All
things must be fulfilled, which were written in the law of Moses, and in the
prophets, and in the psalms, concerning Me.
—Luke 24:44
What the Lord Jesus accomplished here on earth
He owed greatly to His use of the Scriptures. In them, He found the way in
which He had to walk, the food and the strength from which He could work, and
the weapon by which He could overcome every enemy.
In the temptation in the wilderness, it was by
His “It is written” (Matthew 4:4) that He conquered Satan. In His
conflicts with the Pharisees, He continually appealed to the Word,
asking, “Have ye not read?” (See, for example, Matthew 12:3, 5; Mark
12:10, 26; Luke 6:3.) “Is it not written?” (See Mark 11:17; John
10:34.)In His fellowship with His disciples, it was always from the Scriptures
that He proved the necessity and certainty of His sufferings and
resurrection: “How then shall the scriptures be fulfilled?” (Matthew
26:54). And during His last sufferings, it is in Scripture that He pours out
the complaint of being forsaken, and then again commends His Spirit into the
Father’s hands.
Jesus was Himself the living Word. He had the
Spirit without measure. If anyone could have done without the written Word, it
would have been Him. And yet, we see that it is everything to Him. More than
anyone else, He thus shows us that the life of God in human flesh and the Word
of God in human speech are inseparably connected.
In Christ’s use of Scripture, the most
remarkable thing is this: He found Himself there. He saw His own image and
likeness, and He gave Himself to the fulfillment of what He found written
there. It is especially in His example that we must find our own image in
the Scriptures. To be “changed into the same image from glory to glory,
even as by the Spirit of the Lord” (2 Corinthians 3:18), we must gaze in
the Scripture on that image as our own. In order to accomplish His work in us,
the Spirit teaches us to take Christ as our Example and to gaze on His every
feature as the promise of what we can be.
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