w, entered
into sympathy with His purpose on earth, had you, through all that
Scripture tells you of Him, learned His nature, and learned to love Him,
you would at once have recognised Me as His messenger. "Ye have not His
word abiding in you;" ye have not let it lie in your minds and colour
them; ye have not chewed, and digested, and assimilated the very
quintessence of it, for had you done so you would have learned to know
God and seen Him in Me.[20] But "whom He sent, Him ye believe not."

The very Scriptures which had been given to guide them to Christ they
used as a veil to blind themselves to His presence. Jesus points out
where their mistake lay. "You search the Scriptures, because you suppose
that in them, a mere book, you have eternal life; the truth being that
life is in Me. The Scriptures do not give life, they lead to the
Life-giver. The Scriptures, by your superstitiously reverent and shallow
use of them, actually prevent you from finding the life they were meant
to point you to. You think you have life in them, and therefore will not
come to Me." So may a book, lifted out of its subordinate place, be
entirely perverted from its use, and actually hinder the purpose it was
given to promote. To worship the Bible as if it were Christ is to
mistake a finger-post for a house of shelter. It is possible to have a
great zeal for the Bible and yet quite to misapprehend its object; and
to misapprehend its object is to make it both useless and dangerous. To
set it on a level with Christ is to do both it, Him, and ourselves the
gravest injustice. Many who seem to exalt the Scriptures degrade them;
and those who give them a subordinate place truly exalt them. God speaks
in Scripture, as this passage shows, but He speaks for a definite
purpose, to reveal Christ; and this fact is the key to all difficulties
about the Bible and inspiration.

4. The unbelief of the Jews is traced by Jesus to a moral root. They
seemed very zealous for God's law, but beneath this superficial and
ostentatious championing of God there was detected a deep-seated
alienation from God which unfitted them for knowing either Him or His
messenger. "Glory from men I do not receive (ver. 41). But the reason of
this is that ye have not the love of God in you, and cannot appreciate
Divine glory or recognise it when you see it. How can you believe, when
your hearts crave the glory you can give to one another, your ambition
rising no higher than to be spok