When I am out on a date with my wife my goal is to have tunnel vision. When I am conversing with her I care little about who does or does not hear our conversation. If I tell her she is beautiful I am doing it for the purpose of communicating my admiration for her—I’m not doing it so some other joker will know that I’m smitten with my wife. Because, frankly, its not about them in that moment, it is about her.
Of course, if someone else hears our conversation and wants to know about this terrific wife of mine I have no problem sharing with them how wonderful she is. But I’m not really speaking to draw people in.
The Way in Which the Bible is Jesus-Centered
I wonder if we might imagine the Bible to be the same way when we say that it is all about Jesus. We say things like, “The Bible isn’t about you. It’s about Jesus. It is a story of God rescuing humanity for His glory through His Son Jesus”.
We would be saying the Bible is God speaking of the beauty of Jesus much in the same way a husband might be overheard speaking about the beauty of His wife. He doesn’t really care much if He is heard, He just wants to communicate how terrific Jesus is.
If this is our view then one would say our goal in interpretation is to simply overhear the conversation and nudge ourselves into it. The benevolent God will of course be happy to share with us the beauties of His Son—but at the end of the day the conversation isn’t much about us.
But I’m convinced there is a type of Jesus-centered reading of the Scriptures that can actually serve to, as Soren Kierkegaard said, “defend oneself against God’s Word.” Kierkegaard continues:
…I shove all this between the Word and myself and then give this interpreting and scholarliness the name earnestness and zeal for the truth, and then allow this preoccupation to swell to such prolixity that I never come to receive the impression of God’s Word. (For Self Examination, 35)
Mining the text to discover how it is all related to Jesus is well and good. And I would even argue it is a necessary part of engaging in Bible study. But we also have to come to grips with the fact that while the Bible is fundamentally about Jesus it is also a communication to us and even secondarily about us. Even as the story points to the fullness of Jesus it is simultaneously showing us our own inadequacy.
We cannot afford to stop our Bible study when we’ve discovered how the text relates to Jesus. We haven’t fully come to grips with what the Bible is saying until we can understand what it is saying to us and about us in relationship to Jesus—the Bible’s primary focus.
A quick example.
It is one thing to look at the story of David and Goliath and say that this is pointing to Christ the greater David who overturns the works of the devil. But that is not quite all there is to my Bible study.
If I’m really to see the Word of God do work on me then I need to see myself as a cowering Israelite, or perhaps as one on team Goliath. And I need to be confronted with what this says about me and my relationship to God. Then as the Word confronts me with the truth of who I really am I’m more apt to fly to Jesus.
So be Jesus-centered—but be Jesus-centered in a way that lays you so bare that only the precious gospel can heal. And heal it does.
