What's the Point of the Bible?

Text

Luke 24:36–49 ESV

As they were talking about these things, Jesus himself stood among them, and said to them, “Peace to you!” But they were startled and frightened and thought they saw a spirit. And he said to them, “Why are you troubled, and why do doubts arise in your hearts? See my hands and my feet, that it is I myself. Touch me, and see. For a spirit does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have.” And when he had said this, he showed them his hands and his feet. And while they still disbelieved for joy and were marveling, he said to them, “Have you anything here to eat?” They gave him a piece of broiled fish, and he took it and ate before them. 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.” Then he opened their minds to understand the Scriptures, and said to them, “Thus it is written, that the Christ should suffer and on the third day rise from the dead, and that repentance for the forgiveness of sins should be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things. And behold, I am sending the promise of my Father upon you. But stay in the city until you are clothed with power from on high.”

Preacher: The Word of the Lord

People: Thanks be to God

Prayer

Divine Spirit, illumine to us the words of the Lord. Show us the wealth of glory that lies beneath the old familiar stories. Teach us the depths of meaning hidden in the songs of Zion. Raise us to the heights of aspiration that is reached by the wings of the prophet. Lift us to the summit of faith that is trod by the feet of the apostle. Open our eyes, that we may behold wondrous things out of your law.

Amen.

Where to Discern Truth?

My wife and I got rid of our TV and social media about 2 years ago. Instead of spending our evenings around a TV vegging out after a day, we had been doing a lot more reading and talking to one another. One of the things we became convinced of is that we did not want to make the television the centerpiece of our home. It especially was not the way we wanted to disciple our son. Now the primary way we get news in our life is through friends and family updating us on the everyday happenings of the culture.

What strikes me now that I have spent so much time away from a habitual use of TV is when I watch it, I can’t help but see what media companies are trying to teach their audiences. Beyond all of the agendas they may have for the viewers, media that we consume on a daily basis is shaping and forming our conception of reality. It is shaping the story of the world we believe in the language, imagery, and stories being told. They want to paint the picture of the world that that not only matches reality but is designed to shape your wants and desires for what construes “normal”. Many of us get this at an intuitive level, we are being shaped by The Office, Parks and Recreation, and the news on a daily basis.

As I have grown as a Christian, I have realized that the primary place we go to turn for this narrative, the place where we are supposed to spending our time daily to understand reality about the world, is the Bible. The Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments are the only source God has given his people to direct us how we can glorify and enjoy Him. Yet these are hard and old texts that require a lot more of us than just turning on Fox news or CNN. The Bible is God’s Word preserved for us so that we can understand how to interpret reality. One of the primary ways we can best understand the Bible is by understanding it’s big message. The book opens with “In the beginning” and ends with “and they reigned forever and ever”. What kinds of texts do this? Stories, narratives. The Bible is primarily a narrative that is telling one grand story about how God has been working throughout human history to redeem humanity to himself.

We start in our text today because this is the place where our Lord Jesus tells us exactly what the big picture of the Bible is.

What is the Point of the Bible?

I have been in campus ministry for almost five years now and consistently I ask Christians who have grown up in the church, what does it mean to be a Christian or what is the main message of the Bible?” only to be returned with blank stares and shameful gazes because they don’t know the answer. I don’t think its many of the preachers fault for not trying to communicate what the Bible is trying to say, I think we suffer from a lack of coherence. Many of us do not know how the whole Bible fits together.

You may have have grown up hearing Bible stories since you were a child, about Moses and David, Elijah and Jesus, that they have become almost background noise in your life. Have you ever stopped to ponder how all of these are connected? What is the overarching message the Bible is painting for God’s people to understand?

Well our text today gives us insight into this exact answer. So we are going to look at three aspects from the text that give us clues into what the point of the Bible is. Every passage of scripture reveals Jesus by explaining at least one of the following truths about his works:

They are:

There is going to be a Messiah who will suffer, die, and rise from the dead

We must respond to this by repenting of our sins and accepting forgiveness forgiven

This message- that the Messiah’s death and resurrection make forgiveness possible- must be proclaimed to the nations.

