Have You Not Read?

How often does Jesus ask that question? How often does He ask it as a stinging rebuke to leaders who were leading God's people down the wide road of destruction? How often does the question hit us hard in the gut because we have in fact read it many times?

That's the real indictment, isn't it? Not Jesus' contemporaries who have become biblically illiterate. Not the Jewish leaders who seemed blind to the truth of God's Word. Not the world around us that seems to daily devise new ways of ignoring God. No, the real sting of Jesus' question is to us who claim to be his disciples.

Sure we read His Word (I pray that you do and exhort you to start, if you don't), but do we really grasp it? Do we ask the Spirit to illumine the Word written by men, yet inspired by God and crafted over 2 millennia to have a single unitary message? Do we ask, seek, probe the Word itself to see the beating heart, not just of the human author, but that of the heavenly Author? Can we say with Jesus "Man does not live on bread alone, but on every word that proceeds from the mouth of God"?

The next time we sit down with the Bible, let this question linger:  "Have you not read?"

To God Alone be the Glory.