The Scriptures as Light

A pilot friend of mine told me that in flight school one of the last skills you learn is flying with only instrumentation to guide you, what is called in aviation parlance as IFR, or instrument flight rules. Learning to trust instrumentation over visual cues such as terrain, buildings, trees, and other outside visual cues is notoriously difficult. Plenty of airplane crashes happen because the pilots distrusted their instruments and relied on what they saw (or thought they saw). “Pilot spatial disorientation” was blamed for the crash that killed John F. Kennedy Jr. in 1999.

God tell us that His word is “a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path” (Psalm 119:105). The Hebrew word translated as “light” can also be translated as “dawn,” the first light that rises after a long, dark night. The Scriptures are our instrumentation to guide our path, light that shows us the way to live.  

The Scriptures as Signal

Another purpose for the Scriptures is that they direct us not only in a path to walk, but a path that points to Jesus Himself. In John 5:39-40, Jesus told the Pharisees that they were searching the scriptures so diligently, thinking that they would have eternal life by way of them.  Instead, the Scriptures, He said, “that testify about me” – they point us toward Jesus. We then go to Jesus as the Source of the life we crave.

Author and speaker Peter Kreeft has said that when he points to his dog’s food dish, his pet licks his hand. He is trying to signal to the dog that there is food available in his bowl, but he literally “misses the point.” The entire narrative of the Bible, from Genesis to Revelation, is God’s Great Story, each detail, big and small, either pointing ahead to or referring back to Jesus. He is the First and the Last and the “point” of Scripture.

The Scriptures as Reminder

We are reminded through the Scriptures not only of the Great Story of God and His pursuit of His people, but we are also shown what our place with God is and looks like. We are a forgetful people, often forgetting what our response to God should be. C.S. Lewis was fond of saying that “people need more to be reminded than instructed,” and I think he was onto something.

In 100 Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Márques tells the story of the inhabitants of a fantastical town called Macondo. During a particular era in the life of the village, the people slowly lost their memory. To counter this, they would hang signs reminding themselves of what things were and what they did. This is a cow. It is for milking. This is a plow. It is for plowing. Eventually they hung a sign outside the village limits that told travelers simply, “God exists.”

The lives of people in the Scriptures remind us of God’s existence, of His goodness, of His love and grace, and of the place He inhabits with us. From Adam and Eve, to Noah, to Moses, to the prophets and patriarchs, to the kings and judges of Israel, to the disciples and apostles, they all remind us of what it looks like to walk with God in all kinds of situations and settings.

The Scriptures as Instruction

It is a common adage that we become like the things we pay attention to, the people we look at. The Scriptures are replete with the hope that we are to become healed and whole (Isaiah 61:1, Luke 4; Ephesians 1:4), to grow in Christlikeness and character. A.W. Tozer in The Pursuit of God invited us to “come near to the holy men and women of the past and you will soon feel the heat of their desire after God. They mourned for Him, they prayed and wrestled and sought for Him day and night, in season and out, and when they had found Him, the finding was all the sweeter for the long seeking.”               

We are to seek God and to learn to love Him with all our being, and we are to do so in the company of fellow believers. Doing so invites our growth and submission to lead holy lives. The Scriptures help us to know what appropriate response to God’s grace looks like and how to pursue Him with our whole lives.