Two men stared straight at the risen Jesus for seven miles and didn’t recognize him—until the Scriptures had done their work first.
Burning Hearts Series
Then their eyes were opened and they recognized him. — Luke 24:31
We are back on the road to Emmaus for a third time, and I make no apology for it — there is more in this one story than we could mine in a year of Sundays. We have watched their hearts, and we have watched their ears. Now I want you to watch their eyes.
And there is something about their eyes that we have stepped right over twice now without stopping, and it is time we stopped. As Jesus comes up and falls into step beside them, Luke tells us that they were kept from recognizing him (Luke 24:16). Now sit with that for a moment, because it is a stranger thing than we usually allow. These were not strangers to Jesus. At least one of them, Cleopas, plainly knew Him; they had followed Him, listened to Him, leaned the whole weight of their hopes on Him. And now the risen Christ is walking at their very elbow, close enough to reach out and touch, talking with them for the better part of seven miles — and they look straight at Him and do not see Him. Their eyes are open. The Man is right there in front of them. And they cannot see who it is.
And notice the word Luke chooses. He does not simply say they failed to recognize Him, the way grief or a strange hour or a glorified body might naturally account for. He says they were kept from it — and that is the language of something done to them, not merely something that did not happen in them. Someone is holding their eyes shut. And look what fills the space before those eyes are finally opened. It is not a change of lighting. It is not Jesus turning so they can see His face more clearly. It is the Word: for the better part of seven miles He is opening the Scriptures to them, beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, unfolding everything the whole Book had said concerning Himself (Luke 24:27).
Only after that long unfolding does Luke record that their eyes were opened and they recognized him (Luke 24:31). The seeing comes after the hearing, and not the other way around. Which means this was no accident of evening light. The Lord Himself held their eyes shut until the Scriptures had done their first work in their hearts — because He never intended for them to recognize a face before they had first recognized a Word.
That, brothers and sisters, is a parable of how most people read the Bible. The Book lies open. The light is good. The truth is right there on the page, plain as the nose on your face. And they look straight at it and do not see what is in front of them. And it tells us something we are going to need for the rest of this chapter: real sight of the real Jesus was never first a matter of better eyes. It is a matter of the Word doing its work first, so that the eyes have something to finally recognize when they open.
I want to begin with the most common thing anyone ever says to me about the Bible. It is not I don’t believe it. It is not I disagree with it. It is this: I just don’t understand it. I tried, they say. I started in January, with such good intentions, a brand-new Bible and a reading plan tucked inside the cover. I got through Genesis well enough — there are stories there, at least. I held on through most of Exodus. And then somewhere out in the wilderness, among the tents and the sacrifices and the curtains and the laws about mildew on the walls, I quietly ran aground and gave up. It felt, they tell me, like reading somebody else’s mail — a long letter written for another person, in another century, half of it in a code I could not decipher. And so the new Bible went back on the shelf next to last year’s, and the resolution went to join all the other broken ones.
If that is you — and I suspect it is far more of us than would ever care to raise a hand — then this chapter is for you. Stay with me. Because there is an answer to the I don’t understand it problem, and it is not the answer most people assume. It is not that you need a theology degree, or a thicker study Bible with more notes than text, or a higher IQ than the Lord saw fit to give you.
So what is it? There is a single key that fits every lock in this Book, and once that key turns, the rooms you could never get into before swing open, one after another after another, down the whole length of the house. The eunuch in the desert found that key. The two on the Emmaus road found it. And it is being held out to you, right where you sit. So let me show you three things: why we cannot see, what it is we are actually meant to see, and how, at the last, the eyes come open.
A Veil Over the Page
Start honestly, with the problem, because we will never prize the cure until we have felt the weight of the disease. Why is it that sincere, intelligent, well-meaning people can sit down with this Book and get up an hour later utterly baffled? The answer begins out on a hot desert road.
An Ethiopian official — a man of enormous standing, the treasurer of an entire kingdom — is riding home in his chariot from Jerusalem, and as he rides he is reading aloud from the scroll of Isaiah. Now think about that. This is not a careless man. He is reading the very words of God, the prophet himself, the most important book on the face of the earth — and he has bothered to bring it on a long journey and read it out under the sun. And Philip, one of the earliest evangelists of the Christian faith, sent there by the Spirit of God across miles of empty country for this one appointment, runs up alongside the moving chariot, hears him reading, and calls out a single question: “Do you understand what you are reading?”
