What the Lord Jesus accomplished here on earth as man He owed greatly to His use of the Scriptures. In them, He found the way in which He had to walk, the food and the strength on which He could work, and the weapon by which He could overcome every enemy. The Scriptures were indeed indispensable to Him through all His life and passion: from the beginning to the end of His life was the fulfilment of what had been written of Him in the volume of the Book.

It is scarcely necessary to give proof of this. In the temptation in the wilderness, it was by His “It is written…” that He conquered Satan (Mt. 4:4). In His conflicts with the Pharisees, He continually appealed to the Word: “What saith the Scripture? … Have you not read? … Is it not written?” In His fellowship with His disciples it was always from the Scriptures that He proved the certainty and necessity of His sufferings and resurrection: “How then shall the Scriptures be fulfilled?” (Mt. 26:54). And in His communion with His Father in His last sufferings, it is in the words of Scripture that He pours out the complaint of being forsaken, and then again commends His spirit into the Father’s hands. All this has a very deep meaning.

The Lord Jesus was Himself the living Word (Jn. 1:1-4, 14). He had the Spirit without measure (Jn. 3:34). If anyone could have done without the written Word, it would have been Him. And yet, we see that it is everything to Him. More than anyone else, He thus shows us that the life of God in human flesh and the Word of God in human speech are inseparably connected. Jesus would not have been what He was, could not have done what He did, had He not yielded Himself step by step to be led and sustained by the Word of God.

Let us try to understand what this teaches us. The Word of God is more than once called Seed (Lk. 8:11-15; 1 Pet. 1:23). It is the seed of the divine life. We know what seed is. It is that wonderful organism in which the life, the invisible essence of a plant or tree, is so concentrated and embodied that it can be taken away and made available to impart the life of the tree elsewhere. This use may be twofold. As fruit we eat it, for instance, in the corn that gives us bread. The life of the plant becomes our nourishment and our life. Or, we sow it, and the life of the plant reproduces and multiplies itself. In both aspects, the Word of God is seed.

True life is found only in God. But that life cannot be imparted to us unless it is set before us in some shape in which we know and recognise it. It is in the Word of God that the invisible, divine life takes shape, brings itself within our reach, and become communicable. The life, the thoughts, the sentiments, and the power of God are embodied in His words. And, it is only through His Word that the life of God can really enter into us. His Word is the seed of the heavenly life.

As the bread of life we eat it, we feed upon it. In eating our daily bread, the body takes in the nourishment which visible nature – the sun, water and the earth – prepared for us in the seed corn. We assimilate it, and it becomes our very own, part of ourselves; it is our life. In feeding upon the Word of God, the powers of the heavenly life enter into us, and become our very own; we assimilate them. They become a part of ourselves, the life of our life.

Or, we use the seed to plant. The words of God are sown in our heart. They have a divine power of reproduction and multiplication. The very life that is in them, the divine thought, disposition, or powers that each of them contains, takes root in the believing heart and grows up. And, the very thing of which the word was the expression is produced within us. The words of God are the seeds of the fullness of the divine life.

When the Lord Jesus was made man, He became entirely dependent upon the Word of God. He submitted Himself wholly to it. His mother taught it to Him. The teachers of Nazareth instructed Him in it. In meditation and prayer, in the exercise of obedience and faith, He was led, during His silent years of preparation, to understand and appropriate it. The Word of the Father was to the Son the life of His soul. What He said in the wilderness was spoken from His innermost personal experience: “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God” (Mt. 4:4). He felt that He could not live except as the Word brought Him the life of the Father. His whole life was a life of faith, a depending on the Word of the Father. The Word was not a replacement for the Father, but a vehicle for living fellowship with the living God. And, He had His whole mind and heart so filled with it that the Holy Spirit could, at each moment, find within Him, all ready for use, the right word He needed to hear.

Child of God, do you want to become a man of God, strong in faith, full of blessing, rich in fruit to the glory of God, full of the Word of God? Like Christ, make the Word your bread. Let it dwell richly in you. Have your heart full of it. Feed on it. Believe it. Obey it. It is only by believing and obeying that the Word can enter into our inward parts, into our very being. Take it day by day as the Word that proceeds – not has proceeded, but proceeds – out of the mouth of God. Regard it as the Word of the living God, who, in it, holds living fellowship with His children and speaks to them in living power. Take your thoughts of God’s will, God’s work, and God’s purpose not from the church or from Christians around you, but from the Word taught by the Father – and, like Christ, you will be able to fulfil all that is written in the Scripture concerning God’s will for you.

