Read Your Bible
How We Continue in New Life (2 of 4) · Luke 24:13–43
By Michael A. Graham
Introduction
I love this story. I have read Luke 24 many times. I read it again this week, straight through to the end of the chapter. My heart burns every time — on the road, at the table, and in that room a few verses later where they take Him for a ghost.
God speaks. He made the world by speaking — And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light (Genesis 1:3). He began the rescue of the world with a word to Abram, and the word asked everything of him and told him almost nothing: Leave your country, your people and your father’s household and go to the land I will show you… and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you (Genesis 12:1–3). At Sinai He spoke, and then He wrote: He gave Moses the two tablets of the Testimony, the tablets of stone inscribed by the finger of God (Exodus 31:18).
For centuries God sent prophets whose messages began This is what the LORD says (Isaiah 43:1; Jeremiah 2:2; Amos 1:3). And when the time had fully come He sent His Son, who is Himself the Word: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God… The Word became flesh and made His dwelling among us (John 1:1, 14). What we know of God as our Savior we know because God opened His mouth and told us.
We have been walking through A New Life one fact at a time. The last fact is that we receive this new life by repentance and faith, and then keep it the same way we got it — by repentance and faith, day after day. Jack Miller’s booklet lists four ways that keeping goes on, and it puts the list under one heading: The same way it began – in faith and prayer.
The four are these: Pray constantly. Read your Bible. Worship with others. Witness to others. We took the first of them last Sunday. The third and the fourth come on the next two Sundays.
We take the second today, and here is how the booklet says it: Read your Bible… Study it every day. It is the food for your new life and your sure guide. In it you meet Jesus and learn to claim His promises for your life.
Five of those words carry this Sunday: in it you meet Jesus. The Scriptures are where the living Christ speaks, and reading them is how we go to meet Him.
Which raises the question this week has to answer. If Christ is there in the Scriptures, why can a person read them for years and still see so little of Him?
The answer starts with the questions we bring. Most of us arrive with two questions, and they are good questions. What does God say here? And how does this apply to me? Ask those two and stop there. The answer bends toward me — my situation, my next step, my improvement — because I am the one asking and I am the one the answer is about. The Bible turns into a book about me.
Jesus named that result for men who studied the Scriptures harder than most of us do: You diligently study the Scriptures because you think that by them you possess eternal life. These are the Scriptures that testify about me, yet you refuse to come to me to have life (John 5:39–40). Their study was diligent — that is Jesus’ own word for it. Their conclusions were wrong, and those conclusions left them standing in front of the Son of God, declining to come to Him.
On the day of the resurrection Luke shows us how near a man can get and still not know Him. Two of Jesus’ own followers are walking home on a Sunday afternoon, away from a funeral that had ruined the hope they were living on. They knew their Bibles. They knew the facts of the weekend. And the risen Christ walked beside them for hours while they took Him for a stranger.
Luke 24:13–43 (NIV 1984)
Now that same day two of them were going to a village called Emmaus, about seven miles from Jerusalem. They were talking with each other about everything that had happened. As they talked and discussed these things with each other, Jesus Himself came up and walked along with them; but they were kept from recognizing Him.
He asked them, “What are you discussing together as you walk along?”
They stood still, their faces downcast. One of them, named Cleopas, asked Him, “Are you only a visitor to Jerusalem and do not know the things that have happened there in these days?”
“What things?” He asked.
“About Jesus of Nazareth,” they replied. “He was a prophet, powerful in word and deed before God and all the people. The chief priests and our rulers handed Him over to be sentenced to death, and they crucified Him; but we had hoped that He was the one who was going to redeem Israel. And what is more, it is the third day since all this took place. In addition, some of our women amazed us. They went to the tomb early this morning but didn’t find His body. They came and told us that they had seen a vision of angels, who said He was alive. Then some of our companions went to the tomb and found it just as the women had said, but Him they did not see.”
[Jesus] said to them, “How foolish you are, and how slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken! Did not the Christ have to suffer these things and then enter His glory?” And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, He explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning Himself.
As they approached the village to which they were going, Jesus acted as if He were going farther. But they urged Him strongly, “Stay with us, for it is nearly evening; the day is almost over.” So He went in to stay with them.
When He was at the table with them, He took bread, gave thanks, broke it and began to give it to them. Then their eyes were opened and they recognized Him, and He disappeared from their sight.
