Searching the Scriptures—Beware!

A Sabbath Morning Devotional

Sylvan A. Lashley

University of the Southern Caribbean

John 5:39 - “Search the Scriptures for in them you think you have eternal life”…

           Don’t get me wrong—searching the scriptures is a delightful, and admirable occupation.  You’ve grown up in the church, right?  If you have, then you know about the memorization of Bible passages, the memory verses that are the key points of weekly Bible study, and the “Morning Watch” texts that large numbers of people memorize, that daily devotional feature.  I recall that my mother had me repeat from memory all thirteen texts at the end of each quarter, stating both text and reference.  I stood up proudly with my little self every 13^th Saturday at church to repeat the texts.  Then, of course, in my little home church, we’d often repeat the morning devotional texts—the entire church in the Sabbath afternoon program would stand up—“Monday’s text—and we all stood up; Tuesday’s text, and we all stood up in waves, and so on, to repeat the daily text.  And then, I got to college to the first Bible class, “Christian Beliefs” and for the final we had to know 110 texts. I can still remember many of them.  And of course, if you had done theology, one knew the texts on the Sabbath, the sanctuary, the state of the dead and the resurrection—we knew texts for everything.  Thus, the textual approach to Christian living still resounds with many of us. It is part of our heritage.  And those of us who went beyond the texts, could repeat and quote and give the page number of large portions of the spirit of prophecy books authored by Ellen G. White. I had always admired folks who could repeat large swathes of Bible verses, just like young Jews did in the time of Christ.  In fact, many could repeat the first five books of the Bible, the Pentateuch—Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. And so it was, I wore the phylacteries (those little leather bags the Jews carried) of texts and scriptures symbolically on my person. I could use a text in a flash.  If you were shorter than I was, my famous quote would be “the wicked shall be cut short”.  I had a text for every moment, the product of my time.

          It was within this context that Jesus issued His famous words—after all the priests, Sanhedrin and Sadducees had it made. They knew the Word; their  knowledge was vast, superior and impressive, yet it did not impact their lives.  They studied daily, hung phylacteries from the arm, or across the forehead,  but there was little impact on the inner heart.  Jesus was challenging  the hearers to have a deeper knowledge of the Word, a knowledge that would lead to a change in conduct, and eventually to eternal life. There was no guarantee to eternal life by mere reading or knowledge of the Word.   Having head knowledge of the Word was insufficient for it was the heart knowledge that counted, and together with the head knowledge, would lead to an outward change in conduct, behavior and destiny.

          We are at a time of life when we might place greater emphasis on the meaning of the Word for our lives, and step beyond mere diligent memory. Thus, every Sabbath/Sunday school class unit should be a witnessing agent to the community.  We have a personal imperative to move away from a quantitative knowledge and analysis of scripture to a qualitative and reflective experience, to emphasis the gift of eternal life, for the Scripture is a means to an end, rather than an end in itself, that end being the saving power of the Gospel for eternal life, yet  even the devil quoted Scripture to Jesus.   May God’s blessings remain with us as we study His Word, searching the Scriptures so diligently that they become a part of our daily living toward a soon-coming Savior, to eternal life.