As many begin a new year of Bible reading, we would do well to remember one of the chief dangers: searching the Scriptures, and missing the Savior. Recall Jesus’s words to the Jewish leaders of John 5, those most devoted of Bible readers:

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)

Amazingly, it is possible to know your Bible and not know your God. It is possible to study the word and neglect the Word. It is possible to search the Scriptures and miss the Savior.

How can we guard ourselves from such a deadly yet subtle danger? Ultimately, we need the Holy Spirit to breathe Christ into the dry bones of our devotions. We need him to come, morning by morning, and turn our living room or desk into a Mount of Transfiguration. And so, we pray.

But alongside prayer, we can also resolve to keep one goal of Bible reading high above the rest: Catch as much of Jesus as you can. Know and enjoy him. See and savor him. Study and love him.

And to that end, let me offer a modest proposal for your consideration: as you read the Bible this year, plant your soul especially in the Gospels.

I am not proposing that you read only the Gospels this year, but that you consider finding some special way to plant (and keep) your soul in them. You could, for example, use the one-year Discipleship Journal Bible Reading Plan, which includes a Gospel reading for every day. Or you could memorize an extended portion of the Gospels, like the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5–7) or the Upper Room Discourse (John 13–17). Or you could read and reread one of the Gospels, perhaps with journal and commentary in hand.

This proposal will not fit every reader. Some, perhaps, have spent most of their Christian life in the Gospels, and this may be the year to wander with Moses in the wilderness, or hear what Ezekiel has to say, or trace the logic of Romans.

But I suspect many, like myself, would benefit from the counsel of J.I. Packer and J.C. Ryle. First, hear Packer:

We could . . . correct woolliness of view as to what Christian commitment involves, by stressing the need for constant meditation on the four Gospels, over and above the rest of our Bible reading; for Gospel study enables us both to keep our Lord in clear view and to hold before our minds the relational frame of discipleship to him.

“We should never let ourselves forget,” Packer continues, “that the four Gospels are, as has often and rightly been said, the most wonderful books on earth” (Keep in Step with the Spirit, 61).

Now listen to Ryle:

It would be well if professing Christians in modern days studied the four Gospels more than they do. No doubt all Scripture is profitable. It is not wise to exalt one part of the Bible at the expense of another. But I think it should be good for some who are very familiar with the Epistles, if they knew a little more about Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. (Holiness, 247)

Neither Packer nor Ryle sought to create red-letter Christians, who treat the words of Jesus as more inspired than the rest of Scripture. All the Bible is God-breathed, and the Son of God speaks as fully in the black syllables as he does in the red.

Why then would whole-Bible lovers like these two men counsel Christians to give themselves to the Gospels? Consider four reasons.

The Gospels give glory a texture.

Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John could have given us a summary of Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection in their own words. Instead, the Gospels take us among the twelve, where we see and hear Jesus for ourselves. Why?

John tells us: “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). For John and the other disciples, the glory of Christ was not a vague or summarized or paraphrased glory; it was a particular glory, a textured glory, a glory they had “seen and heard” (1 John 1:3) in the specific words, deeds, joys, heartaches, and sufferings of the Word made flesh. And by Gospel’s end, they want us to join them in saying, “We have seen his glory” (John 20:30–31).

“Sinners and strugglers like us need more than general notions of Jesus in our most desperate moments.”

Sinners and strugglers like us need more than general notions of Jesus in our most desperate moments; we need his particular glories. The fearful soul needs more than to remember that Jesus gives peace — it needs to hear him say in the upper room, “Let not your hearts be troubled” (John 14:1). The oppressed mind needs more than a vague idea of Jesus’s power over darkness — it needs to watch him send demons fleeing (Mark 1:25–26). The guilty heart needs more than to say, “Jesus forgives” — it needs to feel Calvary shake under the force of “It is finished” (John 19:30).

Sin is not vague. Sorrow is not vague. Satan is not vague. Therefore, we cannot allow Christ to be.

The Gospels shatter false Christs.

