Page 37 - Back to Bethlehem 2-5-19

I hope the Lord has begun to teach you that you never study the
Bible to know the Bible. God didn’t give us the Bible to know
the Bible. You study Genesis to know Jesus. You study Joshua
to know Jesus. You study Psalms to know Jesus. Every book
in the Bible reveals the Lord in a different way. The only way
to know Him personally is to see Him in the word of God.

Jesus gave a great word to Peter in Matthew 16:16&17, “And
Simon Peter answered and said, ‘Thou art the Christ, the Son of
the living God.’ And Jesus answered and said to him, ‘Blessed
are you, Simon Barjona, because flesh and blood did not reveal
this to you, but My Father who is in heaven.’” And there He
gave the secret to Peter, “You didn’t give it; My Father gave it
to you.” Paul prayed for Christians in Ephesians 1:17&18,
“That the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may
give to you a spirit of wisdom and of revelation in the
knowledge of Him. I pray that the eyes of your heart may be
enlightened, so that you may know what is the hope of His
calling, what are the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the
saints.” When we read the Bible we must ask the Lord to open
our eyes.

I would like to set this truth of revelation before your heart by
looking at Jesus as the Word of God. We know He is the Living
Word and we know this is the written word. We study the
written word to see the Living Word. Let me spend a few
minutes talking about the word. After we do that I want to take
you to Peter’s testimony just before he died. Peter looked back
over his thirty years of life and he said, “I remember this.” Let
me begin with Jesus as the word.

What is God communicating when He says, “The word?” The
prologue, the beginning, the introduction of John 1, “In the
beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the
Word was God. He was in the beginning with God.” It begins
with verse 1 and ends in verse 18, “No man has seen God at any
time; the only begotten God, who is in the bosom of the Father.
He has explained Him.”