They asked each other, “Were not our hearts burning within us while He talked with us on the road and opened the Scriptures to us?”
They got up and returned at once to Jerusalem. There they found the Eleven and those with them, assembled together and saying, “It is true! The Lord has risen and has appeared to Simon.” Then the two told what had happened on the way, and how Jesus was recognized by them when He broke the bread.
While they were still talking about this, Jesus Himself stood among them and said to them, “Peace be with you.”
They were startled and frightened, thinking they saw a ghost. He said to them, “Why are you troubled, and why do doubts rise in your minds? Look at my hands and my feet. It is I myself! Touch me and see; a ghost does not have flesh and bones, as you see I have.”
When He had said this, He showed them His hands and feet. And while they still did not believe it because of joy and amazement, He asked them, “Do you have anything here to eat?” They gave Him a piece of broiled fish, and He took it and ate it in their presence.
Movement 1 — The Principle: Read the Scriptures — they are all about Christ (Luke 24:27)
Read the Scriptures — they are all about Christ (Luke 24:27).
On the day He rose, the risen Christ drew near to two of His own on a road out of Jerusalem (Luke 24:15), and Luke records what Christ chose to do with them. And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, He explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning Himself (Luke 24:27). He starts at Genesis and works forward. He covers the law and the prophets. And the subject throughout is Himself.
Jesus does the same thing a few hours later with the rest of His followers: Everything must be fulfilled that is written about me in the Law of Moses, the Prophets and the Psalms (Luke 24:44). Law, Prophets, Psalms — that was how a Jew named his Bible. Jesus takes the book and says it is written about Him.
So the Scriptures have a subject, and the subject is a Person. This is what makes the Bible one book instead of sixty-six. A single story runs through it, and the story is about God rescuing the world through His Son. The sacrifices, the temple, the priesthood, the kings, the exile and the way home tell that story forward, in shadow and promise, until the Son arrives in person.
Now, why does a book like that have power in a new life? Jack Miller states it plainly: Scripture has inherent power because of its nature as the Word of God. Its words are the very voice of the living God, the written words of Him who is the living, personal Word.
God says so Himself through Isaiah: As the rain and the snow come down from heaven, and do not return to it without watering the earth… so is my word that goes out from my mouth: It will not return to me empty, but will accomplish what I desire and achieve the purpose for which I sent it (Isaiah 55:10–11). Rain waters ground because that is what rain is for, and the Word accomplishes God’s purposes for the same reason — His purposes, which are sometimes other than the one we came looking for.
Jack gathers the Bible’s own pictures for this: the Word is a hammer, a fire, a sword, and food. Then he adds the sentence that keeps the pictures honest — a hammer suspended in the air never broke a rock, a fire must burn something, a sword must cut, and food must be eaten. The booklet reached for the same picture when it called the Bible food for your new life.
A child can hold this principle: this book is God talking, it tells one story, and the story is about Jesus.
Our two questions start to strain right here. We bring both of them to every passage — what does God say here, and how does this apply to me. If the subject of the book is Christ, then asking how it applies to me before asking what it says about Him makes me the subject of a book that already has one.
Read the Scriptures — they are all about Christ (Luke 24:27). Two men who had all of that in their Bibles walked seven miles beside Him without knowing Him.
Movement 2 — The Problem: I read the Scriptures, but make them about me (Luke 24:25)
I read the Scriptures, but make them about me (Luke 24:25).
Luke lets us watch the two men before he lets us hear them. Two men on a road, walking and talking, and the word for their talk means throwing words back and forth at each other. A stranger draws near, walks along with them, and asks what they are discussing. They stood still, their faces downcast (Luke 24:17).
Then listen to what they tell the stranger. Jesus of Nazareth, a prophet powerful in word and deed. The chief priests and rulers handed Him over. They crucified Him. This is the third day. The women found the tomb empty and came back with a report of angels saying He is alive, and men of our own company went and found it as the women had said (Luke 24:19–24). Every fact is accurate. They are reciting the resurrection to the risen Christ.
And in the middle of it comes the sentence that shows the story they were living inside. We had hoped that He was the one who was going to redeem Israel (Luke 24:21). That sentence names their trouble, and the trouble is coherence. Coherence is knowing the story your life belongs to, so that a good year and a terrible year both mean something. What they had seen that weekend and what they had believed all their lives could no longer be held together.