Ever since the real Jesus ascended, we have been in danger of embracing “another Jesus” (2 Corinthians 11:4) — or at least a distorted Jesus. Some do so deliberately, in search of a more convenient Messiah. Many, however, just struggle to faithfully uphold what Jonathan Edwards calls the “diverse excellencies” of Jesus Christ, the lamblike Lion and lionlike Lamb (Seeing and Savoring Jesus Christ, 29). We understand lions, and we understand lambs, but what do we make of a Lion-Lamb?

Imagine yourself in Peter’s shoes. Just when you think you’ve discovered Jesus’s tenderness, he goes and calls someone a dog (Matthew 15:25–26). Just when you imagine you’ve grasped his toughness, he takes the children in his arms (Mark 10:16). Just when you pride yourself for seeing him clearly, he turns and says, “Get behind me, Satan!” (Mark 8:33). And just when you’re sure you’ve failed beyond forgiveness, he meets you with threefold mercy (John 21:15–19).

“We need our vision of Jesus regularly shattered — or at least refined — by the real, unexpected Jesus of the Gospels.”

“My idea of God is not a divine idea,” C.S. Lewis writes. “It has to be shattered time after time” (A Grief Observed, 66). So too with every one of us. We tend to remake the full, surprising, perfect humanity of Jesus in the image of our partial, predictable, distorted humanity. So, like Peter, we need our vision of Jesus regularly shattered — or at least refined — by the real, unexpected Jesus of the Gospels.

The Gospels make Bible reading Personal.

When we talk of “personal Bible study,” we may say more than we mean. The best Bible study is indeed Personal — centered on the Person of Jesus Christ. His presence rustles through every page of Scripture, Old Testament or New. All the prophets foretell him; all the apostles preach him. And the Gospel writers in particular display him.

Yet how easily Bible reading becomes an abstract, impersonal affair — even, at times, when we are reading about Christ. To know Christ doctrinally and theologically is not necessarily to know him personally. To follow old-covenant shadows to their substance is not necessarily to follow him. To grasp the logic of redemption is not necessarily to grasp his love. To be sure, we cannot commune with Christ without knowing something about him. But we can certainly know much about Christ without communing with him.

“It is well to be acquainted with the doctrines and principles of Christianity. It is better to be acquainted with Christ himself,” Ryle writes (Holiness, 247). And nowhere does the Bible acquaint us with Christ the Person better than in the Gospels. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John especially are written for those who, like the visitors in John 12, come to Scripture saying, “Sir, we wish to see Jesus” (John 12:21).

The Gospels are bigger than they look.

The four Gospels are relatively small compared to most of the books on our shelves. If we wanted, we could read through each in a single sitting. But like the Narnian stable in The Last Battle, the inside of the Gospels is bigger than the outside. Between their covers lies an infinite glory — a Jesus whose riches are not metaphorically but literally “unsearchable” (Ephesians 3:8).

We will never catch all there is to know and love about Jesus, but we can catch something more next year. So come again and walk with him on the waters. Come and watch a few loaves feed five thousand. Come and sing with Zechariah, rise with Lazarus, and walk with the women to the empty tomb. Come and remember why the Gospels are indeed “the most wonderful books on earth” — because they give us the most wonderful Person.

Weeks ago, I discovered how little I really believed in hell. I am not sure how else to explain it. I realized it while at a children’s play area, watching my three little ones run, jump, and waddle about.

Seated on the other side of the play place sat a young Latino man lost on his phone. He had several kids, several tattoos, and no wedding ring. How he dressed and how he carried himself reminded me of the men I grew up with, the young man I was at his age. Having read my Bible and having grown up in the area, I assumed he did not know the Lord. More likely than not, he had never heard the true gospel. More likely than not, he didn’t want to.

In that moment, I imagined myself walking over to share Christ with him, only to have him dismiss me as some corny, churchy, preachy-type (as I might have done at his age). And there we would sit — me wishing I never walked over; he wishing the same.

