Knowing God Before the Bible: John 5:39-40 Explained
Short answer: Knowing God before the Bible does not mean reading Scripture less; it means refusing to treat Scripture as the destination rather than the road. In John 5:39-40 Jesus says, “You search the Scriptures, because you think that in them you have eternal life; and these are they which testify about me. Some of the most careful readers in Israel had memorised the scrolls and still stood in front of the one they pointed to. Jesus was not scolding them for studying. He was scolding them for stopping there. The Bible is true, but it is not the Saviour. It is God's own witness to his Son, and the purpose of every page is to bring readers into a living knowledge of the God who speaks. Bible study that never lands on him has missed the point it was aiming at.
Reading the Bible Is Not the Same as Knowing God
It is possible to be an expert in the text and a stranger to its author. That is the uncomfortable claim of John 5:39-40. The people Jesus addressed were not lazy or ignorant. They were the ones who had built their lives around the Scriptures, who copied them, debated them, taught them, and staked their hope of eternal life on possessing them. Their problem was not a lack of study. Their problem was that the study had grown detached from the God it was supposed to reveal. They pored over the map and never sailed. They memorised the doctor's prescription and never took it.
The Bible itself never presents knowledge of God as an alternative to reading. It presents reading as one of the ordinary ways God makes himself known. But Scripture also knows the danger of having right information without a living relationship. Hosea 6:6 says, “For I desire mercy, and not sacrifice; and the knowledge of God more than burnt offerings.” Israel was still bringing the offerings. The ritual had not stopped. What had stopped was the relationship the ritual was meant to express. God's complaint was not about the ceremonies themselves but about hearts that had gone elsewhere while the ceremonies continued.
Jesus takes that prophetic theme and applies it with devastating precision. He does not tell the crowds to stop reading. He tells them to notice what they are missing while they read. The verb for searching suggests diligent investigation, not casual browsing. Something that takes that kind of effort should be expected to reach its conclusion. Their conclusion was supposed to be him. So it is possible to be a serious student of the Bible and still need to be invited, in the plainest terms, to come to Jesus.
This is why the question of knowing God before the Bible is not anti-intellectual. It is a call to order. A person can know a great deal about God and still not know him, in the sense Jesus means. A person can quote the psalm and never pray it. A person can outline the sermon and never be changed by it. The first priority is not a smaller Bible, but a Bible read toward its centre, by a person who actually wants God himself and not only the information about him.
Why Jesus Could Say the Scriptures Testify About Him
Jesus makes an astonishing claim about every part of the Old Testament. He does not say the Scriptures contain a few predictions about him, or that a handful of clearly messianic passages point his way. He says the Scriptures as a whole testify about him. His own summary of the Bible's witness is personal. The story of Israel, the laws, the sacrifices, the poems, the prophets, all have their meaning in relation to the one who now stands in front of them. This is why a Bible study that treats the text as detached moral advice has already begun to wander from its course.
Luke records the same instinct after the resurrection, when Jesus walks with two disciples and explains the things concerning himself in all the Scriptures. The New Testament writers read the Old Testament the same way. Matthew sees Israel's story recapitulated in Jesus. John sees the tabernacle, the Passover lamb, and the bronze serpent all pointing beyond themselves. Paul reads Abraham's faith as the pattern of the gospel. Hebrews reads the sacrificial system as a shadow whose substance has arrived. This is not a clever reading imposed on the text. It is how the apostles learned to read from Jesus himself.
If that is true, then the practical rule for Bible study is not complicated. Read the passage honestly, in its own context, and then ask where it stands in relation to Christ. Some passages lead to him by direct prophecy, some by type and shadow, some by contrast, and some by showing the human need he came to meet. The cross is not a footnote added to the story. It is the hinge. Learning to read that way keeps study from becoming an end in itself and keeps attention moving toward the person the text is about.
This does not require forcing Jesus into every verse. Honest Bible teaching resists artificial links. But it does require refusing a reading that leaves Christ out entirely and calls that neutrality. The text has spoken about him long before we arrived. Our job is to hear what it actually says, and the New Testament is clear that the whole canon is oriented to the Son. A reader who knows that will find the Bible opening up rather than closing down.
The Pharisees' Mistake Was Not Too Much Bible
It is easy to caricature the scribes and Pharisees as men who hated Scripture, and that is simply false. They were the most biblically serious people of their generation. They fasted, tithed, memorised, taught, and travelled to make converts. The problem was not the amount of their Bible knowledge. Somewhere along the way, the means had been treated as the end, and the result was a heart that could not recognise its own Messiah when he arrived. That is why Jesus calls them hypocrites in Matthew 23:23, not for reading the law but for missing its weightiest parts.
