Redemption means to buy out of slavery and to set free, and they had been hoping that Jesus would be the Messiah who should make them free as a nation and set them up with an earthly king much the way they had been under the line of David or the Maccabees. Jesus had died to redeem them from sin. But that! Oh, they didn’t care about that. That wasn’t what they were looking for.
And that is not what men are looking for today. We all want freedom from oppression in order to pursue our own will without hindrance. We would all love to have our problems solved. But we don’t want the problem of our sins solved quite so readily. Because for Christ to redeem us from sin, He must condemn our sin and set us on a path of righteousness that we do not naturally choose for ourselves.
Thus, Jesus began with Cleopas and Mary in the same way He must begin with us, with redemption from sin. And He explained it to them beginning with the Old Testament.
When Jesus began to open the Scriptures to Cleopas and Mary, He initiated the first of three openings that are mentioned in this chapter. He opened the Scriptures; He opened their eyes; and He opened their understanding. These are so significant that they would make an outline for a study all by themselves.
The first opening takes place in the middle of the story (Luke 24:25-27), but the phrase itself occurs a bit later, in verse 32, when they reflected on what Christ had said to them. “Did not our hearts burn within us, while he talked with us along the way, and while he opened to us the Scriptures?”
Have you learned that God always works that way when He points a man or a woman to Jesus Christ? How did Jesus begin at the start of His ministry? He went into the synagogue of Nazareth on the Sabbath day and began to read from the sixty-first chapter of Isaiah:
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised, to preach the acceptable year of the Lord” (Luke 4:18-19).
When He had finished reading these words He sat down and applied them saying, “This day is the Scripture fulfilled in your ears” (v. 21). A little while later the disciples of John the Baptist came to Him asking if Jesus was indeed the Messiah, and once again He referred to this passage.
Where are you going to find out the truth about God? Everybody has a different idea about Him. Everybody is writing about Him. How can you find out the truth? The answer is that you will find out about God as you find out about Jesus Christ. He said, “He that hath seen me hath seen the Father” (John 14:9). And you will find out about Jesus Christ only as you open the Scriptures.
The second opening is in verse 31, and it is a consequence of the first. Jesus had taught them on the way. And then, as He sat with them and broke bread with them in their home, “their eyes were opened, and they recognized him.” This is as true today as it was then. If you will open the Scriptures, God will open your eyes by means of His Holy Spirit so we will recognize Jesus.
The third opening is the one we find at the very end of the story after Cleopas and Mary had returned to Jerusalem and had told the other disciples of Christ’s appearance to them. We are told that as they were speaking Jesus appeared again in their midst and then “opened their understanding, that they might understand the Scriptures” (v. 45). It was the opening of their minds so that they might begin to understand in some depth the things that were written in the Old Testament concerning Him.
