At the very end of John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, Christian looks back from the Celestial City and sees a man called Ignorance approaching the gate.
Ignorance began to knock, supposing that entrance should have been quickly administered to him; but he was asked by the men that looked over the top of the gate: “Whence came you, and what would you have?” He answered: “I have eat and drank in the presence of the King, and he has taught in our streets.” Then they asked him for his certificate, that they might go in and show it to the King; so he fumbled in his bosom for one, and found none.
Since there was nothing to be found “in his bosom,” two angels are commanded to “go out and take Ignorance, and bind him hand and foot, and have him away.” With this, Christian learns the parting lesson of the book: “I saw that there was a way to hell, even from the gates of heaven.”
This is a sobering warning for all who think of themselves as Bible-loving Christians. For Scripture is like the gate of heaven to us, opening divine glories. Yet we can knock at the text every day and remain hollow hearted, with nothing in our bosom.
We need to ask ourselves two questions. First: Where is our hope? It is clear where the Pharisees set their hope. In John 5, addressing those who searched the Scriptures (v.39), Jesus said: “How can you believe, when you receive glory from one another and do not seek the glory that comes from the only God? Do not think that I will accuse you to the Father. There is one who accuses you: Moses, on whom you have set your hope. For if you believed Moses, you would believe me; for he wrote of me. But if you do not believe his writings, how will you believe my words?” (vv.44-47)
The Pharisees set their hope on Moses (v.45). They did not actually believe him; otherwise, they would have believed in Jesus, the one Moses wrote about. Yet they proudly thought of themselves as disciples of Moses (9 v28). Failing to see how the law constantly taught our inability to keep the law, and ignoring how it pointed beyond itself, they set their hope on Scripture itself and the law itself. Thus, they had to trust in themselves to read Scripture and to keep the law. Despite all that Scripture taught, they set their hope ultimately in themselves.
It can seem an almost comical error, these students of Scripture deducing the exact opposite of Scripture’s intention. But do we do any better when we set our hope in our own orthodoxy, our own piety, our own knowledge of Scripture? Hypocrites we remain – like them – unless the Scriptures lead us to place all our hope on Jesus, the one to whom they bear witness.
The second question Jesus’s interaction forces us to ask is this: Where is our glory? Which are we looking for in Scripture: the glory of God or our own glory?
Jesus asked: “How can you believe, when you receive glory from one another and do not seek the glory that comes from the only God?” (v.44). All too often for us, heaven is approval by others and hell is being ignored, and so we master Scripture for the sake of parading our knowledge and pampering our sense of our own rightness. None of this is Biblical.
If we are to have integrity as people of Scripture, we must honour Scripture, not merely by looking at Scripture but by looking along the beam of divine revelation at the glory of God in the face of Christ. Only there will we overcome our tribalism as we find a unity, not in our traditions, but in a humbled, shared adoration of Jesus.