Redeem Israel. Ask what those two words meant to a Jew that week. Israel was occupied. Roman soldiers in the streets, a Roman governor who had signed the execution order that Friday, Roman taxes, Roman power over who lived and who died. The redeemer they were waiting for would break that grip and put a son of David back on the throne. That was the diagnosis: this is what is wrong with the world, and this is what God has promised to put right.
Hold that diagnosis and watch what the weekend does to it. A Messiah arrested by his own leaders, handed to Rome, and executed by Rome has failed at the one thing a Messiah was for. The soldiers are still in the streets. The governor is still in the palace. Their facts were accurate and their conclusion followed from them: He was not the one. Nothing cohered, and nothing could, because the account they were fitting it into had no room for a Messiah who dies.
They had the wrong account of what Israel needed redeeming from. The occupation was cruel, and it was also the symptom. Israel’s trouble ran back behind Rome to Babylon, behind Babylon to prophets nobody heeded, behind the prophets to a golden calf, and behind the calf to a garden. What needed breaking was sin’s hold on them, and no army takes that. So the cross reads as defeat until you know what the war was about. That is a failure of coherence and not of information.
That failure reaches well past those two men. We are not short of explanations. God built one into the way He deals with us, and every person alive works from some version of it. Do this and live: Keep my decrees and laws, for the man who obeys them will live by them (Leviticus 18:5). Sow and reap: Do not be deceived: God cannot be mocked. A man reaps what he sows (Galatians 6:7). That explanation is true. It is God’s own. And it is the first thing we reach for when something goes wrong. What did I do. What did somebody else do. What is this punishing.
The crisis comes when our experience refuses to match that explanation. Job kept the covenant and buried his children. And on that Friday the one man who had never sinned was executed by the people He came to save. It is a true explanation, and it does not cover Job’s graves or that Friday.
The two on the road were working from a narrower version of the same instinct, and they had drawn a wrong conclusion from it. Messiah meant Rome falls. Suffering meant God had withdrawn. The reasoning runs the other way just as easily: blessing means I am obeying, and a settled life means God is pleased with me. Each of those conclusions has a biblical basis, and what bends them is what we lay them against.
These two laid the weekend against a hope: they had hoped Jesus was the one who was going to redeem Israel. It was a good hope, and they were right to put it in Him. They wanted Rome broken. Jesus had come to break sin’s hold on them, which is what had put Rome there. So the events of that weekend arrived as wreckage.
Their mistake is a reading problem and not only a history problem. A man reading his Bible from inside a story too small for his life will do what they did — take in every word accurately and come out with the opposite of the truth. He is not making things up. He is fitting true words into an account too small to hold them.
Cleopas shows what a story too small does to a man’s own sentences. Are you only a visitor to Jerusalem and do not know the things that have happened there in these days? (Luke 24:18). He is telling the one Person on that road who knows what happened that the stranger beside him must be the last to hear. He assumes that what he knows is what there is to know.
That assumption is where these two are standing on the road, and it is where some of us are sitting this morning. The gospel fails to cohere for us for the same reason it failed for them. We read our circumstances through the account we have. The account holds until it breaks — the diagnosis comes back, the marriage ends, the prayer goes unanswered.
Most of us come to the Bible already carrying that account of what is wrong with the world, what is wrong with me, and what would put it right. Then we open the book looking for the fix. A God who saves by dying makes little sense to a man who has diagnosed himself as basically decent and mainly unlucky.
Here is our second question — how does this apply to me — asked by itself: what does it do for the problem I have already decided I have.
I do this. I come to most things with the answer already formed. What I should do. What somebody else should do. How it would all come out if people would listen. Getting me off that answer is hard work, and I have joked for years about printing a T-shirt to warn people. The front would say, Beware of me when I am right. The back would say, Recovering Pharisee.
Other people come to me the same way. They arrive settled about what should have happened, about what somebody else ought to do, and about how it would all come out if that person would see it. I have never argued a man out of an account like that, and I have tried. When a man’s account changes, it is because Christ has shown Himself to him.
Which brings me to the two men on this road. They have been throwing words back and forth for hours, and I recognize them, because I have done that at people for hours myself. Reformed churches turn out men who can keep it up all afternoon, and I am one of them. I listen to a brother while I work on what I am going to say next.
Jesus does something else. He does not take up their argument. He asks them what they are discussing as they walk along, and the question stops them in the road. Then He asks two more words — What things? — and He lets them say the whole of it out loud.