Jesus says there, as Matthew 23:23 says, “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you tithe mint, dill, and cumin, and have left undone the weightier matters of the law: justice, mercy, and faith. But you ought to have done these, and not to have left the other undone.” Notice the balance. He does not tell them to stop tithing the small herbs. He tells them to do both, and to stop the inversion that made precision about small things a cover for neglect of large ones. That is the same inversion he exposes in John 5.
Bible knowledge can become a kind of competence that we bring to God rather than a door we walk through to him. It can become something to defend, something to display, something that makes us feel we are on the right side of the argument. When that happens, the study is still technically accurate and still deeply wrong. The person can win the debate and lose the point. That is a danger for scholars, for pastors, for small-group leaders, and for anyone who has read a lot of Christian books.
The remedy is not to become vague about doctrine. Jesus was not vague. The remedy is to hold knowledge and humility together, which is exactly what Jeremiah 9:23-24 does with the wisdom, might, and riches that people like to boast in. The one thing worth boasting about is that a person understands and knows the God who shows steadfast love, justice, and righteousness. That is not a general spiritual feeling. It is a personal knowledge of a God who has made himself known, and it rules out both empty ritual and empty learning.
Eternal Life Is Knowing a Person, Not Passing an Exam
In John 17:3 Jesus defines eternal life in relational terms. He says, “This is eternal life, that they should know you, the only true God, and him whom you sent, Jesus Christ.” Whatever else eternal life involves, its heart is a relationship with the Father and the Son. It is not merely endless existence or a correct theological file. It is knowing God. That single sentence explains why Jesus can say in John 5 that the Scriptures testify about him, and why he can then add that his hearers are unwilling to come to him for life.
This is the difference between studying a biography and knowing a person. You can read about someone's life for years without ever meeting them. The facts can be accurate and the relationship absent. The Bible is not a biography written from a distance; it is God's own self-disclosure, given so that readers might actually come to him. That is why the language of coming matters more than the language of mastering. Knowing here is not collecting data. It is the kind of knowledge that involves trust, love, obedience, and a life reshaped by the one known.
Paul describes his own ambition in the same terms. In Philippians 3:8-10 he says, “Yes most certainly, and I count all things to be a loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus, my Lord, for whom I suffered the loss of all things, and count them nothing but refuse, that I may gain Christ.” This is a man who knew the Scriptures thoroughly. His learning was not discarded. It was reordered around a person. Everything that had once been his standing before God became refuse compared with knowing Christ.
If Paul needed to say that, so does every reader of the Bible. The goal of opening a text is not to close the book with a satisfying feeling of accomplishment. It is to be drawn into the knowledge of God, which Paul describes as the surpassing value of knowing Christ. That reorients the whole practice of Bible reading. It makes study a form of devotion without making devotion an excuse for vagueness. Both are held together in a life that is learning to know God and not merely to talk about him.
How to Put the Person Before the Procedure
Practically, this means that when you open the Bible you open it as someone who is speaking to God, not only studying a document. That is why prayer before reading is not a formality. It is an acknowledgment that the God of the text is present and is the one you are trying to know. The psalmist asks for open eyes, and the request is not for information in general but for a sight of what God has actually said. Reading with that posture changes what you are looking for. You are asking to meet the One whose words these are.
It also means holding the whole story together. Individual verses matter, and careful attention to context is not optional. But a verse is not a fortune cookie. It sits within a book, a book within a library, and the library tells one story that runs from creation to new creation. When a passage is difficult or a section seems unrelated to Christ, the reader who knows the shape of the whole story has somewhere to go. The story of a nation, a king, or a prophet is not a freestanding morality tale. It is part of the long preparation for the one who would fulfil it.
Another practical habit is to let the text reach your life rather than only your notes. James warns about hearers who look into the mirror and forget. The knowledge Jesus is talking about is not the kind that leaves a person unchanged. Hosea 6:6 pairs the knowledge of God with mercy, not because knowledge produces mercy mechanically, but because someone who truly knows God begins to reflect his character. Reading that never touches how you treat your neighbour, use your money, or forgive your enemy has not yet reached the place where knowledge becomes living.
