The Author in His Own Story

 “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”
— John 1:1 (NKJV)

I found myself thinking about a simple moment in the Gospels when Jesus said, “It is written.” I have always heard those words as a reference point, a way of locating Himself in the Scriptures already given. But it occurred to me that He may have been doing something even deeper than recalling a familiar line. What if He was remembering something He Himself had spoken long before His human voice ever formed the words? What if the Word made flesh was hearing His own voice echoing across time?

Once I began to think along those lines, it struck me that every sentence from His lips had first been breathed through prophets and poets who only ever wrote what the Spirit gave them. The One who stood in dusty streets and taught fishermen and tax collectors was reading from pages He had once inspired. The Author had stepped into His own story. He was walking through scenes He had written before the world began.

Imagining that opens a different kind of tenderness. He wrote the story of humanity knowing He would one day enter its frailty. He poured out the words of life knowing He would one day live every one of them. He shaped the promises, the warnings, the poetry of salvation, knowing that the betrayal, rejection, and suffering woven into the narrative were the very things He would choose to embrace.

It is something like an author who knows the ending before the first page is ever written, but then chooses to lay aside that knowledge, step into the book as a character, and feel the weight of each moment from the inside. As Jesus read the Scriptures of His childhood, the words would not merely have informed Him, they would have awakened something. Not belief in the way we experience belief, but recognition. The realisation that this familiar voice on the page was the same voice that had always been His own.

I often think of the young Jesus standing in the synagogue with the scroll of Isaiah in His hands. How must it have felt to read, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me,” and sense an ancient resonance rising within Him? Did He recognise the tone of it, the cadence, the eternal echo of the voice He had lived with from eternity past? I imagine something quiet and steady in that moment, perhaps even a kind of holy fear, as He felt the weight of every prophecy pointing to Him and realised that He had written them all.

And yet He did not draw back. He lived through His own sentences. He walked the path He had crafted, not observing from a distance, but experiencing each line from within a human frame. The Author became the character. The Word entered His own breath. The One who had written the story stepped into the story and let it carry Him all the way to Calvary, where through agony and wonder He wrote Himself into our redemption.

Thinking of Scripture in this way changes how I approach it. These are not merely ancient words about God. They are words of God, spoken once through prophets, spoken again through the human voice of Jesus, and spoken now to us whenever we read them with open hearts. Every “It is written” becomes “I have told you.” Every fulfilled promise becomes a memory returned.

And then comes the most humbling thought of all: He did not write these things for His sake alone. He wrote them so that we, centuries later, could open the same pages and hear the same whisper. When we come to Scripture longing for clarity or comfort, He is still able to say, I remember writing this, and I wrote it for you.

“Then He opened their understanding, that they might comprehend the Scriptures.”

— Luke 24:45 (NKJV)