Luke says one more thing about that afternoon. They were kept from recognizing Him (Luke 24:16). Somebody is keeping them, and the somebody is God. In the same conversation Jesus calls them foolish and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken (Luke 24:25). God held their eyes and God holds them responsible, and the next thing Jesus does is open the Scriptures to them.
So what is a man to do with that? He can argue with God about it. He can decide God is against him and say so. He can wish God away and get on with the account he already has. Or he can ask.
If the eyes were held, ask God to open them. If the heart is the problem, ask Him for the one thing He promised to do to it: The LORD your God will circumcise your hearts and the hearts of your descendants, so that you may love Him with all your heart and with all your soul, and live (Deuteronomy 30:6). If what I need is to see Christ, then ask for that in the words some Greeks used when they came looking for Him at the Feast: Sir, we would like to see Jesus (John 12:21).
Lord, open my eyes. Lord, circumcise my heart. Lord, we would see Jesus. I do believe; help me overcome my unbelief! (Mark 9:24) — a man asking Jesus to supply the faith Jesus is asking of him.
I read the Scriptures, but make them about me (Luke 24:25). Lord, open my eyes.
Movement 3 — The Gospel: The risen Christ opens the Scriptures, and I see Him (Luke 24:31)
The risen Christ opens the Scriptures, and I see Him (Luke 24:31).
Jesus answered a request the two on the road had yet to make, and He gave them coherence by telling them the story their facts belonged to. That story has a content, and the content is Himself. He gives it as a question and then a sermon. Did not the Christ have to suffer these things and then enter His glory? (Luke 24:26). Have to — the word Luke uses for what God has settled and will bring about. Suffering first and glory after, by God’s own arrangement. The cross they had filed as the end of the story is the road God said His Christ would travel.
That question, and the rebuke in the verse just before it — How foolish you are, and how slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken! (Luke 24:25) — are the two questions He puts in the middle of ours. We come asking what God says here, and how it applies to me. Before He answers either one, Jesus asks them why they could not see what was in front of them, and then what the Christ Himself had to do. Our question about ourselves comes last, after His two, and by then it is asking what this Christ means for me rather than what this passage can do for me.
Then He preaches. He begins with Moses and all the Prophets and explains what was said in all the Scriptures concerning Himself (Luke 24:27). Luke gives us the outline and withholds the sermon.
Jesus would have begun where the promise begins. In the garden, with the man and woman hiding, God turned to the serpent and said that the woman’s offspring will crush your head, and you will strike His heel (Genesis 3:15). A rescuer is coming, and He will be wounded in the rescuing. Jesus would have walked them through the sacrifices, where God had told Israel why the blood was there: sin costs a life, and God provides the life it costs.
And Jesus would have taken them to Isaiah. He was pierced for our transgressions, He was crushed for our iniquities… We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way; and the LORD has laid on Him the iniquity of us all (Isaiah 53:5–6). There is the record cleared, and there is the reason it needed clearing. Then Isaiah goes on past the suffering — After the suffering of His soul, He will see the light of life and be satisfied (Isaiah 53:11) — which is the sequence Jesus had just put to them as a question.
So the content Jesus gave them is the content we have been receiving all summer. A loving God sent His Son Jesus into the world to give us a new and abundant life. We turned, each to his own way. That turning left us with a record that needs clearing, a heart that needs changing, and a master whose hold needs breaking. God answered with His Son, who clears the record, gives the new heart, and breaks the hold. And all three become ours as we turn to Him and trust Him, and keep turning and trusting.
None of that stays a doctrine on a page. A person has to meet the living Christ Himself. Jesus told a religious man that no one can see the kingdom of God unless he is born again (John 3:3). Paul says we were dead in your transgressions and sins until God, because of His great love for us, made us alive with Christ (Ephesians 2:1, 4–5). That is what Jesus walked the two through for seven miles.
Which is why their hearts were already burning before they knew who He was. Were not our hearts burning within us while He talked with us on the road and opened the Scriptures to us? (Luke 24:32). The fire was going while Jesus was still a stranger to them, because the Scriptures He was opening were about Him whether or not they knew it. Christ was in the book, and their eyes were still closed.
Then Jesus opens their eyes, and He does it at a table. When He was at the table with them, He took bread, gave thanks, broke it and began to give it to them (Luke 24:30). Bread broken and handed over is the sermon Jesus had preached, done with His hands.
