Why Jesus, not the Bible, is the Word of God
“The Word of God is inspired, inerrant and infallible, and when He was 18, He grew a beard.”
— Brad Jersak
Imagine a group of men who have memorized Torah, argued the fine points of the Law since boyhood, and organized their entire lives around the sacred text. They are standing in front of God in the flesh, and they cannot recognize Him. Not only that, but soon they will have Him put to death.
This is one of the most devastating scenes in Scripture. Jesus, looking at the Pharisees, says,
“You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about Me, yet you refuse to come to Me that you may have life.” (John 5:39–40)
Read that slowly. They had the Scriptures. They did not have Jesus. They had the words. They missed the Word.
Before I go one line further I want to say something plainly. I have been reading the Bible since I was a little boy. I still remember the red, hard-backed children’s Bible my Sunday school teacher gave me when I was about 10 years old. I cherished that Bible. I love this book. I read it daily. I teach it. I have shaped my life and my ministry around it. What follows is not from a man who has lost his faith in Scripture. It is from a man who has learned to love reading Scripture the way it was intended to be read, through the lens of Christ.
I am becoming convinced that a lot of us in the church, sincere and devoted and often very smart people, have made the Pharisees’ mistake in a quieter, more respectable way. We have confused the witness with the One it witnesses to. We have called the Bible the Word of God when, according to the Bible itself, that name belongs to somebody else.
What John Actually Says
John opens his Gospel with one of the most stunning theological claims in human history.
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” (John 1:1)
“And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.” (John 1:14)
John does not say the book. He does not say the scroll. He identifies the Word with a Person, a Person who was with God, a Person who was God, a Person who took on flesh, walked dusty roads, ate fish, wept at tombs, and let Himself be killed.
The Word of God, according to the Bible, is Jesus.
If we miss that, we miss the whole architecture of the New Testament. The letter to the Hebrews opens the same way.
“Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son.” (Heb. 1:1–2)
God used to speak in fragments. Dreams, prophets, a burning bush.
“But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son…” (Galatians 4:4)
The Son is not a message God delivered. The Son is the message. Everything God had been trying to say for millennia, He said in the person of Jesus of Nazareth.
The Living and Active Word, and the Pronoun We Skip
Now consider a verse you have heard preached a hundred times.
“For the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart.” (Hebrews 4:12)
Almost every time I have ever heard this preached it has been about the Bible. The Bible is the living and active word, the preacher says, sharper than a sword, cutting our hearts open.
Now finish the sentence. Read the very next verse.
“And no creature is hidden from his sight, but all are naked and exposed to the eyes of him to whom we must give account.” (Hebrews 4:13)
Stop. Look at the pronouns. His sight. His eyes. Him to whom we must give account.
The word of God in Hebrews 4 is not an it. The word of God is a Him. The Word who is living and active is the same Word who pierces the heart, who sees us naked and exposed, before whom we will stand and give an account. He is not on your nightstand. He is on the throne and in our lives.
We have ripped verse 12 from verse 13 and used it to describe a book, but the author of Hebrews was describing the Son.
Let the Bible Tell You Who the Word Is
If we let the Bible speak for itself, the question “What is the Word of God?” is not even ambiguous. Look at every place in the New Testament where the title “the Word” is used as a personal name.
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” (John 1:1)
“And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us…” (John 1:14)
“That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we looked upon and have touched with our hands, concerning the word of life…” (1 John 1:1)
“He is clothed in a robe dipped in blood, and the name by which he is called is The Word of God.” (Revelation 19:13)
You cannot hear a book with your ears. You cannot touch a book with your hands and have it be the Word of life in the way John means it. He is talking about a body he touched. And the very last time in Scripture the name The Word of God is given as a proper name, it is the name of a person on a horse riding out to make all things new.
I want to be careful here because someone will push back on me. Yes, “the word of the LORD” comes to prophets throughout the Old Testament. That is true. But even in the prophets, that phrase is never identified with a written text. It is a message from God, often personified, bearing a personal quality. And when we hit the New Testament, that Word takes on flesh. So the Bible’s own usage flows toward a Person, not toward itself.
Nowhere does Scripture call Scripture “the Word of God” as a proper name. That title is reserved.
“But Isn’t the Bible the Word of God?”
