July 5, 2024

Matthew 22:29

²⁹ Jesus answered and said to them, “You are ^[mistaken, not knowing the Scriptures nor the power of God. 

Jesus made this statement to some of the most religious people of His day. They were the people who were in charge of the temple. They had tradition. They had ritual. They had the best facility. They had plenty of money coming into their ministry. They had influence. They had pedigree – their families had been doing this for a long time through multiple generations. They had a big following. People from all over the world were coming to them.

But Jesus told them that all of their religion was useless. He said they were “mistaken.” The word literally means “to be led astray.” They had wandered from the truth. They were roaming about in the realm of religion, but they were not following the right way.

Their state of being mistaken was a continuous action verb. They had not just made an error in judgment, but they had been led astray into a completely deceived lifestyle. This was religion without any relationship with God. And they were so deceived that they didn’t even realize how desperate their situation was.

How is it that religious people can fall into a state of being led astray into deception and completely losing sight of the truth?

Jesus told them the reason for this was that they did not know the Scriptures nor the power of God.

These religious leaders knew a little bit about the Bible. But they were picking and choosing the parts that they wanted to believe, and discounting, or even ignoring, the parts that they didn’t want to believe.

By this time period, the entire Old Testament had been written. In our modern Bibles, this constitutes 39 books, all inspired by the Holy Spirit. In that day it was a little different, as some of the books were combined into one, and some of the longer books were separated into multiple scrolls. But the content that they had was the same as what we have today, except we also have 27 New Testament books added to our modern Bible.

But these religious leaders did not value the majority of these books as the Word of God. They tended to concentrate on five of them and ignore the rest. But anything that was a miraculous occurrence in what they would read, they would explain away as being a religious exaggeration that was teaching some religious principle.

But overall, they denied anything miraculous. In fact, they even denied that there would be a resurrection. They taught that when you were dead, that was the end of your show.

So Jesus let them know that these were the two reasons that they had left the truth and were so deceived that they were completely separated from God. First, they were ignorant of the Scriptures. And then second, they denied the miraculous power of God.

It is impossible to walk with God, know God, and have a relationship with God if you don’t know the Scriptures and you deny that anything miraculous that is revealed in them is a fabrication that is supposed to teach a moral lesson.

It is the Scriptures that reveal God. It is the Scriptures who reveal Jesus, the Word of God, who is the power of God and the revelation of God. If you don’t believe the Word of God and take it as literally as possible, your belief system will be “mistaken.”

There is no way to attain truth without being familiar with the Scriptures, which is the 66 books of the Bible!

And yet, we have people today who are trying to do the exact same thing that the religious leaders of Jesus’s day were doing. They are ignorant of Scripture. They deny Scripture. They make up their own rules and traditions. They even teach that it isn’t important to believe the Scriptures, so long as you believe in Jesus.

This is nonsense! There is no way to know Jesus apart from the Scriptures. Those who profess a knowledge of Jesus apart from the Scriptures have actually invented their own Jesus. He is a work of fiction that they have invented apart from reality. With this framework, they are trusting in something that is not real.

Religion without the Scriptures and the power of God is mistaken. It is a wandering from the truth. And none of the trappings that come with this type of religion can make up for the essential missing ingredients.

And religion without truth cannot save you. It can’t get you to heaven. It can’t heal your sickness. It can’t take away your anxiety. And it can’t prosper your soul.

Bottom line: Any religion that doesn’t take the Scriptures literally is nothing but garbage.