<p>5:39 <i>You search the scriptures, because you think that in them you have eternal life; and these are they which testify of me</i>- This is so tragically true of so many Protestant groups today. Bible study is not necessarily the way to coming to the Lord Jesus. In fact, it was their academic approach to the Bible which actually stopped them coming to Him (:40). Surely the Lord is using irony here: as if to say, &lsquo;Go on searching through the scrolls, thinking as you do that finding true exposition will bring you eternal life. But you must come to <i>Me</i>, the word-made-flesh, the living and eternal life, if you wish to find it&rsquo;.</p><p>We must see in that Man who had fingernails, hair, who needed to shave, who sneezed and blinked, the very Son of God; the Man who should dominate our thinking and being. And we must grasp the wonder of the fact that from the larynx of a Palestinian Jew came the words of Almighty God. All that was true of natural Israel becomes a warning for us, Israel after the spirit. The tension between the following of Jesus and merely studying the pages of the Bible for academic truth is brought out in the Lord&rsquo;s encounter with the Jews in Jn. 5:39: &ldquo;Search the scriptures; for in them ye think ye have eternal life: but ye will not come to <i>me</i> that ye might have life&rdquo;. Surely the Lord is using irony here: as if to say, &lsquo;Go on searching through the scrolls, thinking as you do that finding true exposition will bring you eternal life. But you must come to <i>me</i>, the word-made-flesh, the living and eternal life, if you wish to find it&rsquo;.</p><p>C.H. Dodd throughout chapter 3 of his classic <i>The Interpretation Of The Fourth Gospel</i> gives ample reason to believe his thesis that John's Gospel was written partly in order to deconstruct the popular teachings of Philo in the first century- and there are therefore many allusions to his writings. Thus John records how in vain the Jews searched the Scriptures, because in them they thought they had eternal life (Jn. 5:39)- when this is the very thing that Philo claimed to do. This approach helps us understand why, for example, the prologue to John is written in the way it is, full of allusion to Jewish ideas about the <i>logos</i>. How John writes is only confusing to us because we're not reading his inspired words against the immediate background in which they were written- which included the very popular false teachings of Philo about the <i>logos</i>. Thus Philo claimed that God had two sons, sent the younger into the world, and the elder, the <i>logos</i>, remained &quot;by Him&quot;- whereas John's prologue shows that the <i>logos</i> was an abstract idea, which <i>was</i> sent into the world in the form of God's one and only Son, the Lord Jesus. See on Jn. 3:3.<br />The Lord was unlike any other Rabbi- He wasn&rsquo;t a verse-by-verse expositor of the Old Testament, neither did He like to argue case law. He told parables to exemplify and clarify His message- not in order to explain an Old Testament verse, as the Rabbis tended to. He drew lessons from nature in a way the Rabbis simply couldn&rsquo;t do. Rabbi Jakob, a first century Rabbi, stated: &ldquo;He who walks along the road repeating the Law and interrupts his repetition and says: How lovely this tree is How lovely this field is To him it will be reckoned as if he had misused his life&rdquo; (The Mishnah, <i>Pirqe Abot</i> 3.7b). By contrast, the Lord stopped and looked at the flowers of the field and drew His teaching from them. The Rabbinic way was to write and study endless <i>midrashim</i> on Bible verses, a kind of verse-by-verse exposition. The Lord&rsquo;s approach was more holistic and natural. The word <i>Midrash </i>comes from <i>darash</i>, to search, and perhaps the Lord had this style of &lsquo;Bible study&rsquo; in mind when He said: &ldquo;Ye search i.e. midrash the scriptures because ye think that in them ye have eternal life&hellip; but ye will not come unto me, that ye may have life&rdquo; (Jn. 5:39). Neither the Lord nor myself are against careful Bible study. But the Lord was warning against the attitude that eternal life comes from midrashing the Scriptures, writing dry analytical commentary, labouring under the misapprehension that this somehow will give life. Eternal life comes from knowing the life of Jesus, for His nature and quality of life is the life that we will eternally live, by His grace.</p><p>They didn't <i>feel</i> the wonder of inspiration in their attitude to Bible study- even though they would have devoutly upheld the position that the Bible texts were inspired. And here we have a lesson for ourselves. The Lord brought this out in Jn. 5:39, in saying that &quot;Ye search the Scriptures, because ye think that in them ye have eternal life&hellip; and ye will not come to <i>me</i>, that ye may have life&quot; (RV). Their Bible study did not lead them to Him. And is just as possible that we too can be Bible-centred and not Christ-centred. For to academically study a document and perceive its connections and intellectual purity does not require the living, transforming, demanding relationship which knowing Jesus does. See on Acts 13:27.</p><p>The Lord told the Jews to &ldquo;search the scriptures&rdquo; so that they would have the word of God and the love of God abiding in them (Jn. 5:38-42). They academically knew &ldquo;the scriptures&rdquo;, but the voice of God, the presence of God, and the love of God this reveals, was simply hidden from them. They weren&rsquo;t <i>really</i> studying. But the Saviour also upbraided His very own men for their lack of true Biblical perception: &ldquo;O fools, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken&rdquo; (Lk. 24:25). Note that He did not upbraid them for not understanding His own clear prophecies concerning His passion; instead He rebukes them for not grasping the OT teaching about His death and resurrection. Yet if we try to prove from the OT alone that Messiah would die and resurrect, we are largely forced to reason from types. Even Isaiah 53 is only a prophecy of Christ insofar as Hezekiah (to whom it primarily refers) was a type of Christ. Stephen in Acts 7 resorts to typology to prove his points about the Messiahship of Jesus. The point is, the Lord expected those simple fishermen to have worked these things out, to have heard the voice of God in those OT types. And He upbraided them because they failed to do so. &nbsp;</p>