Jigsaw puzzle pieces assembling into a single picture

From Puzzle Pieces to The Picture of Jesus Christ

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We come into the world confused. Not a little confused, and not about trivial things — confused about the deepest ones, and mostly without realizing it. Picture a table covered in puzzle pieces just dumped from the box: scattered, face-down, mixed up, nothing joined to anything. That is closer to the state we start in than we like to admit.

Many have noticed that the Bible reads like an enormous puzzle — scattered ideas that need to be brought together and connected.

To whom will he teach knowledge, and to whom will he explain the message?… For it is precept upon precept, precept upon precept, line upon line, line upon line, here a little, there a little. (Isaiah 28:9-10 ESV)

Precept upon precept, line upon line, here a little, there a little — whatever else is at work in Isaiah’s words, the phrase catches something true about how Scripture reaches us: in fragments, scattered across the whole, a little here and a little there. For anyone who reads it closely that becomes self-evident. It really is one big puzzle. The question is how we put it together.

Why Words Can’t Do It

Have you ever tried to assemble a puzzle using words — to tell someone how, rather than show them? You can’t. You do it, or you sit down beside them and demonstrate. A puzzle is visual. It takes vision: seeing the shapes, the colors, the patterns, the way one piece’s edge answers another’s.

And we are working at a real disadvantage — we don’t have the picture on the box. That image is normally the main guide, and we don’t have it. Worse, we usually think we do. What we are actually holding up is the image of the world. The world puts a picture in front of our eyes constantly and tells us that is what we’re assembling. And it isn’t only the picture that’s the world’s; so is the lens we look through. Like our own eyeballs, we never see the lens itself. We are blind to it — and we view everything through it anyway.

Fake Pieces in the Box

A scattered puzzle would be hard enough. Ours is worse: the real pieces are mixed in with fakes. Ideas we are sure came from the Bible but actually came from the world — and ideas that did come from the Bible, but reached us already translated and handled by people who were themselves looking through the world’s lens. Old leaven, worked right into the flour.

Beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and Sadducees… Then they understood that he did not tell them to beware of the leaven of bread, but of the teaching of the Pharisees and Sadducees. (Matthew 16:11-12 ESV)

The old leaven is teaching — fake pieces. And where we have made connections, much of the time we have joined one fake piece to another. We get a glimpse here, three or four real pieces joined there, a small true patch of the picture — surrounded by confident connections that are simply false. How do we sort the real from the fake on our own? We can’t. If that has not overwhelmed you yet, it is coming — and if we have never been overwhelmed, we are probably deceiving ourselves. The puzzle is not even flat; it has many dimensions. It can swamp the human mind entirely.

The Land of Confusion

This is neither new nor accidental.

“Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.”… That is why it was called Babel — because there the Lord confused the language of the whole world. (Genesis 11:7-9 ESV)

We live in the land of confusion — and, if we are honest, we are the land of confusion. The scattering at Babel is the world we wake up in. On our own the challenge is not merely hard; it is insurmountable. Which is exactly where God enters it.

Toward a Pure Language

For then I will restore to the peoples a pure language, that they all may call on the name of the Lord, to serve Him with one accord. (Zephaniah 3:9 NKJV)

A pure language — the reversal of Babel. And there is a first installment of it:

And when the day of Pentecost was fully come, they were all with one accord in one place… and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit gave them utterance… each one was hearing them speak in his own language. (Acts 2:1, 4, 6)

Notice what actually happened: each person heard in his own language — real speech, not noise, understanding handed to each one. Babel scattered understanding into many languages; Pentecost begins to gather it back. (There is far more to Pentecost and language than belongs in one post.) And that points past language itself to something deeper:

Where there is no vision, the people perish. (Proverbs 29:18 KJV)

The “vision” there is not eyesight but God-given sight — revelation. And that is just the point: words, by themselves, do not supply it.

The Glory of Kings

If the picture is concealed, what are we meant to do about it?

