Sunday, April 22, 2012

Opening Your Mind to Understand the Scriptures


Third Sunday of Easter
April 2, 2012
Then He opened their minds to understand the Scriptures…

Wouldn’t that have been great to be there? To stand before Jesus as He opened your mind to understand the Scriptures? There are those times you’re in Bible Class and you’re really examining a passage in the Bible and it just doesn’t make sense. Or those times when you’re at home reading the Bible or spending time in devotions and a passage of the Bible says the opposite of what you would expect God to say in His Word. Or the times when someone challenges you on a particular passage in the Bible and you’re stumped, conceding to them that you really don’t understand what that passage means.

How great would it be to have Jesus right there with you opening up your mind to understand the Scriptures? If you could go back to certain times and places in history, which ones would you choose? This is one of those events in history I would want to have experienced. What must that have been like for Jesus to open their minds to now understand the Scriptures? Was this like a light-bulb moment, where now they understood it all perfectly? All their questions were answered instantaneously; all those things didn’t quite get before they now had a handle on; all those passages that had stumped them before they could now rattle off a coherent explanation of them.

This isn’t quite what happened on that day when Jesus opened their minds to understand the Scriptures. As much as we would love to have an immediate and perfect grasp of the Scriptures, on this side of heaven that’s just not going to happen. Certainly one of the things the apostles understood as they now had their minds opened by Christ to understand the Scriptures was that they still had a life-long learning and growing process in those very Scriptures.

So what does it mean that He opened their minds to understand them? He tells us in the next words He says: “Thus it is written, that the Christ should suffer and on the third day rise from the dead, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins should be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem.” This is an amazing statement by Jesus. He’s not just saying, “You guys now understand that the Old Testament prophesied that I would suffer and on the third day rise from the dead.” The Old Testament did indeed prophesy that, but Jesus had on other occasions said this very thing. Look at what He says now, He says that the Old Testament prophesied these things as well as this: “and that repentance and forgiveness of sins should be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem.” Start at Genesis 1:1 and read all the way through Malachi 4:6 and you won’t find those words in the Old Testament.

But if we back up for a moment, and those first two things Jesus mentioned, His suffering and resurrection, what are we to make of these things having been prophesied in the Old Testament? Does it specifically say, as Jesus says in our Gospel reading, it is written, that “that the Christ should suffer and on the third day rise from the dead.” If you look in the Old Testament will you find those words? Most Christians don’t feel at all uncomfortable in finding that those exact words are not found in the Old Testament. It is amazing enough at how the words of the Old Testament do prophesy Jesus’ suffering, death, and resurrection. There are passages such as Psalm 22 and Isaiah 53 that when you read them you can’t help but marvel at how words that were written centuries before Christ so accurately describe what Jesus went through.

So it’s pretty easy for us Christians to look at the Old Testament and see how they do indeed prophesy Jesus and His suffering, death, and resurrection. It’s easy enough for us to see in those and many other passages in the Old Testament prophecies that do not mention the name of Jesus a direct fulfillment in Jesus. When Jesus opened the apostles’ minds to understand the Scriptures, though, what do you think they made of Jesus’ next words, “and that repentance and forgiveness of sins should be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem”? Now that they had this new-found understanding of the Scriptures directly from Jesus, were they able to open up directly to chapter and verse in the Old Testament and find where this thing Jesus was talking about was prophesied?

What in actuality was happening is what happens to you. Though you weren’t there on that day, what Jesus did for them on that day He does for you today. When Luke says that Jesus opened their minds to understand the Scriptures, he is showing us that what Jesus was doing was opening up the Scriptures for us as well. How this is is because he was showing that Jesus wasn’t just saying that there are particular passages in the Old Testament that prophesied Him and that He fulfilled. He was showing that the Old Testament serves this purpose: to bring Christ to us. The Old Testament is admittedly tough to understand in many ways. But it’s impossible to understand if you don’t see what Jesus is doing here, namely, showing us that He is the thing the Old Testament is delivering to us.

There is a religion that only holds to the Old Testament and not the New Testament. There are many religions that reject the New Testament even as they do the Old Testament. But Christians look at the Old Testament and also the New Testament and see the Word of God. The Old Testament shows us how God paved the way for salvation to come about through Christ. The New Testament shows us the fulfillment of that. The New Testament lies in the Old Testament concealed. The Old Testament lies in the New Testament revealed.

Another way of saying this is that apart from Christ the Old Testament is just another book. Christ is at the center and heart of the Old Testament, but in a concealed way, not as in the New Testament. Whereas, for example, the Old Testament will say that salvation will come through the Suffering Servant and that by His stripes we are healed, as in Isaiah 53, the New Testament states overtly that Jesus is the one who was our Servant, who suffered on the cross, and that it was in His suffering and death we are healed of the sickness of our sinfulness and are forgiven.

This is why it’s such an important statement when Jesus says that it is written “that repentance and forgiveness of sins should be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem.” What Jesus is doing is not saying, “If you just turn to Isaiah chapter 30 you’ll find those exact words there.” What He is doing is showing us that He is the one who interprets the Bible. He is the one who shows us what the Old Testament is saying, teaching, and prophesying. And what that is is, well, it’s Him. He is the object of the message and the prophecies of the Old Testament. They point to Him. They show us Him. They deliver to us salvation that is completely in Him.

This is what He opened the disciples’ minds to understand. It is what He does for you in your life. When you read and study the Old Testament you aren’t just reading a bunch of historical stories and vague prophecies. You reading, and receiving, Christ who suffered, died, and rose for you. And you are being delivered to you something you might never have realized before: “repentance and forgiveness of sins should be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem.”

You can see how Jesus’ having opened the disciples’ minds to understand the Scriptures bore out as Peter points to this reality in the First Reading: “what God foretold by the mouth of all the prophets, that his Christ would suffer, he thus fulfilled. Repent therefore, and turn again, that your sins may be blotted out, that times of refreshing may come from the presence of the Lord, and that he may send the Christ appointed for you, Jesus, whom heaven must receive until the time for restoring all the things about which God spoke by the mouth of his holy prophets long ago.” You can see how this bore out, as two thousand years later we are sitting here in San Diego, around the globe from where it started in Jerusalem and we are hearing this very same message, as Jesus said it was prophesied in the Old Testament, “that the Christ should suffer and on the third day rise from the dead, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins should be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem.”

You and I carry the very same message out in our lives, to the people we know and the people we meet, San Diego becoming our Jerusalem. You don’t need to wonder if you really understand the Scriptures. You don’t need to fear that you don’t know what to say. You know exactly what the Scriptures teach and what they give: Jesus, the one who suffered, died, and rose for the sins of the world and the repentance and forgiveness that comes about through Him. Amen.

SDG

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