Then their eyes were opened and they recognized Him (Luke 24:31). It is done to them. The same hand that held their eyes shut in verse 16 opens them in verse 31. Sight is a gift, given at a moment God chose.
Across that afternoon Jesus draws near, asks the question, opens the Scriptures, goes in when they urge Him, breaks the bread, opens their eyes, and passes from their sight. They talk and walk; He acts. And they had described Jesus without hearing themselves: a prophet, powerful in word and deed (Luke 24:19). The deed comes first in the Greek. Deeds are what He had been doing to them all afternoon. Christ makes Himself visible in His own Word.
The risen Christ opens the Scriptures, and I see Him (Luke 24:31).
Movement 4 — Our Response: So each day I read the Scriptures until I see Him — and my heart burns (Luke 24:32)
So each day I read the Scriptures until I see Him — and my heart burns (Luke 24:32).
What I am reading for is a Person. That can turn, without my noticing, into a hunt for a feeling — as though I have not finished my reading until something has happened inside me. So I read to meet Christ. The burning is His to give, and it is His to give regardless of what I bring to the reading. A cold morning with the book open is still a morning in front of the God who speaks.
Three things keep people from following this Jesus, and the three run in an order. Some cannot make Him cohere — the story will not fit what they have seen. Some balk at the content — a God who saves by dying is not the God they came looking for. And behind both of those sits the last one, which is usually the reason the other two hold: following Him costs too much.
What it costs is the throne. I am on one — the throne of my own life — and from it I settle what my circumstances mean, what I am owed, and who I am going to be. That is also why I read the way I do. A man on a throne reads everything, his Bible included, for what it does for his own kingdom. I want to keep writing my own story. I want God to make much ado about me. Reading this book until I see Him takes that throne away from me, because a King on the throne means I am not on it. I am dethroned, and that is the cost. We will hold that seat for years rather than pay it.
We are not drifting off that throne. We are reaching for a firmer grip — on our circumstances, our health, our reputation, our children, the version of ourselves other people are allowed to see. The Word of God comes to take that throne, and it finds a man tightening his hold on it.
This passage puts a throne in front of us. We had hoped that He was the one who was going to redeem Israel — a son of David back on the throne in Jerusalem and Rome put out. They wanted a King enthroned. A King is enthroned. His throne is not the one in Jerusalem they were picturing. The kingdom is larger than the strip of it Rome was holding. And the way to that throne ran through the chief priests, who handed Him over to be sentenced to death (Luke 24:20).
Paul says what that cost Christ. He did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made Himself nothing, and He became obedient to death — even death on a cross! (Philippians 2:6–8). The grasping is ours. Christ let go of what was His by right. He did it to seat us with Himself, on His own throne and not the one He took from us — God raised us up with Christ and seated us with Him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus (Ephesians 2:6).
Jack Miller puts his finger on why we hold on. Answering people who say the gospel promises more renewal than broken lives ever show, he writes:
Yes, let me acknowledge the working of God’s grace sometimes takes years to soak into our lives. Grace definitely is for the long haul and must overcome much resistance in our lives. But isn’t much of our problem right here? We tend to resist grace by underestimating what the Lord of grace has done and is doing for us. We minimize in our hearts what He has done in His work for us in His atonement and is now doing in us by the Spirit. So then the problem lies not so much with grace, but with our tendency to overestimate what we can do by our own moral willpower, and in this manner we hinder the Spirit of Christ by our unbelief.
That is how we keep the throne, and Jack gives it one name: unbelief.
And that is where the cost turns into the best news in the passage. Unbelief is the sin under the other sins, and Jesus says so — the Spirit convicts the world in regard to sin, because men do not believe in me (John 16:9). It is what Jesus named on that road when He called them slow of heart, and it is what keeps me on my own throne.
Now watch what Jesus does with it. He names it to their faces — How foolish you are, and how slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken! — and in the same breath He asks, Did not the Christ have to suffer these things and then enter His glory? (Luke 24:25–26). Then Jesus walks seven miles opening the Scriptures to the men He has just called slow of heart. The suffering Jesus is explaining on that road is the payment for the unbelief He is rebuking on that road. His cross covers the sin of not believing Him.
The two on the road took what they had seen straight to the church. There they found the Eleven and those with them, assembled together (Luke 24:33). The gathered group speaks first: It is true! The Lord has risen and has appeared to Simon (Luke 24:34). Then the two tell what happened on the road and how they knew Him in the breaking of the bread (Luke 24:35).
