Lynne Baab

Praying about the flow of time: The unity of the Bible in the road to Emmaus conversation

Lynne Baab • Wednesday May 21 2025

When I was 11, my family lived in Wiesbaden, Germany. My dad was an Air Force pilot stationed there. We attended an Anglican church, and 11 was the age for confirmation. My parents asked me if I wanted to be confirmed — no pressure, they said — and I examined my heart. I had a sense of God’s bigness and power, communicated by the communion liturgy, and I loved Psalm 23. Yes, I thought, God is my shepherd, and I want to affirm that through confirmation.

Between the age of 12 and 15, Sunday school was deadly boring, the communion service no longer spoke to me, and I stopped viewing myself as a Christian. All that changed at 19, and I came back to the Christian faith. Or I became a Christian. I never know which one it is. Early in my life as a committed Christian, I came across the passionate, angry prayers in Jeremiah (Jeremiah 12:1-4, 15:15-18 and 20:7-18). I thought it was amazing that a prophet could speak to God that way, and I found it remarkable that God must have been pleased enough with Jeremiah’s honesty that the book of Jeremiah found a place in the Bible.

Another highlight of those early years, learning about Jesus, was a five-day conference on Genesis 1-3. The beauty of the poetic language stunned me. Another five-day conference on Psalm 67 exposed me to a different kind of rich and evocative language, and five days focused on only seven verses showed me that mining the riches of biblical passages has great rewards. On my own, I found Psalm 139, which became an anchor, affirming that God truly sees me. A study of Mark’s gospel led me to Malachi 3 and 4. The connections between the prophet’s words and Jesus’s ministry seemed so vivid and alive. So many passages in Isaiah seemed to connect closely with what Jesus was doing, especially Isaiah 40, 53, and 61.

In my young adult life, I probably studied the New Testament more than the Hebrew Scriptures, but I’m mentioning all those passages to illustrate that my early faith was grounded as much in the Old as the New Testament.

To my total surprise, when I served as an associate pastor in a Presbyterian congregation in the late 90s and early 2000s, and then when I taught pastoral theology between 2007 and 2017, I heard numerous comments like this:

“I can’t read or study the Old Testament, because it describes a different God than the New Testament. I can relate to Jesus, but definitely not that awful, violent God of judgment portrayed in the Old Testament.”

Sometimes the speaker was a committed Christian, sometimes a person drifting away from the church, and other times someone who still believed in Jesus but who had completely rejected the church and Christianity as an institution.

You can tell from my last three blog posts that I love the story of Jesus meeting Cleopas and his companion on the road to Emmaus. I love the bodily experience the disciples recount. I love the picture of the guest-host shift that hospitality at its best brings us, and I find Jesus being revealed as he blessed and broke the bread to be deeply evocative of many biblical themes.

In this post, I want to highlight what Jesus says to Cleopas and his companion. The two disciples have just told him about the events surrounding Jesus’s death and the stories from the women about Jesus’s resurrection.

“Then he [Jesus] said to them, ‘Oh, how foolish you are and how slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have declared! Was it not necessary that the Messiahshould suffer these things and then enter into his glory?’ Then beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them the things about himself in all the scriptures” (Luke 24:25-27, the whole story is Luke 24:13-35).

All four Gospels refer repeatedly to the Hebrew Scriptures, both as they describe Jesus’s ministry and as they quote Jesus’s teaching. The conversation on the road to Emmaus is one more illustration of the fact that the Bible, all of its parts, speaks about one God — Creator and Redeemer of all people, whose love is as vast as the beautiful ocean and whose mercy is as high as the heavens are above the earth. I wonder how much of the material in the Gospels that refers to the Hebrew Scriptures came from this discussion on the road to Emmaus.

Yes, parts of the Bible are hard to understand. We cannot comprehend everything about God’s ways. And the Bible is a document created by humans led by God’s Spirit, a mix of the human and divine, so perhaps some of the portions we can’t understand are simply an unclear picture of how God works and who God is. I don’t know, but I know that God is my shepherd and that Jesus saw his ministry described in the Hebrew Scriptures. I also know that parts of the Old Testament speak to my heart in a profound way about a God who is beyond my comprehension yet here, present, loving me, and loving you.

O Lord my God, you are very great.
You are clothed with honor and majesty,
    wrapped in light as with a garment. . . .
O Lord, how manifold are your works!
    In wisdom you have made them all;
    the earth is full of your creatures. (Psalm 104:1, 2, 24)

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Next week: World Environment Day. Illustration by Dave Baab: Princess Diana Gardens, Cambridge, England. I like to imagine that the woman is reading a Bible.

Related posts:

• Creative prayer with Jeremiah
• Creative prayer: The Psalms and music
• Connections between the Bible and prayer: Who is God?

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Lynne M. Baab, Ph.D., is an author and adjunct professor. She has written numerous books, Bible study guides, and articles for magazines and journals. Lynne is passionate about prayer and other ways to draw near to God, and her writing conveys encouragement for readers to be their authentic selves before God. She encourages experimentation and lightness in Christian spiritual practices. Read more »

Lynne is pleased to announce the release of her two 2024 books, both of them illustrated with her talented husband Dave's watercolors. She is thrilled at how good the watercolors look in the printed books, and in the kindle versions, if read on a phone, the watercolors glow. Friendship, Listening and Empathy: A Prayer Guide guides the reader into new ways to pray about the topics in the title. Draw Near: A Lenten Devotional guides the reader to a psalm for each day of Lent and offers insightful reflection/discussion questions that can be used alone or in groups. 

Another recent book is Two Hands: Grief and Gratitude in the Christian  Life, available in paperback, audiobook, and for kindle. Lynne's 2018 book is Nurturing Hope: Christian Pastoral Care for the Twenty-First Century, and her most popular book is Sabbath-Keeping: Finding Freedom in the Rhythms of Rest (now available as an audiobook as well as paperback and kindle). You can see her many other book titles here, along with her Bible study guides.

You can listen to Lynne talk about these topics: empathy, bringing spiritual practices to life. Sabbath keeping for recent grads., and Sabbath keeping for families and children.

Lynne was interviewed for the podcast "As the Crow Flies". The first episode focuses on why listening matters and the second one on listening skills. 

Here are two talks Lynne gave on listening (recorded in audio form on YouTube): Listening for Mission and Ministry and Why Listening Matters for Mission and Ministry.

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"Dear Dr. Baab, You changed my life. It is only through God’s gift of the sabbath that I feel in my heart and soul that God loves me apart from anything I do."
— a reader of Sabbath Keeping