“And they said to one another, Did not our heart burn within us while He talked with us on the road, and while He opened the Scriptures to us?” Luke 24:32
All proper human understanding has Christ as the focus and centrality (Col. 1:16-17); otherwise, the word “understanding” is only a borrowed term. According to God’s creation and His Word, the only genuine, proper understanding is to understand everything in Christ, from Christ, through Christ, and unto Christ. Without this, you have no understanding. You do not understand your life. You do not understand anything properly. Unless you see Christ, you only have the husk of an understanding. He is the kernel of all understanding. From God’s point of view, to understand means to enter into His thoughts about everything — about creation and His purpose. So for us as human beings, the proper understanding is to see Christ as all and in all. That is understanding. This comes from having our minds renewed.
There is only one way to study the Scriptures, and that is to come to the Scriptures to see Christ. If you come to the Scriptures to study the Bible, to simply get Bible knowledge, you do not see and you do not understand the Scriptures. You may have Bible knowledge, but what links everything together? In Luke 24:27 the Lord opened the Word from Genesis through Malachi, clearly showing the disciples the things concerning Himself — that He was the focus of all the Scriptures. After the disciples’ eyes were opened, they said to one another, “Did not our heart burn within us while He talked with us on the road, and while He opened the Scriptures to us?” A burning heart comes when we can take the Bible and talk about Christ and apply Christ. It is the understanding of the Bible with Christ as the focus that causes our heart to burn.