How to Read the Bible like Jesus

As Christ’s followers, we’re called to imitate him in the way we live (Mark 8:34; 1 Cor 11:1). We tend to think of this command in terms of how we act, speak, and think. But what about how we read the Bible?

If Jesus Christ is the fullest revelation of God, it makes sense that he’d be the person we look to for guidance on how to read the Bible. Not only should we have the same view of the Bible that Jesus had, but we should read it the way he read it.

So how did Jesus read the Bible? He read it as a means to fulfilling the two greatest commandments and as a narrative that points to him.

Fulfilling the Two Great Commandments

In Matthew 22, an expert in the law affiliated with the Pharisees asks Jesus what the greatest commandment in the law is. Jesus responds,

You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. (vv. 37–39)

Instead of giving just one commandment, Jesus gives two—both citations from the Old Testament. The first is Deuteronomy 6:5, which was part of the Shema, the central confession of Jewish piety in the first century. The second is Leviticus 19:18, which calls Israel to govern their interactions with one another with love. But notice what Jesus says next: “On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets” (v. 40).

Jesus broadens the question’s scope from the greatest commandment in the law to include the entirety of the Old Testament. The verb translated “depend” in the ESV has the sense of “hang.” Just as a door hangs on its hinges, allowing it to move back and forth and fulfill its purpose, so too these two commandments are the hinges on which the entire Old Testament moves to accomplish the purpose of enabling God’s people to love God with their whole lives and to love their neighbor as themselves.

Consider what Jesus is saying. Everything in the Bible is given to enable us to love God and our neighbor. It doesn’t matter if you’re reading Leviticus, Lamentations, or Luke. It doesn’t matter if you’re reading Joshua, Judges, Job, Jeremiah, or John. It doesn’t matter if you’re reading Chronicles, Corinthians, or Colossians. Every passage in every book is given by God to grow us in our love for him and for others. That’s how Jesus read the Bible.

Narrative That Points to Him

Everything in the Bible is given by God to enable us to love God and our neighbor.

For Jesus, Scripture wasn’t simply a collection of laws, stories, proverbs, and psalms. He read the Bible as a coherent narrative about who God is, who we are as human beings, and what God’s purposes are for the world. And he made the staggering claim that all of it, in some way, points to himself. Although we see this throughout the Gospels, Luke 24 is arguably the clearest example. How Jesus read Scripture was such an important idea for Luke that he tells two post-resurrection stories to make his point.

The first story is found at the end of Jesus’s appearance to the two disciples on the road to Emmaus. Not recognizing Jesus, these disciples explain to him the events of the past week that culminated in Jesus’s crucifixion and what their expectations of him had been. Their hopes that Jesus would be the One to redeem Israel had been crushed (Luke 24:21). Yet they explain that his tomb was now empty (vv. 22–24). Jesus’s response to them must have been jarring: He rebukes them for not recognizing that all of Scripture points to him.

If this was all Luke had to say about the subject, we’d have plenty of material for discussion. But Luke returns to it a second time later in the chapter. This time, Jesus’s audience is the entire gathering of the disciples. He demonstrates to his followers that he’s the risen Christ, and then the narrative continues:

Then he said to them, “These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you, that everything written about me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled.” Then he opened their minds to understand the Scriptures, and said to them, “Thus it is written, that the Christ should suffer and on the third day rise from the dead, and that repentance for the forgiveness of sins should be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things. (vv. 44–48)

The proper way to read Scripture is as a narrative that points to who Jesus is, what he has done for his people, and the announcement of that good news to the ends of the earth. He isn’t saying only certain parts of the Old Testament point to him; he’s saying all of it points to him in some way. In the days of the Roman Empire, it was said that all roads lead to Rome, and in a similar way we can affirm that all of Scripture leads to Christ.

All of Scripture points to Jesus in some way.

Some Old Testament passages are located along superhighways that take you straight to the cross, such as Isaiah 53. Other passages are located further out in the countryside and may require you to travel down a dirt road, to a county road, to a state highway, and then finally to an interstate that gets you to Christ.

If we truly believe, like Jesus did, that “man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God” (Matt. 4:4; Deut 8:3), then how we read the Bible matters. We should read the Bible like Jesus did: as a means of fulfilling the two great commandments to love God with our whole being and to love our neighbor as ourselves, and as a narrative that points to Christ.