Knowing the scriptures isn’t the same as knowing God

The scriptures are meant to teach us about the character of Christ, but few study them enough to learn very much about him at all. It’s not difficult to find a professed Christian whose confidence in how they imagine Jesus to be far exceeds their familiarity with the scriptures that describe him. Most Christians nonchalantly claim that they know Jesus, when few are even familiar with the scriptures that describe him. A superficial study of the scriptures may be sufficient to yield a list of God’s attributes—such as love, mercy, and justice—but not enough to surpass the superficial ideas of the meaning of these words, let alone their application to daily life.

It is nothing short of astounding that modern people believe you can know all there is to know about Jesus through vague familiarity with a few verses of scripture. Many of these same people have no problem spending at least four years and ever-increasing sums of money to study at college. No one should think that they know much about the author of all truth and the creator of everything known while their effort to study him dwarfs in comparison to the time required to gain a functional understanding of anything within his creation.

The best way to prove how little the average Christian knows the scriptures is to mark their surprise as you cite stories from the New Testament that illustrate a very different Jesus than they believe in. You may be surprised to hear that Jesus:

• Responded to a sincere Canaanite woman asking for help by calling her a dog on account of her ethnicity.²
• Used the profanity of his time to insult those with whom he disagreed.³
• Insulted religious leaders.⁴
• [Drank] and ate enough to be credibly criticized as a drunk and glutton.⁵
• [Denigrated the religious beliefs of a Samaritan woman who] had honored him by calling him a prophet, while proclaiming the superiority of his own.⁶
• [Disputed] his friends’ heartfelt proclamations of loyalty.⁷

The fewer the scriptures upon which you base your understanding of God, the more likely you will be surprised by how he actually is. Anyone surprised by scriptural accounts of what God said, did, commanded to be done, or allowed to happen should diminish their confidence in their understanding of his character and wherever they obtained it. If you don’t even know the aspects of the Lord’s character demonstrated in the scriptures, how can you possibly imagine that you know him?

It is one thing to be overconfident in your expectation of how well you know God given a lack of familiarity with scripture, but there are many who manage to avoid learning how he is in spite of spending a great deal of time in the scriptures. Instead of searching the scriptures for improvements they can make to themselves, they make scripture study an end in itself.⁸ Rather than searching for differences they can reconcile between them and God, they ignore the differences and memorize the behavioral matches or irrelevant factoids, building up tall barriers of verse-enforced false traditions that make it all the less likely they will receive the truth when confronted with it.⁹

The scriptures are not meant to be the product—you are. They are an instruction manual for the work, not the work itself. You can’t correctly understand how God is through only studying his word. You must also live it!

Those who study the word of God without living it tend to subconsciously skip over the parts that suggest needed change.⁸⁶⁰ Christians ought to know, explain, venerate, and emulate Jesus’ behavior on all occasions, not just when it matches their church’s arbitrary standards or their favorite feel-good activity. Instead of ignoring the parts of the scriptures that don’t align with your religion, you ought to ignore the parts of your religion that don’t align with your scriptures.

Even in the rare case that a person knows the scriptures well and applies them honestly, they should not mistake being familiar with that limited account for being familiar with the unlimited being. It is always difficult to convey an accurate model of someone’s character from one person to another in a way that the other person can accurately predict the thoughts, feelings, and actions of the person you are describing across many situations. If true for a normal person, imagine how much more difficult this would be if you were describing the Lord. The apostle John spent three years with the Lord, and yet he lamented how difficult it was to write adequately about him.⁸⁶¹ If you were to somehow hear about what transpired during the remainder of the three year ministry of Christ beyond the few weeks covered in the New Testament, or the contents of his thirty years of life prior to that, how confident can you be that you would not be surprised in what you learned?