What is your most prized possession? To find out we would only have to look at what you give your time, attention, and resources to.
For the Christian, what should be the most prized possession? Everyone including the First Grade Sunday School Class just rightly answered, “Bible.” Very good; but, why?
The reason why is because the Bible is rock of revelation that our faith is built upon.
How do you know God? You know him from his word.
There is a sense in which God’s character is revealed in creation (Ps. 19) and even to a degree within us as image bearers (Rom. 1). However, our view of this revelation is strained and the revelation itself is inferior. It is strained by virtue of our sin and the revelation is inferior to the Scriptures. The knowledge of God is chiefly given through the revelation of God by means of the word written and incarnate (Heb. 1:1-3; John 14:9; 2 Tim. 3:16-17). If anyone knows God they know him through his word.
How do you hear from God? You hear from him from his word.
Christianity, contrasted to other world religions (Buddhism, Hinduism, etc), is an outside in religion. We do not reason up to God or look within for our understanding of God. Instead God reveals from himself to us from the outside. B.B. Warfield developed this point with precision and depth in his book The Inspiration and Authority of the Bible.
How do you see God? You see him through his word.
We know that we cannot see God. He is Spirit (Jn. 4:24; 1:18. But the Bible also talks about “beholding” God (2 Cor. 3:18). We see God through the eyes of faith. Well, what does faith latch on to? What does faith see? Faith is not a blind word groping about the corridors of philosophy hoping for a warm room to sit in. Faith is the settled disposition of the soul that rests upon the reality, trustworthiness, and beauty of God. (cf. Heb. 11.1; 11.6).
How do we see God? Well, it is Jesus, the Son of God, who rightly reflects and images God. It is Jesus who is the revelation of God. It is Jesus who is the perfect, final, sufficient, and supreme revelation of God (Heb. 1:1-3). He reveals the goodness, love, wrath, holiness, grace, power, and mercy of God. How do we see Jesus? We see him by faith as we read the Bible.
You cannot see God or see the glory of Christ apart from the Bible. There are no other avenues to behold (synonym for see) apart from the Scriptures. In the midst of John Owen’s treatise on The Glory of Christ, he writes about this topic saying,
This is the glory of the Scriptures, that it is the great, yea, the only, outward means of representing unto us the glory of Christ; and he is the sun in the firmament of it, which only hath light in itself, and communicates it unto all other things besides. (John Owen, Works, Volume 1, p. 316)
What is your most prized possession? It is your Bible. You need it to know God, to hear from him, and to see him. May God graciously forbid us from fasting from the Bible because we are really fasting from God.