Bully's Blog

The Eternal Son came to earth and lived the Christian life . . . visibly. But pause for a moment. The Eternal Son is the second member of the Godhead (the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit). Did it ever occur to you that your Lord . . . the Lord Jesus Christ . . . stated publicly that he could not live the Christian life? Of himself, he could not live the Christian life (John 5:30). Isn’t that amazing! (So, if you’re having a hard time, just consider John 5:30.) Now let us inquire of him, “How did you live the Christian life?”

Was the mainstay of his Christian life prayer and Bible study? He did pray, but was prayer the central pillar of his secret to living the Christian life? That just does not seem to fit, does it? The Son depending on prayer and Bible study to make it through the day?

Actually, this idea, your Lord needing to read his Bible every day to get through life as a believer, is an insult (1) to his preexistence in eternity and (2) to the fact that his Father indwelt him. Your Lord did not live the Christian life by means of Bible study. But he quoted it, did he not? Does that not mean he was dependent on reading his Bible every day? And have we not often had pointed out to us his dependence on prayer and Bible study? And what of prayer? It is true that he rose early in the morning and went to a quiet place to pray. But do not read into such scenes the modern-day concept of what prayer is. Be careful, or you will see a man who is out there on his own all day long, praying, reading his Bible, and trying hard to be a good Christian . . . even a man so much on his own that he has to pray every morning without fail to make it through the day (making it through the day being dependent on his reading the Bible and praying that morning).

The fallacies of that scene are endless, but this one stands out the most. All day long the Lord Jesus was not alone. There was not one second when he was outside of constant, conscious fellowship with his Father.

My grandpa was a Louisiana Cajun who loved His Lord boundlessly. He was a total illiterate. But that did not stop grandpa. He would ceremoniously pick up his Bible and hold it in front of him and stare at it intently for long periods of time. The problem was, he almost always held the Bible upside down! Now that is really illiterate; and, yep, that was my grandpa. And, yes, he loved his Lord and spoke of his intimacy with the Lord in a way that few literate Bible scholars or Greek-reading theologians could ever hope to match!

“Without the Father, I can do nothing.”
“The life I live, I live by means of my Father.”

—Gene Edwards