Instead of getting up, though, I leaned my head back and closed my eyes. And that is when it hit me: I do not really believe in hell right now. How could I? My compassion blew away at a mere inconvenience. Jesus’s doctrine of eternal, conscious torment was no real thing to me. Nor was the eternal blessedness of heaven. Missionaries have crossed oceans, left families, brought their coffins with them to foreign lands; yet there I sat, retreating at the mere thought of rejection. What kind of faith was this?

The scary part, I realize, was that in that same moment, I could have started writing an article about hell, preached an impromptu sermon, debated an atheist on its necessity. Yet, reciting Bible verses wasn’t what was required — believing them was. Across from me sat an immortal soul, and yet there I just sat, unwilling to travel even a few short steps to enter an awkward conversation that could have led him to eternal life.

I wish I could report that I stood up and began preaching. I wish I could tell you that I walked over to that young man and prayerfully spoke words of life to his soul. But I didn’t. To my shame, I suppressed the stirring, indulged unbelief, and heartlessly packed up my kids and left that man just where he sat. Lord, have mercy upon us both.

Bright Red Letters

How would our lives look differently, yours and mine, if we believed that hell is for real? How many trivialities, how many unworthy anxieties, how many small concerns and tiny pursuits would be lit aflame? How many selfish insecurities, how many dull and shallow days, how many unworthy entertainments and lukewarm seasons and cowardly inactivity would simply shatter by believing what Jesus himself told us about the judgment to come?

Our Christlikeness can be rather selective at times, can’t it? Who believed in or spoke of hell more than Jesus? Who else knew with utter certainty what fierce artillery aimed every day at the wicked? All the apostle’s teaching is Christ’s teaching, but what did Jesus himself say about hell? What were his reddest letters? See if your soul can sip even a small sample from just the first Gospel:

“If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body be thrown into hell. And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body go into hell.” (Matthew 5:29–30; Matthew 18:8–9)

“The Son of Man will send his angels, and they will gather out of his kingdom all causes of sin and all law-breakers, and throw them into the fiery furnace. In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. . . . So it will be at the end of the age. The angels will come out and separate the evil from the righteous and throw them into the fiery furnace. In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” (Matthew 13:41–42, 49–50)

“Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.’ . . . And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.” (Matthew 25:41, 46)

Outer darkness. A fiery furnace. Destruction of both body and soul (Matthew 10:28). Eternal punishment. Inarticulate wailing. Teeth grinding. “Many” travel there (Matthew 7:13). Jesus’s sermons often fell like napalm, because he loved the souls of men.

“How would our lives look differently, yours and mine, if we believed that hell is for real?”

Jesus gives us shocking glimpses of judgment in scalding and scarlet letters. Scripture contains many more. We need them to rouse us to love, forgiveness, purity, patience, and to God himself. Will we nod at them, close the book, and leave it upon the dresser? Will these words not send us to the nations, to ambush sin, to walk across a playground? Did Christ leave us here to wave at unbelievers as they sprint past us off the cliff? Is this love for God and love for neighbor?

Friendless Depths

We can daringly tell Christ’s message about hell because that message is about much more than hell. It is about a God who took on flesh to drink down the wrath his people deserved.

Knowing the full horrors of hell, oh, manly and heroic he, came to us, became us, stepped in front of us, to save us. He did not experience hell proper — hell begins after the resurrection and the final judgment. But he did face that wrath which makes the lake of fire, we might say with due reverence, into a fiery puddle. The wicked in hell never approach the full weight, never near the full price, never exhaust the divine quiver of the arrows their sins deserve. But to ransom even one soul, the God-man paid the full debt, suffered the full torment, empties a cup of eternal woe. In other words, where the wicked shall suffer incompletely (though still horribly) forever, he plunged to the very bottom of that great lake of wrath to rescue us.

See him, O saint, diving, down, down, down, through to soul-blistering depths, further and further, deeper and deeper, agonizing, alone.