The Bible is about God

We are introduced in our text today to the risen Lord introducing himself to the eleven disciples. Jesus has just come back from the dead and is apparently very hungry after a long trip. He asks for food from his disciples and they give him some fish to eat. They are stunned and perplexed with joy as he showed them his hands and feet which still bore the marks of the cross. It appears that when human being are resurrected, they will still carry marking of their suffering in some glorified way.

To begin with, we have to understand the fundamental lens with which to look at Scripture though. The Bible is not about you, it is about God. God is the primary actor in the narrative and humans are always doing something in response to what God has already done. This doesn’t come naturally to many people who read the Bible though. Even Jesus’ disciples didn’t seem to understand that the Bible was all about Jesus.

The Messiah Would Suffer, Die, and Rise From the Dead

The first thing we see about the Bible is that it is about a Messiah to come. Jesus tells them starting in verse 44 that “These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you.” So Jesus has been telling his disciples during his entire earthly ministry that this was going to happen and that the Whole Bible was pointing to this moment. What Jesus is talking about here is our Old Testament. When Jesus opened their minds to understand the scriptures He was giving them a lesson in how to interpret the Old Testament basically he is saying: When you read the Old testament, the main point you should be getting from is Luke 24:46-47 “and said to them, “Thus it is written, that the Christ should suffer and on the third day rise from the dead, and that repentance for the forgiveness of sins should be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem.”

Is this the message you picked up when you read the Old Testament? It certainly wasn’t my first impression. So what is Jesus doing here, he is telling His disciples that this grand narrative starting with Adam and Eve back in the garden was all pointing to Him. Jesus is getting this idea from all the way back in Genesis 3:15. You see here just after the fall of humanity, God promising to send this wounded victor who will crush the head of the serpent and in that act, be killed himself. The whole rest of the narrative you as an attentive reader should be looking for this snake crusher. We keep being introduced to people who may seem to be the one promised to come but ultimately fail to be that person.

It is finally when we turn to the New testament that we are introduced to Jesus the Christ that our expectations are high for the promised Messiah to come. That word Jesus uses, Christ, is not a name of Jesus but a title. Jesus’ last name is not Christ but he is Jesus the Christ. Christ is the Greek translation of the Hebrew word Messiah. So To say Jesus Christ is to say Jesus Messiah. This messiah is the one would would suffer and die and rise from the dead.

Illustration

We don’t often think of fulfilled prophecies in our day and age but one that I think resonates with our culture is from the book and movie series Harry Potter. Harry, the young protagonist of J.K. Rowling’s book series, becomes a wizard at a young age and quickly learns that he is swept up in an epic battle of good and evil, and he is the one who is destined to destroy the dark lord and defeat death and evil one and for all. Harry grows into this identity over the course of his life and finally does defeat evil once and for all.

Now in Harry Potter, this is made very explicit. Because Rowling is writing to Children, she makes the prophecy fulfillment motif very in your face so you would be hard pressed to miss it. The Bible is a book written by god and while it has stories in it a child can understand sufficiently, it is a dense piece of literary genius which takes an adult mind to understand fully. In the Scriptures it can take years to see this grand narrative unfolding. Don’t lost sight as your read your Bible that Jesus is the hero of the story and the one who was sent to rescue humanity.

We Must Repent of our Sins and be Forgiven

Next, after we learn that after the Messiah’s must rise from the dead, we are told that “...t repentance for the forgiveness of sins should be proclaimed in his name.” What is the biggest problem in the world according to the Bible? Death. Death according to the Scriptures is the ultimate enemy of humanity, it was never our original purpose. Humanity was made to live forever but because of our first parents fall, death has entered into the world through sin. In the garden God told Adam that if he should eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil he would surly die. So what we see is our sin earns us death. If we disobey God we deserve death.

When Jesus is saying we need forgiveness of our sins, his fundamental understand of humanity is not that we are all good in our hearts but just misguided, or that people are uneducated and if they can go to school and learn to better themselves they will all turn out okay in the end. No, Jesus is aware that ever sense the Fall of Adam and Even in the garden, humanity has been broken to to their core. Our sin separates us from a holy God makes us liable to judgment and to hell.

