Senior professors today are so intelligent that one, John Lenox, even concluded that younger generations no longer understand metaphors. I have not heard a young person think of Jesus as an actual door. Lenox did. Revelation is a difficult book, but thinking of it as merely full of symbolism is just plain alarming.
Human effort is still needed to learn about God and receive the Holy Spirit to truly understand it. Just as believers don't transform by osmosis, sleeping with your Bible, staring at it closed, or reading it without applying what it says will not lead to conviction. Unbelievers cannot know God on their own; nevertheless, some Muslims in the Middle East claim they dreamed about Jesus, and then they looked for information to learn about Him on their own, eventually meeting other Christians.
New Christians should start in Genesis; if they can accept that it is the truth, the more difficult parts of the New Testament would make sense, and they would probably avoid applying their secular worldviews to Biblical interpretation, since science cannot even adequately explain evolution. The only truth about science is that it can deceive. Run the preceding sentence in a chatbot, and it will call it an overgeneralization. Why allow a mere AI, with all its hallucinations and iterative design, make a simple fact a cognitive error?
As implied from Lenox's words about the essentiality of Genesis, one should read it first to learn about man's original sin; the first book serves a filter, and it is either you grasp the severity of why Jesus needed to cleanse us from sin through His sacrificial death, or you go on with life believing that it is fine to sin because God will welcome sinful people in heaven, and He will, but not in the way that many people expect.
Lenox is calmer than John McArthur, who causes distress among his listeners because of his strict adherence to discipline and the letters, as evangelicals call him, the lion of the pulpit, his frightening words can steer up fire in the hearts of his listeners, causing them to retreat or even withdraw from their sinful ways; yet, Lenox's gentle words cause more fear because more and more young Christians are in awe of God's words, but they appear to them as more fantastical than reality. Would God ask, How have you affected your neighbor for Me, so they can find rest?
All of these realizations from Lenox's analysis of AI's consequences? The number of his PhDs and his informal training in the humanities are biblically plausible for a reason. Lenox epitomizes Proverbs 4:7.