This is where people start to get nervous, and rightly so. Let me be clear. I am not saying, and please hear this, that Scripture is unimportant or unreliable or optional. I love the Bible. I trust the Bible. I believe what Paul told Timothy.
“All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness.” (2 Timothy 3:16)
Notice what Paul does not say. He does not say Scripture is the Word of God. He says it is God-breathed. The Spirit breathed through the prophets and apostles so that their words would bear faithful witness to the Word. Scripture is a faithful and reliable witness, an irreplaceable witness, but it is not the Word itself.
John’s Gospel makes the point another way when it introduces John the Baptist.
“He was not the light, but came to bear witness about the light.” (John 1:8)
John the Baptist was not the Light. He pointed to the Light. Even so, the Bible is not the Word. It is the God-inspired witness pointing to the Word. If we give more weight to the leather-bound book we love, more than the One it points to, it would be like us kissing John the Baptist’s shoes while Jesus stands behind us. John himself said, “He must increase, but I must decrease” (John 3:30). The book knows what it is. We are the ones who have gotten confused.
This is not a new idea. It is the way the earliest Christians understood Jesus. Around AD 318, Athanasius of Alexandria wrote his classic work On the Incarnation of the Word. Read the title again. Not On the Inspiration of Scripture. On the Incarnation of the Word. For Athanasius and the church that produced the Nicene Creed, “the Word” was the Son of God, never a book. Athanasius refused to let the Christian faith collapse into text-worship. It is participation in the very life of the Word made flesh.
Brad Jersak, in A More Christlike Word, calls this “the Emmaus way” of reading Scripture. He is pointing at Luke 24, where the risen Jesus met two disciples on the road and, “beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself” (Luke 24:27). The Bible only does its job when it leads us to Christ. Read it any other way and you end up like the Pharisees, Scripture-soaked and Christ-blind.
Which Bible, Anyway?
There is another reason I have grown uncomfortable calling the Bible the Word of God, and it is a question you rarely hear preached from any pulpit. Which Bible?
The Bible I grew up with, the Protestant canon, has 66 books. The Catholics have 73, because they include the deuterocanonical books. The Eastern Orthodox have a slightly different list. The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, one of the oldest continuous Christian traditions on earth, has around 81 books in its broader canon, including 1 Enoch and Jubilees, texts most Protestants have never opened.
So if “the Word of God” is the Bible, which Bible? The one I happened to be handed as a child? The one assembled in Western Europe? Is the Ethiopian Christian, whose ancestors followed Jesus before mine did, holding a Bible that contains too much of God? Or is mine missing some?
I am not raising this to shake anyone’s confidence in Scripture. I am raising it because “the Word of God equals the Bible” is not as clean a claim as many of us assume. Every branch of Christ’s body has, across two millennia, drawn the canonical lines a little differently. But every one of them, Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox, Ethiopian, should agree on this. Jesus is Lord. Jesus is the Word made flesh. Jesus is who the Scriptures point to. That confession is older and deeper than the disagreement.
There is one more wrinkle worth naming, and it takes some Christians by surprise. During the Reformation, the great rallying cry was sola scriptura, “by Scripture alone.” But the Reformers, while raising that banner, were simultaneously shortening the Bible. Luther’s 1534 German Bible moved seven Old Testament books, plus parts of others, into a separate section called the Apocrypha, marked as “useful and good to read” but not equal to Scripture. The 1611 King James still printed those books in a separate section between the testaments. Most modern Protestant Bibles dropped them entirely. So when a Protestant today says “the Bible alone,” they mean a Bible that is seven to fourteen books shorter than the one Christians had been reading for over a thousand years. That does not make the Reformers wrong. They had reasons, particularly their appeal to the older Hebrew canon. But it should at least give us pause. Sola scriptura requires us first to decide which Scripture, and that decision is, unavoidably, not itself in Scripture.
Where Did We Even Get the Word “Bible”?
Here is something most Christians never stop to consider. The word Bible is not in the Bible.
Bible comes from the Greek ta biblia, which just means “the books.” A library. That word comes from byblos, the papyrus reed used to make ancient scrolls, named after the Phoenician port of Byblos (modern Jbeil, Lebanon), which exported the reed to the ancient world. Etymologically, the word we use for our most sacred text means “the papyrus things.”