Illustration

You may think to yourself, that sounds extreme. My sin separates me from God, but God is a God of love and not a God of wrath. I really understand the heart posture you are coming from but God’s love and wrath are not in contradiction with one another. The opposite of love is not wrath but indifference.

If you child later today was eating lunch and then hit their sister, threw their food on the ground, and punched a hole in the wall, you would justifiably feel angry with them. I would be shocked if you did not feel angry with them for doing that. Especially because this is the fifth time you’ve told them this week! The reason you feel anger is not because you don’t love your child, but because you love them and know that behavior is not good for them. The opposite of that would actually be if you didn’t care. If you were indifferent and let them go about on a rampage through the house the did nothing to intervene, nothing to stop them. Now I am not saying you need to hit them back or respond the same way they are acting, but you would as a parent need to lovingly come and correct your children, using discipline to guide them towards maturity.

God loves you, he loves you even more than you love your child. There is a common saying that God cannot be in the presence of sin, but this is false. it is not that God cannot stand to be in the presence of sin but that sin cannot stand to be in the presence of God. When your child is on a rampage, a good parent doesn't move away from their child but moves toward their child out of love. It is your child who runs away out of fear and shame. When Adam and Even fell, it wasn’t God who recoiled but it was they who recoiled from God. When Jesus came on earth, it wasn’t Jesus who recoiled from sinners but sinners who recoiled from Him! Sin wants to keep you away from the presence of God and God loves you so much he came to pay the price of your sin because you never could.

This message- that the Messiah’s death and resurrection make forgiveness possible- must be proclaimed to the nations.

Finally, this Good News, this amazing wonderful news that God has suffered, died, and rose form the dead to offer forgiveness from sin it to be proclaimed to all the nations. God is a missionary God who has been working with humanity to accomplish his purposes since the beginning of the world. God instituted the church after Christ ascended to be the vehicle by which this message would be proclaimed to future generations.

What is amazing here is that Jesus is telling his disciples that they are worthy to spread this message because they were eyewitnesses of everything he had done! We can trust the writings of the New Testament of Jesus authority because he proclaimed that the apostles were witnesses of these things and were given the power of the Holy Spirit to accomplish that task. What is even more wonderful is that if you claim Jesus to be the Lord of your life as well, you have that same Holy Spirit living inside of you. The same Spirit given to the disciples two thousand years ago is the same one who lives inside of you and bears witness to Christ and his work on your behalf.

What this means for you is that you have been given the same spirit to proclaim the same Christ. Jesus has empowered you to go and share the message of the Gospel to your neighbors starting in Glasgow, Columbia, and to the ends of the earth.

The world is becoming progressively anti-christian in the view of reality. The church has a mission, not to save people, but to tell them of the marvelous salvation offered to them freely in Jesus Christ. As a disciple of Jesus, he has commissioned you to go and proclaim this message. You do not need seminary degree or any degree of higher learning to respond to this call. The spread of the gospel is a supernatural work done by the Holy Spirit. In Cru we define evangelism as: sharing your faith in the power of the Holy Spirit and leaving the results up to God. We say this because we do not save people. We merely proclaim the great victory that has been won by our Lord.

Conclusion

So we see that the whole Bible has been pointing to Jesus and his suffering, death, resurrection so that forgiveness of sins could be proclaimed to all the nations. This is the main point of your Bible. You need look no further than the words of the Lord than to see the whole Bible is about Jesus and what he has done for you so you could be in a relationship with him.

Brothers and sisters, do doubts about this story come up in you? Do you think to yourself that this is an old an antiquated message, that we need forgiveness of our sins? That Jesus actually rose form the dead? Doubts arose in the hearts of Jesus disciples when they saw him in the flesh after his resurrection just as doubts may arise in your hearts today. We have been given the Bible as a witness of these things so we can have confidence in the message. The doubt of the disciples should increase your own faith because you are not alone in this. It is an astonishing message to proclaim. Yet we are not preaching fairy tales, but something that truly happen in history.

Please pray with me: