Why Do We Study the Scriptures?

Why do we do it? Why will we be spending time together here, week by week, in the Scriptures? It is a fair question to ask at the start of anything new, and it deserves an honest answer.

I will tell you plainly that I do not open my Bible because I am, by nature, a disciplined man. Left to myself I can find a dozen easier things to do with an evening. I open it because I have become convinced that the Bible is not a book like other books, and that God has said quite specifically what He intends it to do. So before we talk about how to study, let us begin where the Bible begins: with what God says His Word is for.

There are three reasons, and they build on one another.

1. God gave us His Word so that many might be saved

Start with God’s intention in giving it at all. Paul, writing near the end of his life to a young man he had trained in the faith, put it this way:

And that from a child thou hast known the holy scriptures, which are able to make thee wise unto salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus. — 2 Timothy 3:15

Note the purpose. The Scriptures are able to make a person wise unto salvation. God did not give us a book to satisfy our curiosity, or to sharpen our arguing, or to make us look thoughtful on a Sunday. He gave us a book that saves — and He gave it that way on purpose, so that many would be saved and not a select few.

That is why He did not leave the writing of it to men’s own devices:

All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness. — 2 Timothy 3:16

For the prophecy came not in old time by the will of man: but holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost. — 2 Peter 1:21

Moses and David, Isaiah and Jeremiah, Matthew and John, Peter and Paul — real men, in real places, writing in their own voices out of their own lives. And behind every one of them, the Spirit of God, carrying them along so that what they wrote was exactly what God meant to say. That is what inspired means: God-breathed. When we open the Bible, then, we are not reading men’s opinions about God. We are listening to God.

John tells us why he wrote his Gospel down at all:

But these are written, that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that believing ye might have life through his name. — John 20:31

And Paul tells us how that believing comes about:

So then faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God. — Romans 10:17

Peter says we are born again “by the word of God, which liveth and abideth for ever” (1 Peter 1:23). Paul thanked God that the Thessalonians received what he preached “not as the word of men, but as it is in truth, the word of God, which effectually worketh also in you that believe” (1 Thessalonians 2:13). It effectually worketh. The Word does something. It does not merely inform; it acts.

That has a consequence for us as a church, and it is not a small one. If God saves people through His Word, then a church full of people who know their Bibles is a church full of people through whom God can work. The gospel you carry into a hospital room, into a nursing home, into a hard conversation at a kitchen table, is the same gospel that turned you around. Learning the Scriptures is not a private hobby for the unusually studious. It is how we come to have something worth giving away.

2. God desires that those who are saved become more like His Son

But salvation is not the end of God’s purpose for us — it is the beginning. Paul says in Romans:

For whom he did foreknow, he also did predestinate to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brethren. — Romans 8:29

Conformed to the image of his Son. That is the shape God intends your life and mine to take. Not merely forgiven and left as we were, but remade — until what we love, and how we spend our money, and how we speak to our families, and how we treat the person who can do nothing for us in return, begin to look like Jesus.

So how does that happen? Paul answers that too:

But we all, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord. — 2 Corinthians 3:18

Beholding, and changed. That is the order, and it never reverses. We do not become like Christ by gritting our teeth; we look at Him, and the Spirit does the changing. And where do we look at Him? In the Word. The Bible is the glass in which we see the glory of the Lord, and the one who keeps looking comes away different.

This is why Jesus prayed for His own, “Sanctify them through thy truth: thy word is truth” (John 17:17). And it is why the psalmist wrote, “Thy word have I hid in mine heart, that I might not sin against thee” (Psalm 119:11) — not on the shelf, not only in a notebook, but in the heart, where it can do its work on an ordinary Tuesday afternoon.

The Bible is honest about how much this can cost. It says of itself:

For the word of God is quick, and powerful, and sharper than any twoedged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart. — Hebrews 4:12

Which means our study will sometimes be uncomfortable. Scripture does not flatter us. Of the four things Paul says the Word is profitable for — doctrine, reproof, correction, instruction in righteousness — two of them are things we would rather not be told. But he gives the reason for all of it: “That the man of God may be perfect, throughly furnished unto all good works” (2 Timothy 3:17). God corrects what He loves.

James warns us against a study that never reaches our hands:

But be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving your own selves. For if any be a hearer of the word, and not a doer, he is like unto a man beholding his natural face in a glass: For he beholdeth himself, and goeth his way, and straightway forgetteth what manner of man he was. — James 1:22–24

So we do not read in order to collect information. We read in order to be made over — which means reading with a willingness to be told to change.

3. God seeks to be glorified, with His Son, through us

There is a third reason, and it takes us outside ourselves altogether. On the night He was betrayed, Jesus prayed:

Father, the hour is come; glorify thy Son, that thy Son also may glorify thee … And now, O Father, glorify thou me with thine own self with the glory which I had with thee before the world was. — John 17:1, 5

Father and Son, giving glory to one another from before the world was made. And by grace, that glory is meant to move through us. Jesus said, “Herein is my Father glorified, that ye bear much fruit” (John 15:8). Paul prayed that the Philippians would be “filled with the fruits of righteousness, which are by Jesus Christ, unto the glory and praise of God” (Philippians 1:11), and that “the name of our Lord Jesus Christ may be glorified in you, and ye in him” (2 Thessalonians 1:12).

The end of all our studying, then, is not a well-informed congregation. It is a God-glorifying one — a people in whom the worth of Christ is visible in the ordinary business of a week: in patience with a difficult child, in honesty in a day’s work, in the way a long illness is carried, in kindness to someone who will never be able to repay it. “Whether therefore ye eat, or drink, or whatsoever ye do, do all to the glory of God” (1 Corinthians 10:31).

Put the three together and you have the answer to our opening question. God gave us His Word so that many might be saved. He gave it so that the saved might be made like His Son. And He gave it so that He and His Son might be glorified in us. Bible study is not an extra for the especially serious. It is where the Christian life is fed.

How, then, should we read?

A few plain things — not rules, but habits.

Scripture holds up the Bereans as an example for exactly this: “they received the word with all readiness of mind, and searched the scriptures daily, whether those things were so” (Acts 17:11). Ready to hear, and willing to check. That is the posture I hope we will keep here.

So that is where I hope our time together in these devotions will go. Not a place to come and be impressive, and not a place to be lectured at — a place to open the Word, look at it carefully, and let it do what God said it would do. I am glad to have you reading along, and I am looking forward to it.

May the Lord give us ears to hear.