And a reader should stay honest about the limits. Some passages are hard. Some disagreements among faithful Christians are real, and they should be named rather than papered over. Knowing God before the Bible does not mean pretending every question is settled. It means keeping the goal in view even when the details are hard: to know the God who spoke, to come to the Son he sent, and to let the Word do its work in a life rather than filing it away as information.
What It Means to Come to Christ
In John 5:40 Jesus adds the word that keeps this discussion from drifting into abstraction. He does not simply say they missed a concept. He says they are unwilling to come to him that they may have life. The issue is movement. It is not enough to have accurate views about Christ set off in a corner of the mind. A person is invited to come, to trust, to entrust themselves to him. That is a decision and a direction, not just a conclusion.
This is the line Jesus drew with his own generation, and it is the line his Spirit still draws. Reading and rereading the Bible can become a way to keep the question of personal trust safely postponed. As long as I am still studying, I can feel I am still moving, without ever actually coming. But Jesus makes coming the point. He does not say that people who know a great deal about him have life. He says those who come to him do. Knowledge is included in the coming, but it does not replace it.
This also means the Christian life is not divided into a study category and a devotion category, with one for the mind and one for the heart. The same Lord is known through careful reading and through prayerful dependence, and the two are meant to serve each other. When study is done in the presence of God, it becomes worship. When prayer is shaped by the words of Scripture, it becomes informed rather than vague. The two belong together because they are both ways of relating to the same person.
So the phrase knowing God before the Bible is best understood as a matter of ordering, not subtraction. The Bible remains God's word written, fully trustworthy, and essential for faith and life. But it is read by a person, in the presence of a person, about a person. That is the difference between two readers with the same open book. One closes it and files the notes away. The other closes it and lives toward the Christ the whole book was written to make known.
Biblical fidelity check
The passage establishes something specific: Jesus, the one through whom God has spoken, treats the Scriptures as true and authoritative, and he says they testify about him. It does not establish that study, doctrine, or careful reading are unnecessary, and it certainly does not establish that the Bible contains errors or is optional. John 5:39-40 is not criticism of devotion to Scripture. It is a rebuke of devotion that refuses the one Scripture is about. The passage also does not tell us everything about how salvation works; it gives us one crucial sentence of it.
A common misreading takes this verse as permission to downplay the Bible altogether, as if knowing God and reading the Bible were rivals and the point is to pick the first. That misreads what Jesus is doing. He is not telling the crowd to read less; he is telling them why to read. The whole passage depends on the authority of the Scriptures he is describing. Another misreading treats it as a blanket condemnation of serious study, but the New Testament repeatedly commands sound teaching and close attention to the text. The rebuke is not for knowing the book. It is for refusing the Lord the book reveals.
Other passages that speak to John 5:39-40
The same concern for real knowledge of God runs through the letters of John and beyond. Those who want to keep reading are helped by studies that stay close to the text and its purpose. 1 John 2: Light, Love, and Abiding shows how fellowship with the Father and the Son shapes a life. 1 John 5: Faith Overcomes the World traces what it means to believe in the Son and hold eternal life in him. 1 John Bible Study Guide: Summary, Themes, Outline, and Gospel Connections helps frame the whole letter, and 2 John 1: Walking in Truth and Love Together ties truth to relationship rather than abstraction.
Frequently asked questions
Does John 5:39-40 and the idea of knowing God before the Bible mean I should not read the Bible?
No. Jesus is not telling his hearers to stop searching the Scriptures. He is telling them that their searching had not reached its purpose. The very next verse says they were unwilling to come to him. The answer is not less Bible but Bible read toward its centre. Scripture is God's word, and it is essential. What the passage warns against is reading it as an end in itself, so that the reader accumulates knowledge about God while never actually coming to him in trust and love.
How can I tell if I am studying the Bible without knowing God?
Look for a few signs. Does your reading ever move you to prayer? Does it shape how you treat people, forgive, give, and speak? Do you care more about being right in a discussion than about loving the person in front of you? Are you willing to come to Christ with your need, or only to think about him from a distance? None of these questions is a test you pass once. They are honest questions to bring to God, who knows you and still invites you to come.
Where does great Bible knowledge fit for a Christian?
Knowledge is good and commanded. Paul told Timothy to present himself approved to God, and he wrote dense letters full of careful argument. But knowledge sits under love and serves it. It is not the goal; it is a servant of the goal, which is to know God and to make him known. A well-stocked mind that does not love God or neighbour is a warning, not an achievement. Deep learning joined to humility and love is exactly what the church needs.