And listen to the man’s answer, because it is one of the most honest and humble sentences in all the Bible:
“How can I, unless someone explains it to me?” — Acts 8:31
There is the whole problem in one sentence — and notice carefully who is saying it. This is no fool. This is a cultivated, powerful, literate man, devout enough to have traveled hundreds of dusty miles simply to worship the God of Israel, hungry enough for truth that he is reading Hebrew prophecy for pleasure on the road home. He has the Book open on his lap. He has his eyes fixed on the page. He is even, as it happens, parked on exactly the right chapter — the single most important passage in the whole Old Testament, as we shall see. And he cannot make head nor tail of it. How can I, unless someone explains it to me? Do you see? It was never a problem of effort. It was never a problem of intelligence, or of sincerity — he had all three in abundance. It was simply that he was reading without the key. He was standing at the locked door, rattling the handle, sincere and earnest and getting nowhere, because no one had yet placed the key in his hand.
Paul names the cause. He is writing about his own people — Israel, reading their own Scriptures, in their own language — and what he says explains the eunuch, and explains the man whose Bible went back on the shelf, and explains us:
We are not like Moses, who would put a veil over his face to prevent the Israelites from seeing the end of what was passing away. But their minds were made dull, for to this day the same veil remains when the old covenant is read. — 2 Corinthians 3:13–14
A veil. That is Paul’s word for it. And he is reaching back, as he writes it, to the old story of Moses coming down the mountain with his face shining so brightly from being in God’s presence that he had to cover it with a veil. The problem, says Paul, is not that the Book is dark. The Book blazes. The problem is that something hangs between the blazing Book and the human eye. Think of a great window in an old house, facing east, built to flood a whole room with the morning sun — and someone has hung a heavy curtain across it, and drawn it shut, and left it shut for years, until the room has sat so long in shadow that the people living in it have half forgotten the sun is even there. They grope for the lamp. They complain of the cold. They have stopped expecting the room to ever be bright.
And then one morning a hand reaches out and draws the curtain back — not slowly, not inch by careful inch, but in a single motion — and the light that was blazing on the other side the whole time floods in and fills the room exactly as it always would have, the very instant the curtain moved. The window never changed. It was never the dim one. Only the curtain came down. And Paul tells us plainly what that curtain is, and exactly how it falls. The veil is unbelief — the dullness of a mind and a heart turned away from God. And it is removed by one thing only, and never by any other: only in Christ, Paul says, is it taken away; whenever anyone turns to the Lord, the veil is taken away. Turn to Christ, and in that turning itself the curtain falls, and the light that was blazing on the page the whole time floods in at last.
And there is a deeper, more humbling reason still beneath even that one:
The person without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God but considers them foolishness, and cannot understand them because they are discerned only through the Spirit. — 1 Corinthians 2:14
This is humbling, because it tells us that in the end this is not a problem we can simply out-think. A man may have read every commentary ever written and stacked them to the ceiling. He may have the Greek and the Hebrew at his fingertips and a wall full of framed degrees. And Paul says that, without the Spirit of God, that man still cannot truly grasp the things of God — no more than a man born blind can grasp, by listening very hard and concentrating with all his might, the difference between scarlet and gold. It is the wrong faculty for the task. You cannot hear a color or taste a sound, and you cannot crack open the deep things of God with mere brainpower, however much of it you have, because spiritual things, Paul says, are discerned only through the Spirit.
And so the very first thing we do, before ever we open this Book, is not to sharpen our wits but to bow our heads, and ask the One who wrote the thing to come and read it along with us. For the Author is still alive. He still makes house calls. And He has never once left a humble reader sitting alone in the dark.
So there is the diagnosis, and we must feel it before we move on. The Book is not the problem. Your mind, exactly, is not the problem. The veil is the problem. And the veil only ever lifts in one place, and at the touch of one Person. And before we name that Person, let one man put a human face on everything we have just said. His name was Nicodemus, and he was as well-equipped a reader of Scripture as his generation produced — a Pharisee, a ruler of the Jews, a teacher of teachers, a man who had given his life to these very texts and could recite the prophets from memory. He had Ezekiel’s promise of a new heart and a new spirit written into his very bones, and Jeremiah’s promise of a new covenant lying open beside it.
And yet, when he came to Jesus by night with his careful questions, it grew painfully plain that all those texts had lived in his head for a lifetime without ever once landing in his heart. The Book was not locked against him. He had simply never found the key. We will meet him again, further along this road, and see what at last became of him; for now let him stand as the human face of the veil — a teacher of Israel with the light blazing on the page in front of him, and a curtain drawn clean across his eyes.
