Disciples on the Emmaus Road.
On the Emmaus Road …
There are two striking moments in the Luke 24:13-35 story about the two disciples on the Emmaus road: They didn’t recognize Jesus when He first joined them, and they recognized Him after “he explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning him” Luke 24:27.
Lots of people want to see Jesus. Yet few do. Maybe we don’t encounter Jesus because we don’t engage with His Word.
I love it when the Emmaus Road story gets to Luke 24:31-32. “Then their eyes were opened and they recognized him …” Note the phrase, “their eyes were opened.” After Jesus had gone through the Old Testament, explaining to Cleopas and his friend what was said about Him, they saw Jesus.
They saw Jesus! When the Scriptures were opened to them, it opened them up to Jesus! No wonder they said, “Were not our hearts burning within us while he talked with us on the road and opened the Scriptures to us?” Luke 24:32.
God’s Word is a window to see Jesus.
God’s Word is unlike any other word! When we open the Scriptures, we open a window to see Jesus.
In the context of our existence, there are two windows through which we can look – the window to the world and the window to Jesus.
If we look closely through the window to the world, looking beyond everything we see in the foreground, we’ll see nothing but worthlessness and pointlessness. The world’s best things at best are painted nothings and false joys. “Everything,” in the world, as Solomon says in Ecclesiastes 1:2, is “utterly meaningless!”
But when we look through the window of Scripture, like really look, we see the extraordinary, glorious, unbridled, beautiful, astonishing, magnificent Jesus. As the 19th-century Anglican clergyman J. C. Ryle says, “In every part of both Testaments, Christ is to be found – dimly and indistinctly at the beginning – more clearly and plainly in the middle – fully and completely at the end – but really and substantially everywhere.”
Do you want to see Jesus? To see Him, you’ve got to open the Word and give it your full attention.
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Summary
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