“Are you not in error
because you do not know the Scriptures
or the power of God?”
MARK 12:24
Ouch.
Tired of watching their religious brethren attempt to trap Jesus, the Sadducees thought they would give it a go. How hard could it be?
You guessed it: another epic fail. They were simply no match for the wisdom and authority of Jesus.
Jesus’ stinging rebuke to the religious elite of the day serves as a warning to us, who have immediate and constant access to God’s written Word. Is it possible that He would address the same question to us?
This coming Sunday, Jerrel Haugen will engage us with the Mark 12 encounter, confronting us with the truth of the text.
“You do not know the Scriptures.”
It’s so easy to try to bluster and fake our way through life, all the while knowing that God’s Word is right in front of us, a light to our eyes and a pathway for our steps (Ps. 119:105).
The prophet Isaiah railed against the people of his time for not considering the ramifications of striking out blindly on their own. They had cut themselves off from the Source of all truth and were winging it, improvising, and hoping for the best from worldly wisdom.
“When someone tells you to consult mediums and spiritists, who whisper and mutter, should not a people inquire of their God? Why consult the dead on behalf of the living?
Consult God’s instruction and the testimony of warning.
If anyone does not speak according to this word, they have no light of dawn. Distressed and hungry, they will roam through the land; when they are famished, they will become enraged and, looking upward, will curse their king and their God. Then they will look toward the earth and see only distress and darkness and fearful gloom, and they will be thrust into utter darkness.”
ISAIAH 8:19-22
To strike out on our own and pretend that God’s Word has nothing to say to us is to court disaster, but to feed off the Word of God is to breathe the pure oxygen of heaven.
“Scripture is the speech of God to man . . . revealing not only God, but ourselves;
explaining moods for which we had no cypher,
touching us as no other book can, and in moments when all voices beside wax faint and still,
telling facts which we had not been able to discover, but which we instantly recognize as truth;
the bread of the soul;
the key of life;
disclosing more depths as we climb higher in Christian experience.
We have tested you too long (by being in the Word) to doubt what Jesus said you were – the indispensable and precious gift of God.”
~F. B. MEYER’s THE WAY INTO THE HOLIEST