John 5:39 Meaning You Search the Scriptures

The writings testify of the awareness reading them, for they are that reader's own biography told in advance. Every figure in them is a state of consciousness, and the whole account traces the passage a person makes from forgetting who he is to waking as the source. To search these pages expecting life stored in the letters themselves is to miss what they point at; the life they speak of is the imagining that stands behind the words.

What they bear witness to is not a man who lived once and far away. They witness to the power in the one who studies them, the same power that shaped his world and now looks out from his own eyes. A person reads his own story there and slowly recognizes the central figure as himself. The book was always about the one holding it.

A lifetime of study returns exactly what the question behind it was built to collect, and nothing more.

A search returns what it was sent to collect. Men asking what they already possess come back with inventory, inventory sets a state of security, and security makes a living man standing in front of them look like one more claim to be checked against the record.

Every hour of that study reinforced the primary question instead of exposing it, which is how sincerity compounds in the wrong direction. The cost is not ignorance of the text but ownership of it, and the one those pages testify to walks into the room and gets filed rather than followed.