.  In the end, the moral almost always is about being moral and so it always ends up being about changing your behavior and mostly the voice of law.  Sort of like when you know an exercise nut who ends up dying and his exercise equipment gets sold at a yard sale --  so the moral of the story is don't exercise and you will live longer.  Not exactly.  The parables of Jesus particularly suffer from this.  Not to mention how we read the book of Proverbs as if these were little Ben Franklin style witticisms that are good to know but don't have much to do with Jesus.

Too much Bible study today is concerned with knowing details of the Scripture without knowing the central message of the Word and how it points to Christ and makes Him known.  The fascination with the things about which we are curious is not quite matched with our desire to know Christ and to make Him known.  The reality is that these curious details are marvelously entertaining and certainly interesting but do they really contribute to knowing Christ and walking in His way?  Could we be as blind to the Christ of Scripture as St. Paul -- knowing the Word without knowing its author?  That is a question worth our attention as we plan out Bible studies that will interest folks and pack them in.  It is also a question worth our attention as we read God's Word devotionally.