The Key That Fits Every Lock
Which brings us to the very heart of the matter, and to the single most important thing I will say to you in this entire book, so if your mind has wandered, call it back now. There is one key that opens every locked door in the whole of the Bible. And that key is not a technique, and it is not a system. It is a Person, and His name is Jesus Christ. The whole Book — every law and every long story, every psalm and every thundering prophet, every shadow and type and ancient promise — is, at the deepest level, about Him. Once you truly see that, you have the master key in your hand, and you will spend the rest of your days walking gladly through doors that used to be bolted shut against you.
Here is the verse this entire book has been quietly waiting for:
And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself. — Luke 24:27
Slow right down here, because every single phrase is loaded with gold. Beginning with Moses — that is the first five books, the law, the genealogies, the sacrifices, the wilderness, all of it. And all the Prophets — that is the whole great sweep of the rest of the Old Testament. In all the Scriptures — not a handful of obvious proof texts cherry-picked here and there, not three or four famous predictions, but all the Scriptures, the entire library. And what was the one golden subject He found running through every shelf of it? The things concerning Himself. Do you grasp what Jesus is actually claiming on that road? He is saying that the entire Old Testament — written down across a thousand years and more, century upon century before He was ever born in Bethlehem — is, from its first page to its last, about Him. He is the thread that runs through the whole tapestry. He is the figure hidden in the carpet. And you have only to pull that one thread, and the whole pattern comes alive in your hands.
And it is a wonder when you begin to see it. The lamb slain at the first Passover, its blood brushed over the doorposts so that death passes the house by — who can that be but the Lamb of God, whose blood shelters us from judgment? The bronze serpent that Moses lifts up on a pole in the desert, so that any dying man who simply looks at it lives — Jesus takes that very story and says, that is Me; I will be lifted up like that, and whoever looks to Me will live. Joseph, betrayed and sold for silver by his own brothers, cast into a pit, given up for dead, and raised at last to a throne where he saves the very ones who betrayed him — can you read that now and not see Jesus? The rock in the wilderness, struck so that water gushes out for a perishing people; the manna that falls fresh and free every single morning to feed them; the great high priest who alone may carry the names of the people on his heart into the presence of God — every last one of them a finger pointing forward, down the long centuries, to the One who was always, always coming.
It is exactly like reading a fine mystery novel for the second time, after someone has told you who did it. The first time through, half the book made no sense — odd little remarks, strange details, whole scenes that seemed to lead nowhere at all. But pick it up and read it again, now that you know the ending, and the entire thing lights up before your eyes. Every one of those puzzling details was a planted clue. The author knew the ending the whole time, and was laying the trail on every page. That, brothers and sisters, is your Old Testament. Once you know that the ending is Jesus, you go back and read it again, and it lights up from Genesis to Malachi, because the Author knew the ending all along, and He was writing toward it the entire way.
Now consider what makes all of this more astonishing still. In a mystery novel, one mind writes the whole thing; the coherence has a simple explanation — one author, one desk, one plan. This Book was not written that way. We watched, a chapter ago, how those forty human authors were carried across fifteen centuries like ships before a single wind. Weigh, for a moment, what that means for the trail of clues. Most of those writers were dead and buried long before the next one ever picked up a pen. There was no committee. There was no possibility of collaboration across fifteen hundred years. And yet, when you lay all sixty-six books end to end, there is one trail of clues, running without a break and without a contradiction, leading to one Man. It is precisely what the letter to the Hebrews says so quietly you could read straight past it:
In the past God spoke to our ancestors through the prophets at many times and in various ways, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son. — Hebrews 1:1–2
Many times. Many ways. Forty human hands. And one Son standing at the end of every one of them — the answer the whole long puzzle was always pointing toward, the ending that only one Author could have known from the beginning.
But this Book can be handled with enormous diligence and still be missed entirely. Jesus said as much, to the most Scripture-soaked, Bible-saturated men of His entire day:
“You study the Scriptures diligently because you think that in them you have eternal life. These are the very Scriptures that testify about me, yet you refuse to come to me to have life.” — John 5:39–40
Hear the tragedy buried in those words. These were not lazy men. These were men who loved the Scriptures, who counted the very letters of them, who could recite whole books from memory without a slip. Nobody on earth studied harder. And Jesus tells them, to their faces, that they had missed the entire point — because the Scriptures were a finger pointing away from themselves to Him, and these men had fallen down and worshiped the finger. It is as if a starving man were handed a menu in a fine restaurant, and he studied that menu lovingly — admired the elegant typeface, memorized every description, had it framed, told all his friends how dearly he treasured his beautiful menu — and never once ordered the meal, and went home hungry. Or as if a man were given a map to the one country he had longed to see all his life, and he learned every line and every contour of that map by heart, and framed it on his wall, and never made the journey, and died having never set foot in the place. The Scriptures are the map. They are the menu. They were never, ever meant to be the destination. They were given to bring you to a Person. And it is perfectly, terribly possible — the Pharisees prove it, and full and busy churches prove it to this day — to love your Bible and never come to your Christ.
