March 21

“He said to them, ‘This is what I told you while I was still with you: Everything must be fulfilled that is written about me in the Law of Moses, the Prophets and the Psalms’.” —LUKE 24:44

If our faith is based only on our experiences of God, we will have plenty of good reason to doubt, because our experiences will not always be what we expect. When a Christian walks out of a car accident unscathed, he thanks God for protecting him, but an unbeliever says, “Phew! I was lucky!” Which is the right perspective and how do we know?

There are two things Jesus talks about after His resurrection that are vital to the conviction of our faith and the truth of Christianity. There is the testimony of Scripture, as discussed here, and the testimony of the Holy Spirit. Jesus told His disciples that everything must be fulfilled that is written about Him in the Law of Moses, the Prophets and the Psalms. He then opened their minds so they could understand the Scriptures. Jesus presents a crucial reason why they should believe in Him. To paraphrase, “What you have seen and visually bear witness to is not the grounds on which you are going to believe, but rather you believe on the grounds that this goes back to Moses, the Prophets and the Psalms.” 

Many people might say, “But I’ve had great experiences of Jesus”, and others will say the same of Islam, Buddhism or Hinduism, but this is Jesus saying the grounds of our confidence are not simply in what we’ve experienced, but in the prophecies of Old Testament Scripture in which His birth, life, death, resurrection, ascension and exaltation are recorded. Some of them were written up to 800 years before He was born. As every one of about 333 prophecies came to fruition exactly as foretold, our confidence must be in the fact that the Word of God has shown itself to be true.

There are wonderful times when we sense and experience God at work in our lives, but there are also times we walk in the dark. What do we do then? We place our trust in the truthfulness of Jesus, the Gospel and the authority of Scripture. In Luke 24:48, Jesus said to His disciples, “You are witnesses of these things.” But in this context, He is also saying, “You are witnesses to the truth of Scripture.” The disciples waited to be clothed with power from on high, but their confidence and security was based on the witness of Scripture. We must know what Scripture says, believe it, trust it and live day-to-day with that conviction and joy, which comes from the Holy Spirit. Though personal experiences will influence us, our faith in Jesus Christ should not be founded on subjective criterion, but on objective fact.

PRAYER: Dear Father, I am incredibly grateful for the Scriptures. They nourish and strengthen my faith, and bring me increasingly closer to You. Thank You, God. 

TO REFLECT UPON: Do I credit my faith more to the truths of Scripture or personal experience?