In Christ’s use of Scripture, the most remarkable thing is this: He found Himself there. There, He saw His own image and likeness. And, He gave Himself to the fulfilment of what He found written there. It was this that encouraged Him under the bitterest sufferings, and strengthened Him for the most difficult work. Everywhere, He saw the divine waymark traced by God’s own hand: through suffering to glory. He had only one thought: to be what the Father had said He should be, to have His life correspond exactly to the image of what He should be as He found it in the Word of God.

Disciple of Jesus, in the Scriptures your likeness can also be found – a picture of what the Father means you to be. Seek to have a deep and clear impression of what the Father says in His Word that you should be. Once this is fully understood, it is inconceivable what courage it will give to conquer every difficulty. I have seen what has been written concerning me in God’s book. I have seen the image of what I am called in God’s counsel to be. Knowing that likeness to Christ is ordained of God, inspires my soul with a faith which conquers the world.

The Lord Jesus found His own image not only in the institutions, but especially in the believers of the Old Testament. Moses, Aaron, Joshua, David, and the prophets were types. And so, He is Himself again the image of believers in the New Testament. It is especially in Him and His example that we must find our own image in the Scriptures. To be “changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord” (2 Cor. 3:18). We must gaze in the Scripture-mirror on that image as our own. In order to accomplish His work in us, the Spirit teaches us to take Christ as our Example, and to gaze on every feature as the promise of what we can be.

Blessed is the Christian who has truly done this – who has not only found Jesus in the Scriptures, but also in His image the promise and example of what he is to become. Blessed is the Christian who yields himself to be taught by the Holy Spirit not to indulge in human thoughts about the Scriptures and what it says of believers, but in simplicity to accept what it reveals of God’s thoughts about His children.

Child of God, it was “according to the Scriptures” that Jesus Christ lived and died. It was “according to the Scriptures” that He was raised again. All that the Scriptures said He must do or suffer He was able to accomplish, because He knew and obeyed them. All that the Scriptures had promised that the Father would do for Him, the Father did. O give yourself up with an undivided heart to learn in the Scriptures what God says and seeks of you. Let the Scriptures in which Jesus found the food of His life be your daily food and meditation. Go to God’s Word each day with the joyful and confident expectation that, through the blessed Spirit who dwells in us, the Word will indeed accomplish its divine purpose in you.

Every word of God is full of a divine life and power. Be assured that when you seek to use the Scriptures as Christ used them, they will do for you what they did for Him. God has marked out the plan of your life in His Word. Each day, you will find some portion of it there. Nothing makes a man stronger and more courageous than the assurance that he is living out the will of God. God Himself will see to it that the Scriptures are fulfilled in you if, like His Son, you will surrender yourself to this as the highest object of your life.

Prayer: “O Lord, my God, I thank You for Your precious Word, the divine mirror of all unseen and eternal realities. I thank You that I have in it the image of Your Son, who is Your image, and also, o wonderful grace, my image. I thank You that as I gaze on Him I may also see what I can be. O my Father, teach me to rightly understand what a blessing Your Word can bring me. To Your Son, when here on earth, it was the manifestation of Your will, the communication of Your life and strength, the fellowship with Yourself. In the acceptance and the surrender to Your Word, He was able to fulfil all Your counsel. May Your Word be all this to me, too. Make it to me, each day afresh through the anointing of the Holy Spirit, the Word proceeding from the mouth of God, the voice of Your living presence speaking to me. May I feel with each word of Yours that it is God coming to impart to me something of His own life. Teach me to keep it hidden in my heart as a divine seed, which in its own time will spring up and reproduce in me in divine reality the very life that was hid in it. Teach me above all, my God, to find in it Him who is its centre and substance, Himself the eternal Word. Finding Him, and myself in Him, as my Head and Exemplar, I will learn, like Him, to count Your Word my food and my life. I ask this, O my God, in the name of our blessed Christ Jesus. Amen.”