And Jesus makes the claim total. Standing among His gathered disciples, He says:
“This is what I told you while I was still with you: Everything must be fulfilled that is written about me in the Law of Moses, the Prophets and the Psalms.” — Luke 24:44
Now to a Jewish ear, the Law, the Prophets, and the Psalms was simply the ordinary way of naming the whole Bible — its three great divisions, the entire Hebrew Scriptures from cover to cover, nothing left out. And Jesus stands in the middle of His gathered disciples and says: everything written about Me, in the whole of it, must be fulfilled. Not one corner of it is exempt. The Law speaks of Him. The Prophets speak of Him. The Psalms speak of Him. Take any door at all in the vast house of Scripture, and the same single key turns the lock. And that, for a confused and discouraged reader, is the most liberating thing in the world to learn — because it means you can never finally be lost. However strange the chapter, however far out among the laws and the lists and the unpronounceable names you wander, there is always one question that will turn you back toward home: where is this pointing? How does this fit the One the whole story is about? You no longer hold a heap of disconnected fragments. You hold a compass, and the needle always swings home to Christ.
When the Eyes Are Opened
So we have the problem — the veil. And we have the key — Christ, of whom the whole Book speaks from end to end. Now watch what actually happens, in two places at once, when that key finally turns in the lock and the eyes come open.
Go back one last time to that desert road. The eunuch, you remember, was stuck — and do you know which passage he was stuck on? He was reading Isaiah 53. The towering chapter about a man led like a lamb to the slaughter, who opened not His mouth, who was pierced and crushed and cut off from the land of the living for sins that were never His own. Seven hundred years that prophecy had lain there waiting on the page. And the eunuch reads it and asks Philip the most natural question in the world: who is the prophet talking about here — himself, or some other man? He is a single verse away from the greatest discovery of his life, and he cannot see it. And then comes one of the loveliest sentences in the whole book of Acts:
Then Philip began with that very passage of Scripture and told him the good news about Jesus. — Acts 8:35
That was all it took. Notice what Philip did not do. He did not change the subject. He did not say, never mind that hard chapter, let me find you something simpler. He began with that very passage — the one the man was already reading, the one that had him so baffled — and he simply put the key into the lock. He said, in effect: that suffering servant you are reading about, that silent lamb led away to the slaughter — His name is Jesus of Nazareth, and only a few weeks ago I watched every word of it come true with my own eyes. And in that instant the veil lifted. The chapter that had been a bolted door one moment before swung wide open, and the man saw his own Savior standing in the middle of it, plain as daylight. By the end of that road he had asked to be baptized in the first water they passed, and Luke tells us he went on his way rejoicing (Acts 8:39). The same scroll. The same chapter. The very same eyes. But now there was a Name in it — and everything, everything, was different.
And the same thing happened on the Emmaus road. The two men have urged the stranger to stay the night; He has sat down at their own table and taken up the bread to bless it; and Luke writes the words we have been waiting to reach:
Then their eyes were opened and they recognized him. — Luke 24:31
The held eyes of Luke 24:16 are opened at last. The veil falls away. They see, finally, who it is — and in the very same instant He is gone from their sight. And the two of them turn and stare at one another across the table, and out it comes, the line we know so well by now:
“Were not our hearts burning within us while he talked with us on the road and opened the Scriptures to us?” — Luke 24:32
Now do you see what it was that finally took the veil away? We began this chapter with Paul’s use of the old story of Moses coming down the mountain — his face so bright from being in the presence of God that he had to cover it with a veil, because the glory was more than human eyes could bear. Paul borrowed that image to describe something that hangs not over Moses’s face but over the human heart reading Scripture without Christ: a veil of dullness, real and persistent, that no learning or effort can lift. And he told us plainly the one thing that does lift it:
But whenever anyone turns to the Lord, the veil is taken away. — 2 Corinthians 3:16
That is the Emmaus story in twelve words. Those two men had been walking with the Lord for seven miles, and the veil had held — because they did not yet know who He was. But the moment the bread broke and recognition came and they turned, heart and eye, to the risen Christ — the veil was not merely pushed aside or thinned. It was taken away. And all those miles of Scripture that had left them cold and confused were not a long, baffling walk anymore. They were a burning road, every mile of it blazing now with a Name. The difference between confusion and illumination was not a new reading method. It was a turning. It is always a turning.
