To the religious leaders of His day, our Lord once said, “Search the Scriptures; for in them you think you have eternal life: and they are they which testify of me. And you will not come to me, that you might have life” (John 5:39-40). According to Jesus, He is the subject of Scripture. He is what the Bible is all about. The Scriptures were written to “testify” of Him. This explains why The Baptist Faith & Message—our Southern Baptist confession of faith—boldly declares: “All Scripture is a testimony to Christ, who is Himself the focus of divine revelation.”

No matter what or where you are reading in the Bible, it is in someway or another telling you, teaching you or showing you something about Jesus Christ. For this reason, our ministry’s confession of faith contains the following statement on the Scriptures: “We believe that the Bible is the divinely inspired, inerrant and infallible Word of God. It has Christ for its subject, salvation for its end, and truth, without error for its content. It is therefore the sole authority for faith and practice.”

In the very first words of the first verse of the first chapter of the Bible’s most famous prophetic book, the Book of Revelation, we read these words, “The Revelation of Jesus Christ” (Revelation 1:1). Many people believe that the Bible’s foremost prophetic book is all about the revelation of the future; however, the book plainly states in its opening salvo that it is about the revelation of Jesus Christ.

The purpose of the Book of Revelation is the same as the purpose of all of the other books of the Bible; it is to reveal Jesus Christ to us. In fact, the purpose of the whole Bible—the written Word of God—is to get us to Christ—the Living Word of God. If the Bible can’t do this for us, it really can’t help us, since it’s Jesus alone who can save us.

In Luke 24:44-45, the resurrected Christ attempts to help His disciples over the hurdle of doubt by “opening their understanding” to “the Scriptures.” Christ does this by walking them through the Scripture and showing them everything “in the law of Moses, and in the prophets, and in the psalms, concerning [Him].” Like Christ’s disciples, we will never arrest our doubts or truly understand God’s Word until we too are seeing Jesus in “the law of Moses, and in the prophets, and in the psalms.” In other words, we’ll never understand the Bible until we’re seeing Jesus in every verse on every page.