With hand outstretched for the bottom, “he poured out his soul to death” (Isaiah 53:12). Through friendless deeps and misery unmeasured, see this Son of Sorrows swim boldly along the bottom — omnipotent wrath crushing him. See him feel upon the seabed, ah, one lost pearl. A little further, the second. Further still, a third. As the pressure increases beyond bearing, he cries, “I thirst!” yet presses on, though heaven’s troops would stand at his beck and call. He will have his prize, his people. One by one, under heat and wrath-shattering contemplation, he reaches out, Christian, for you, holds you, claims you as his own. Angels are stunned into silence. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” he cries (Matthew 27:46). After six excruciating hours, he collects his last pearl and shouts victoriously, “It is finished” (John 19:30).

For all eternity, Jesus alone reached the bottom of God’s righteous hatred toward sin. He alone absorbed the full wrath of his Father crushing him as “he became sin for us, who knew no sin” (see 2 Corinthians 5:21). No sinner in all of eternity shall submerge the depths he did. None besides the Lion of the tribe of Judah could so conquer. Sinners eternally sip at a challis they cannot hope — or bear — to finish. He did.

Cruel Kindness

Christian reader, do you really believe this?

If we all did, would our cities not be filled with a knowledge of Christ? When we refused to avoid eye contact with those in our everyday lives, as I did that day, how might our local parks, laundromats, coffee shops, restaurants, and sporting events fill with the name above all names?

You and I need to learn a little more gospel impoliteness: to learn to speak when unasked, to go when uninvited, and to tell that name — that only name given under heaven — by which men must be saved. Let Spurgeon’s arrows sink to the heart.

We are so gentle and quiet, we do not use strong language about other people’s opinions; but let men go to hell out of charity to them. We are not at all fanatical, and for all we do to disturb him, the old manslayer has a very comfortable time of it. We would not wish to save any sinner who does not particularly wish to be saved. We shall be pleased to say a word to them in a mild way, but we do not speak with tears streaming down our cheeks, groaning and agonizing with God for them; neither would we thrust our opinions upon them, though we know they are being lost for want of knowledge of Christ crucified. (Words of Counsel for Christian Workers, 32–33)

Humanly speaking, I was willing to let that man go to hell out of a dark sort of charity to him (and a dark sort of charity to me). He probably didn’t want to hear of Christ (as many don’t). He might have rejected it (which many do). But such cowardly calculations are not mine or yours to make. And the historic and biblical doctrine of eternal, conscious, just torment of the wicked should have consumed that cold, fleshly indifference known in plainer tongues as cowardice or hatred.

What would happen in our cities if every Christian (and every church) really believed in the horrors of hell and, with it, the desperate need of every soul for Jesus Christ?

To the left of my desk is an original oil painting by an award-winning artist named Audrey Strandquist. Unless you live about an hour west of Minneapolis and are above the age of fifty, I doubt you’ve seen her work. Audrey was my wife’s maternal grandmother, and her awards were conferred mainly at regional fairs. She typically painted landscapes, but in the painting next to me, titled “Threshing” and dated August 8, 1940, she beautifully captured a portrait of her tall, strong 24-year-old soon-to-be farmer husband, Wally, standing next to a bin of freshly threshed grain. In the background is a field of mature corn. Audrey was 23 when she applied the oils to this old canvas.

Audrey passed away in October 1998, and Wally in April 2013. Both are buried a short distance from the farm they worked from the time they married well into their elder years, in a small cemetery next to the little evangelical country church they faithfully attended and served for most of their lives. They were what we might be tempted to call “ordinary folk.” But that would be a misnomer, an oxymoron of colossal proportions.

There actually exists no such thing: an ordinary human life. To think a life ordinary is to believe a delusion. It reveals the shameful fact that we can barely bear true beauty — we who tire quickly of sunsets, often curse the rain, find wind an inconvenience, and define boring as watching the grass grow. How strange that we find violent virtual deaths in our films more captivating than the gentle life that miraculously awakens when buried, pushes up through the dark soil, catches the sunlight for food, and grows into a brilliantly green brushstroke of beauty in the very real landscape art we view every day.

“As for man, his days are like grass” (Psalm 103:15). Perhaps that is why we find the lives of men boring and ordinary. Watching a man is like watching the grass grow.