Which is exactly what happens a few lines further on. When the Lord appears that same night to all the gathered disciples at once, Luke records it in the plainest words imaginable:
Then he opened their minds so they could understand the Scriptures. — Luke 24:45
He opened their minds. Notice, from that one short sentence, that this is finally His work and not ours. We have our part to play, and we must play it — we read, we study, we ask our questions, we sit with the hard text and refuse to give up. But the actual opening of the mind is His gift, and the way He gives it is through the Spirit He promised and sent. On the last night of His life, Jesus told His disciples:
“When he, the Spirit of truth, comes, he will guide you into all the truth… he will glorify me because it is from me that he will receive what he will make known to you.” — John 16:13–14
The Holy Spirit is the One who opens the mind to the Scriptures — but mark carefully how He works. He does not come as a separate route to God that goes around Jesus. He comes from Jesus, sent by Jesus, to make known the things of Jesus. His whole work in the Scriptures is to take the Word that is about the Son and press it alive into a human heart. Which is why the Spirit and the Son cannot be separated in this matter, any more than light can be separated from the sun that sends it.
Approach this Book while turning away from Christ — treating it as a historical document, a moral code, a religious text to be mastered by effort — and the Spirit’s own presence cannot open eyes that are pointed away from the very thing He has come to show. But turn to the Son — really turn, the way those two men finally turned at the table — and the Spirit does, freely and instantly, what He was sent to do. He lifts the veil. He opens the mind. This is why the first disciples could not keep the Scriptures and let go of Jesus: it was Jesus who sent the Spirit, and the Spirit who made the Scriptures come alive. The three belong together, and they cannot be pulled apart.
So here is the most practical thing I can possibly leave with you, and if you will take it up it will change your reading for the rest of your life. Before you open the Book, pray four small words: Lord, open my eyes — show me Yourself here. Not help me understand this passage, as though the text were a puzzle to be cracked by effort alone. Show me Yourself — because the veil lifts at the turning of a soul toward Christ, and the Spirit who illumines the Book is the Spirit that Christ alone gives.
And then read every passage you come to with one living question burning quietly in your mind: where is the Redeemer in this? What is this showing me about Him, or about my need of Him? One word of caution, lest we run off and get silly about it, because some people do. I do not mean that you go hunting for secret codes, or pretend that every stray number and curtain-ring and tent-peg is a hidden symbol of Jesus. That is not reading; that is conjuring. The thread is not a magic trick. The thread is the storyline. It is the one great drama of a ruined and helpless people and the Rescuer who was always coming for them — running on through promise and sacrifice and longing and prophecy and failure and hope, century after century, until at the last He walks onto the stage in Bethlehem. Read for that — soberly, reverently, expectantly — and you will start to find Him on page after page where you had never seen Him before. And what you must then do about Him, once you have seen Him — well, that is for a later chapter. For now, the whole work is simply to see.
✠ ✠ ✠
So here is the whole chapter in three words: a veil, a key, an opening.
There was a veil — over the eunuch’s scroll, over the disciples’ eyes, over our own dull and wandering hearts — and it is real, and it is the reason sincere and clever people read this Book and walk away from it still in the dark.
And there is a key — the Lord Jesus Christ, of whom Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms all spoke with one voice, the One the whole long story was always, from the beginning, about — and that single key turns every lock in the house.
And there is an opening — the blessed moment when the eyes come clear and the mind comes open and the Book that was a bolted door becomes a window thrown wide, and you see, shining up out of pages you had long ago given up on, the face of your own Savior, who was standing there in them the whole time.
The eunuch went up that desert road baffled and alone, and he came down it baptized and rejoicing, because one man ran alongside his chariot and put the key into his hand. The two on the Emmaus road sat down to supper heartbroken and confused, and they rose up from that table with their eyes wide open and their hearts on fire, because the risen Christ had walked them clean through the Scriptures and shown them, at the last, Himself.
And mark where their eyes were opened. They were opened at a table, over broken bread. That table is exactly where we are going next. But for now, do not leave it as a closed Book a single hour longer. Take it up. Ask Him to come and read it with you. And then watch the grime of all those years begin to lift, one patient inch at a time, until the face that was there the whole time looks back at you out of the page.
Were not our hearts burning within us, while He opened the Scriptures to us? He is opening them still.
Take up the Book, and ask Him — and see.
