Are the Scriptures ABO
By Rev. George F. Borghardt
The Scriptures can be read two ways: about you and for you. One speaks about your condition before God and those around you. It’s all about you. The other delivers Christ crucified for you, for the salvation of sinners.
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Modern Christianity wants to look for what the Scriptures have to say “about us.” We are to read the Bible as though it were an instruction manual and then figure out what the words mean to us. How do the Scriptures make us feel? How do we apply them to our lives? What lessons do we glean from the written words in order for us to succeed or to have a better and more prosperous life? That’s how you read the Scriptures to find out about you. And, to be sure, there really is a lot of useful stuff about life in the Bible. You can find out how to be a nicer person. You can learn how to (and how not to) handle your anger and how to deal with the people who hate you. You can learn how to seem like the smartest person in the room and how to never make friends with the stuff you have. You can learn how to properly treat your neighbor and be a good steward of your money. All of that good stuff about you can be found in the Scriptures! Unfortunately, the more you read the Scriptures for what they say about you the more you’ll find out that what’s actually true about you is that you are blind, dead, and an enemy of God. The Scriptures say you sin daily and much and that nothing inside you is good. You’ll also learn just how angry God really is about you and the things you do and don’t do. How everything about you is evil, ever since you were in the womb; how all that you do, think, and feel is twisted by sin; how, even knowing this about you, you still want everything to be about you. You want it to be at the center of it all. You are that self-centered— even in how you are tempted to read the Scriptures: about you. Even if you could do all that the Scriptures say you should do, all by yourself, you couldn’t make up for all the things you haven’t done. And any message all about you, or your relationships, or how to be a better parent when you grow up than your crazy parents are, or what you can do for God to devote yourself to His Word, will inevitably end in guilt because you don’t or won’t do these things—not well enough and not perfectly, which is what God demands. Not doing what you are commanded to do always ends in condemnation. If your reading of the Scriptures is that all or most of the Scriptures are about you, then they are only Law for you—Law that ends in your death and going to hell. But the Gospel is in the “for you” of Scripture. All of Scripture speaks of Jesus. Jesus is all about you: born for you, baptised for you and for your righteousness. Jesus preached, taught, healed the sick, raised the dead for all those people and for you, too. For you, He kept every “about you” of the Law perfectly and then counted all those things He kept as having been kept by you. He died the death you deserve for
