“Mirrors on the ceiling
The pink champagne on ice
And she said, ‘We are all just prisoners here
Of our own device”
And in the master’s chambers
They gathered for the feast
They stab it with their steely knives
But they just can’t kill the beast…” (Hotel California, The Eagles)

What is Hotel California about? Lots of people have offered opinions over the years, including the band members themselves. And even among them, it doesn’t seem like there is a full consensus. But these lyrics, at least, do a pretty good job of describing one of those things that the Bible talks about more than we tend to in modern Christian circles.

Gluttony.

When the Bible talks about gluttony, it almost always does so in the context of food, and it’s a habit that’s often paired with drunkenness:

• They shall say to the elders, “This son of ours is stubborn and rebellious. He will not obey us. He is a glutton and a drunkard” (Deut. 21:20).
• Do not join those who drink too much wine
      or gorge themselves on meat,
  for drunkards and gluttons become poor,
      and drowsiness clothes them in rags.(Prov. 23:20-21).
• The Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, ‘Here is a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners.’ But wisdom is proved right by her deeds” (Matt. 11:19).

Not that lyrics from The Eagles are tantamount to Scripture, but they seem to be describing the same kind of thing – it’s an insatiable need. A compulsion for more. The inability to stop and simply say “enough.”

And while we should think of gluttony in the context of food, especially in America, we might also think more broadly and understand that gluttonous behavior can really have most anything as its object:

• We can be gluttonous in our media consumption.
• We can be gluttonous in our work.
• We can be gluttonous in sexual appetite.

But one area in which we don’t often think of the word is in our consumption of Scripture. Isn’t this a place where there is never enough? When we could always do with more? Where our appetite should be insatiable? After all, it’s certainly not doing us any harm to consume ever more quantities of Scripture.

That’s true, and yet it’s true with a corollary, because we must readily accept that the Bible isn’t meant to only be consumed; it’s meant to be practiced. If we don’t pair those things together, then we are deceiving ourselves about our true spiritual state:

Do not merely listen to the word, and so deceive yourselves. Do what it says. Anyone who listens to the word but does not do what it says is like someone who looks at his face in a mirror and, after looking at himself, goes away and immediately forgets what he looks like. But whoever looks intently into the perfect law that gives freedom, and continues in it—not forgetting what they have heard, but doing it—they will be blessed in what they do (James 1:22-25).

In an affluent society, we have the luxury of all kinds of potential gluttony. Food? Clothing? Entertainment? Leisure? We can be gluttonous in all these. And we might also, along with these, fall prey to an intellectual kind of gluttony that loves the study of God’s Word, but doesn’t necessarily love the living of God’s Word. We love the parsing of verbs, the study of words, the mining of golden nuggets – and yet the way we live our lives does not change at all.

Is this not also gluttony? Whereby we are “using” God’s Word to stroke our egos, growing ever intellectually fatter while never exercising what we find there? Surely we should beware if we find this compulsion in ourselves. And perhaps, in such a potentially gluttonous society, we would do well to ask ourselves the very basic question:

When was the last time I made the conscious choice to do what the Bible said?