It is the glory of God to conceal things, but the glory of kings is to search things out. (Proverbs 25:2 ESV)

And [thou] hast made us unto our God kings and priests. (Revelation 5:10 KJV)

Put those together. God conceals; kings search out; and we are made kings. Searching out what God has hidden is not idle curiosity — it is the calling itself. And the thing hidden has a name:

…the knowledge of God’s mystery, which is Christ, in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. (Colossians 2:2-3 ESV)

It Is a Mystery

The mystery is not a footnote in the New Testament; it is one of its main themes — hinted at in the Old, opened in the New. And it sets our posture. If the thing is genuinely a mystery, we should be full of questions — and the more we see, the more questions we should have. The danger is the opposite reflex: assuming we already know. The mystery is meant to be understood — but for those God calls and grants his Spirit, not for those who are sure they already have it. The verses below are worth reading straight through; the theme is unmistakable once you look for it.

Further study on the mystery: Mark 4:11; Ephesians 1:9-10; Ephesians 3:3-9; Colossians 1:25-27; Colossians 2:2-3; 1 Timothy 3:16; Romans 11:25; Romans 16:25; 1 Corinthians 15:51; Ephesians 5:32; Ephesians 6:19; Colossians 4:3; 1 Timothy 3:9; Matthew 11:25; Matthew 13:33-35; Matthew 13:44; Luke 10:21; Luke 13:20-21; Luke 18:34; Luke 19:42; Colossians 3:3; John 16:25; 2 Corinthians 3:12-17; 2 Corinthians 4:3-4; Hebrews 6:19-20; 1 Corinthians 1:18-31; 1 Corinthians 2; Jeremiah 6:10; Revelation 10:7.

The Key

So how is it opened?

…the words of the holy one, the true one, who has the key of David, who opens and no one will shut, who shuts and no one opens… Behold, I have set before you an open door, which no one is able to shut. (Revelation 3:7-8 ESV)

The key, and the open door, are Christ’s — his authority, not ours. And there is a warning about what people do with that key:

Woe to you lawyers! For you have taken away the key of knowledge. You did not enter yourselves, and you hindered those who were entering. (Luke 11:52 ESV)

The key can be taken away — by the very people who claim to hold it (See Who Are The Nicolaitans?).

God Shows — He Doesn’t Just Tell

Here is how God deals with confusion. He is not its author —

For God is not the author of confusion. (1 Corinthians 14:33 KJV)

— but the author and finisher of our faith (Hebrews 12:2). And his way is not to shout louder. It is to show.

Now there are also many other things that Jesus did. Were every one of them to be written, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written. (John 21:25 ESV)

A little over three decades of one life — and the cosmos could not hold the books. Words run out; they get misread the instant two people hold a single word and mean two different things by it. A picture is worth a thousand words; this is worth far more. So when the Word became flesh, God could finally do what words alone never manage — he could demonstrate. He became the example. The feasts — Passover, Unleavened Bread, Weeks and Pentecost, the Jubilee — are where we watch him do it.

Some Keys to Connecting the Pieces

None of this is a method we master; it’s a posture we keep. But looking back over the ground, a handful of things keep proving to be keys:

  • The true picture comes from God — not because we are clever and figured it out.
  • The example of Jesus Christ. His life often demonstrates something a single verse, read flat, seems to contradict — and we tend to harp on the verse and ignore the life. The mismatch is a clue, not a nuisance.
  • God’s feasts and holy days, which picture far more than a single storyline. They overlay the life of Christ in detail — in layers and cycles, not one flat line.
  • The sequence of key dates: fulfillments arrive in order, the way the feasts fall in order.
  • The Hebrew civil calendar, which turns out to play its own part.
  • Not just words, but icons, symbols, pictures. The parables and miracles are intensely visual — to be seen, not only read.
  • The greater context — and whether it comes from God or from the world. As the picture connects, that context begins to take on a life of its own and shows us still more.
  • The contradictions and gaps in our own thinking, taken as evidence that we do not yet understand.
  • Prayer for God’s Spirit, in the humility of admitting we don’t get it.
  • And under all of it: everything is connected.

The best way to learn any of this is not to be told it. It is to put it into practice and watch it work — which is, after all, the whole point.

See also: The Biblical Principle of Cycles Within Cycles

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