I must read labels now before consuming food or drink. It wasn’t always like this but in my late 30s I developed an intolerance to lactose in milk that would give me a stomach ache for a whole week (and other uncomfortable consequences). Drinking can be hazardous to my stomach, to my comfort. So, I look at the ingredients for the conveniently bold letters in all caps: CONTAINS: MILK.
One relative has more serious consequences. With a serious peanut allergy, consuming peanuts has sent this loved one to the ER where they could have died if they did not make it in time. It was truly scary. In their case consuming nuts is not only hazardous to comfort, it can be fatal. So those who know check the labels: CONTAINS PEANUTS, ALMONDS, MAY CONTAIN OTHER TREE NUTS NOT LISTED. Those are selective dangers for a subset of the population. One must beware of poison chemicals when consumed has dangerous and deadly consequences.
In the same way, reading the Bible with an open heart and having your thoughts consume biblical words, ideas, and claims has dangerous and deadly consequences. Reading the Bible will burn you, strip you, convict you, and kill you. It will burn your faith’s impurities. It will strip you of your old self. It will pierce your mind and disrupt your peaceful and quiet compromise and comfortability with your sin. It will kill you, the old you, the selfish you, the part of you that is still rebelling against and distrusting the Lord Jesus.
Kevin Vanhoozer wrote,
All textual understanding is a theological matter—an encounter with something that transcends us and has the capacity to transform us, provided that we approach it in the right spirit. Such is the fundamental thesis of my argument. The interpretive virtues are in reality spiritual virtues: without faith—an openness to transcendence—we would never find something in the text that is not our own creation, or our own reflection. Hence the struggle with the text is ultimately a spiritual struggle—with the text and with ourselves. Readers may have reasons for wishing not to encounter the meaning of the text; it may be too challenging, a threat to our lifestyle, if not to life itself. For the Gospels call us to die to self, to former practices, to previous self-understandings. The reader’s struggle with the text, then, is sometimes a struggle to death. It is at the very least a wrestling match in which we may ask for a blessing but receive a dislocated hip.[1]
In the Bible God’s Spirit speaks to us today (cf. Hebrews 3:7) through the human author’s words to his original audience in his day. What does the Spirit speak? He speaks Jesus Christ, the Word of God made flesh (John 1:1-18; 5:39; 16:14; Luke 24:44-47; Colossians 2:2-3). His biblical words teach, reprove, correct, and train us in righteousness (2 Timothy 3:16) so that we would love God and love others from a pure heart, a good conscience, and a sincere faith (1 Timothy 1:5) in Jesus Christ, the Word communicated (Romans 10:17; 2 Timothy 4:2).
I encourage you to read the Bible. Drink the poison that kills the selfish you. Prayerfully meditate on the truths that destroy your self-centeredness and puts Christ Jesus in the center. Let the Bible cause tension and disruption and discomfort in your heart and relationship with God such that it decimates your current peaceful compromises with sin, evil, and corruption.
The Bible is the most deadly and dangerous thing you can feed your mind and heart with today. It is also the most life-giving and healthy thing you can consume because it revives the soul, it makes wise the simple, it rejoices the heart, it enlightens the mind, it gives you Jesus Christ, and the Spirit shows you his glory that you are changed from one degree of glory to the next. It makes you gladly take up your cross for the next moment, die to your selfish self again, and follow the one who is the way, the truth, and the life.
[1] Kevin Vanhoozer, Is There Meaning in the Text?: The Bbile, the Reader, and the Morality of Literary Knowledge, (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1998), 381.