Lives Like Grass

Wally and Audrey were like grass. But being farmers, they found the adventure of grass less boring than most of us. Year after year, in a choreographed dance of collaborative labors, they tilled the dark soil, buried the seeds, and watched the epic of nourishing life slowly unfold. They endured the suspense and sometimes the tragedies of storms, droughts, and pestilence. They knew that the flower of the field was both fiercely resilient and fearfully fragile.

Like the grass they so carefully tended, their lives were a portrait of unassuming beauty. In the landscape of reality, you likely wouldn’t notice them unless you took the time to look. Wally was strong yet gentle, and his voice was calm and soothing. Audrey was kind and encouraging, and the bounty of her dinner table was unsurpassed. They moved like the slow, steady rhythms of the seasons. They were human poetry in motion. But we frenetic twenty-first-century Westerners, who have largely lost the patience required for poetry, might call it slow motion.

“There actually exists no such thing: an ordinary human life. To think a life ordinary is to believe a delusion.”

With unpretentious drama, they both came to faith in the living Christ while young, being raised by faithful parents and in faithful church communities. They met, fell in love, got married, and then faithfully loved one another for more than half a century. That alone is a marvelous feat, given how many dangers, toils, and snares half a century brings to anyone. The lyrics of these living poems tell of how Wally patiently and tenderly cared for Audrey through the numerous health challenges she faced throughout her adulthood, and how both of them, in thousands of ways over many decades, served the saints of Oster Covenant Church.

But the most profound effect they had on me was how they faithfully raised a daughter who came to embrace the faith she saw them live out in the so-called ordinary ebb and flow of life, which of course is where all the truly epic events of life occur. They had no idea the priceless gift this would be to me since their daughter would become my godly mother-in-law — 48 years after Audrey put her brush to canvas on that hot, midsummer, threshing day.

The Grass Withers

Wally and Audrey were like grass. Grass might seem to grow slowly, but in reality, its poetic life is brief. Which is why this painting moves me deeply, this portrait of a hardworking young man crafted by his gifted, hardworking young soon-to-be wife, both in the flower of their youth. That was 84 years ago. The painting is still with us, but the mortal bodies of the artist and her subject are not.

These blades of the grass of God flourished in the morning, but in the evening, they faded and withered (Psalm 90:6). Scorching winds of disease eventually passed over Audrey and then Wally, and now they are gone (Psalm 103:16). Two more casualties of the curse. Another reminder of the ignoble prosaic ending to the poem so noble and full of wild glory that tongues of neither men nor angels can fully capture it: a human life. An ordinary human life.

All flesh is grass,     and all its beauty is like the flower of the field.The grass withers, the flower fades     when the breath of the Lord blows on it;     surely the people are grass.The grass withers, the flower fades,     but the word of our God will stand forever. (Isaiah 40:6–8)

Where Grass Withers No More

I was there on the mournfully joyful days when we sowed the perishable remains of that kind, encouraging, artistic woman, and then, fifteen years later, the remains of that gentle, down-to-earth man, like seeds, into the hallowed ground beside the meeting house of the church they loved.

But make no mistake: we indeed sowed them. For it is the core of the Christian hope, the hope Wally and Audrey treasured in their souls, that what is sown perishable will be raised imperishable, what is sown in weakness will be raised in power, what is sown natural will be raised spiritual (1 Corinthians 15:42–44). They died in the hope all believers share: that the Sun of righteousness, the bright Morning Star, will make it possible for us, even though we die, to live in the eternal morning where the grass of God withers no more (Malachi 4:2; John 11:25–26; Revelation 21:4; Revelation 22:16).

And a day is coming when we will know that the epic stories of these quiet, grass-like saints have always been far more thrilling than the best novels and the greatest films. We will marvel at our former dullness, having ever considered such lives ordinary.

Someday, the curse will be reversed, and we will not have the patience to watch the millisecond epics of cinematic mass murder that have captured the imagination of fallen man. We will not have the capacity to find such dim phantasmal shadows entertaining at all. Not when what is playing out before us in vibrant colors now inconceivable is the gloriously wild real story of everlasting grass that, having burst from the ground, is alive with the light of the undying Star.