He Opened their Understanding

We cannot believe the Scripture to be the word of God, we cannot believe any particular divine truth which we find in the Scripture, without the effectual inward work of the Holy Spirit's illuminating our minds the fact that this is His word and His word is true. It is only when the Holy Spirit illumines our minds, that we can receive the testimony of the Scriptural facts with the full confidence that they are God's very word, because His authority is in them. It is because of the inward work of the Holy Spirit bearing witness by and with the Word in our hearts, that we are thereby convinced to believe them and to receive them and to rest our faith upon them. By the working of the Spirit in granting illumination on them, opening our minds to them, we become convinced that it is our duty to believe them. And we joyfully receive them as from the hand of God Himself. We have a good example of this in Jesus' opening the understanding of the disciples to understand the Scriptures.