The earliest Christians did not commonly call the Scriptures “the Bible” until about the 4th or 5th century AD. The apostles, the martyrs, the first generations of church fathers did not have a “Bible” in any sense we would recognize. They had the Scriptures (the Hebrew writings), the circulating letters of Paul, and the Gospels. And they had Jesus. The Word.
I am not saying the term “Bible” is bad. I use it all the time. But it is worth knowing that the word itself just means “the books,” and that calling the books “the Word of God,” capital W, is a habit the apostles never had. They called Jesus the Word. The books they had, they called Scripture.
The Pharisee Problem
The danger is not theoretical. It is the central drama of the Gospels.
The Pharisees were not the villains because they took the Scriptures seriously. They were the villains because they took the Scriptures seriously and missed Jesus. They tithed mint and cumin. They memorized Torah. They debated the fine points of Sabbath observance. And when God Himself walked into the temple they could not recognize Him, because He did not match the picture their reading of the text had given them.
So they killed Him.
This is the warning Scripture gives us about Scripture. You can read this book your whole life and still crucify the One it is about. You can build a theological system that is internally consistent, biblically defensible, and footnoted to the gills, and still be standing in front of the living Word without seeing Him.
And before we are too hard on the Pharisees, we should look in the mirror. We may not literally crucify Jesus today. But look at what we have done. We have taken the one Body of Christ that He Himself prayed would be one (John 17:21).
And we have divided that Body, by some counts, into more than 40,000 Christian denominations. And almost always, the fracturing is done in the name of Scripture. Over doctrine, over interpretation, over the “right” way to read the text. The very book that was breathed out to point us to the One who is our peace has become, in our hands, the most common reason we are not at peace with one another.
We may not have killed the Word made flesh, but we have used the words about Him to divide His Body every Sunday morning at ten o’clock.
This is, perhaps, the Pharisee problem in its modern dress. I used to be a good Pharisee. Sadly, I can still remember doctrines I used to believe that divided me from a brother in Christ, and I don’t even believe many of those doctrines today.
How do we keep from repeating it? We let the Bible do what the Bible was given to do, which is point us to Jesus. We read every page through Him. We let Him interpret the text; the text does not get to define Him. Jersak calls this “the Emmaus way,” with the risen Christ as our companion on the road, opening the Scriptures so that our hearts burn.
When Scripture leads us to Jesus, it is fulfilling its God-breathed purpose. When Scripture becomes the destination, it has been quietly turned into an idol. A beautiful, leather-bound idol that we crack open on Sunday morning while never coming to the One it is trying to introduce us to.
So What Do We Do with the Bible?
Honor it. Read it. Memorize it. Teach our children from it. Let it shape our prayers, our politics, our friendships, and how we spend our money. Do not put it down.
But put it in the right place.
Jesus is on the throne. The Bible is the witness testifying to the One on the throne. If we treat the witness like the King, we have become idolaters with very good exegesis. The Pharisees did not have a bad Bible. They had a wrong center.
So when I open John tomorrow morning I want to walk with the disciples on the Emmaus road, not sit with the Pharisees in their council chamber. I want my heart to burn within me. I want every chapter, every parable, every prophecy, every psalm to do what it was breathed out to do, which is to walk me into the presence of Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh, the Light that has overcome all darkness.
Let’s do what the Pharisees would not do. Come to Him that we might have life. Come to Jesus. He is the Word. The Bible is what points us to Him.
For Reflection
A few honest questions for any Christian who has read this far.
- Does it offend you when you hear someone say, “The Bible isn’t the Word of God; Jesus is”? If so, why? What is the offense, exactly?
- Do you value the Bible more than the Word made flesh? If you are not sure, ask yourself when you last spent as much time with Jesus in prayer as you did with the text on a page.
- If you had to give up either your Bible or your relationship with the living Christ, which would feel like the greater loss? Which one should?
- When you read your Bible, are you searching the Scriptures, or are you coming to Jesus? Are they the same thing for you, or has one quietly replaced the other?
These are not gotcha questions. They are the kind of questions Jesus Himself asked the Pharisees, and taken seriously, they can be the beginning of repentance, freedom, and joy.
Scripture quotations are from the English Standard Version (ESV).
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