The two from Emmaus are mid-sentence — while they were still talking about this — when Jesus Himself stood among them (Luke 24:36). Luke gives Him no arrival at all. At a table seven miles off He disappeared from their sight (Luke 24:31). The two walked those seven miles back in the dark. And now He is in the room, and Luke does not say He came. He is suddenly gone, and then He is suddenly there.
Where was He in between? He was where He told them He would always be: And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age (Matthew 28:20). What moves in this chapter is not Him.
Now look at who is in that room. Peter is there. The last time Peter spoke about Jesus in public he said it three times over — Woman, I don’t know Him (Luke 22:57). Then he went outside and wept bitterly (Luke 22:62). The rest had watched the crucifixion from as far off as they could get: all those who knew Him, including the women who had followed Him from Galilee, stood at a distance, watching these things (Luke 23:49). These are men who left Him. They have the women’s report, they have Simon’s word, and they have these two from Emmaus telling them it is true. And now Jesus is standing in the middle of them.
Luke tells us how they took it. They were startled and frightened, thinking they saw a ghost (24:37). Grown men going the other way — for the door, for the window, for whatever way out of that room there was. This is the place in the chapter where I laugh out loud.
We would go the same way here. If the risen Lord Jesus Christ suddenly stood among us at Boatswain Bay this morning, we would be under the pews and out the windows. And He would say to us what He had to say to them.
Jesus has to talk them down. Peace be with you (24:36). Those are the first words the risen Christ speaks to the men who had left Him, and He says them before anybody has explained himself or apologised for anything. Then Why are you troubled, and why do doubts rise in your minds? (24:38).
Then Jesus proves the body. Look at my hands and my feet. It is I myself! Touch me and see; a ghost does not have flesh and bones, as you see I have (24:39). Joy and amazement still had them unable to take it in. He asked for food. They handed Him a piece of broiled fish, and He ate it in front of them (24:41–43). The hands Jesus holds out are the hands the chief priests handed Him over to have nailed (24:20).
That is a man’s response to meeting the risen Christ. Isaiah went the same way when the doorposts shook and the house filled with smoke: Woe to me! I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the LORD Almighty (Isaiah 6:5). Seeing Christ undoes a man before it settles him. Nobody in that room has to be argued off his throne. The King has taken it by standing there.
That leaves the burning. What these two had all afternoon was the risen Christ, present and speaking, in the Scriptures He was opening. Their hearts burned because He was there, and He is there when we open the book.
So each day I read the Scriptures until I see Him — and my heart burns (Luke 24:32).
Conclusion
Read the Scriptures — they are all about Christ (Luke 24:27). I read the Scriptures, but make them about me (Luke 24:25). The risen Christ opens the Scriptures, and I see Him (Luke 24:31). So each day I read the Scriptures until I see Him — and my heart burns (Luke 24:32).
The two men on that road had the two questions we all bring — what does God say here, and how does this apply to me — and those two questions had carried them as far as grief. So Christ put two more in the middle. Why could you not see this? And how did the Christ Himself do what God required? The book that was about me becomes a book about Him, and then it comes back to me with Him in it, and the heart burns and the feet go to His people. This is why we take four questions through a passage together each week rather than two.
Those two middle questions meet the three things that stand between a man and Christ: coherence, content, and cost.
And all three answers turn out to be one Person. The story that makes sense of a cross and an empty tomb is Christ’s own, so coherence arrives with Him rather than from a better argument. Christ is the content, and He is the one who opens it. And of the cost, which is my throne, no one but He and the Father and the Spirit has measured what it came to, and He is the one who paid it.
He is still opening the Scriptures and opening eyes. The book is on the table, and it is the very Word of God this morning, warm heart or cold. In it we meet Jesus. So read it until you see Him.
Here is the verse to carry: They asked each other, “Were not our hearts burning within us while He [Jesus Christ] talked with us on the road and opened the Scriptures to us?” (Luke 24:32).
And here is a way to pray it back: Father, your Son is on every page and I have been reading about myself. Uncover my eyes. Circumcise my heart. I have kept the parts of your book that suited me, and I have wanted a story with me at the middle of it and myself on the throne of it. Take that from me and give me your Son. Open the Scriptures to me as you did on that road, and let me see Him — and when I do, say to me what you said in that room: peace be with you. Amen.