Every Text Still Comes To Him In That Voice

He was taught to slow down.

That is the shortest true description of what he received. Before, he read Scripture the way most people do, which is quickly and for the general sense, and afterward he read it the way you read a legal document that concerns you personally.

Where does the sentence turn. What is the subject actually doing. Which word is load bearing. What is this chapter doing that the one before it was not.

Seven years of that, mostly across a table with two mugs on it.

And that man's life was not what it appeared, and when it came out it was not partial and it was not a misunderstanding, and there were people in that circle who have not recovered.

So now he reads, and this is what happens.

He gets to a turn in a sentence, and the turn opens the way it does, and he hears the cadence. Not the words. The rhythm of somebody about to say, now look what has happened here.

And underneath that a suspicion has taken root over three years, and he has never put it into a sentence until now: if he could be that wrong about his own life, what am I trusting when I trust his method.

It is a serious question in the sense that it feels serious. It arrives with weight. It has changed what he does: he checks himself four and five times now on readings he would have been settled about in ten minutes, and he has stopped saying anything in company about a passage unless he has cross checked it against two commentaries.

The reading has got slower and it has not got better.

And you have a method you cannot trust. Somebody taught you how to do something, and their life fell in, and you have begun quietly auditing everything you produce because you cannot audit them.

Let God be true though every one were a liar

There is a moment in Romans three where Paul asks a question that is exactly yours, in the largest possible form, and answers it in about eleven words.

He asks whether human unfaithfulness cancels God's faithfulness.

By no means! Let God be true though every one were a liar.Romans 3:4

Though every one were a liar.

That is the extreme case, deliberately chosen. Not one teacher. Everybody. The whole race of carriers turning out to be false, and the conclusion he draws from that scenario is not that we would then have nothing, but that God would still be true, because the truth of God was never sitting in the reliability of the people transmitting it.

You are holding something whose truth was never suspended in the character of the person who taught you. It is written, by no means, let God be true though every one were a liar (Romans 3:4), and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a first century argument about faithfulness and applies it to a man at a study table who has begun auditing himself.

Now the suspicion, because it needs pulling apart precisely, and you of all people will appreciate it being done properly.

If he could be that wrong about his own life, what am I trusting when I trust his method.

Look at what that argument requires. It requires that the method drew its validity from the man's integrity. But a method of reading is not a testimony. It is a set of operations, and operations are checkable, and you have been checking them for seven years without noticing that is what you were doing.

Every time a reading of his opened a passage and the passage stayed open under pressure, that was verification. Not of him. Of the method. You have run that verification hundreds of times and it has held every time.

You have been testing this for seven years and it has never once failed a test. Scripture says test everything, hold fast what is good (1 Thessalonians 5:21), and it is the Holy Spirit who gives understanding to the person doing the testing (2 Timothy 2:7), which is the arrangement that has been running underneath all of it.

And the cadence, which is the part that no argument reaches.

You hear his rhythm before a turn opens. That is not the method failing; it is memory, working the way memory works when somebody has taught you something at a table with two mugs on it for seven years.

It will fade. Not because you decide it should, and not on a schedule. But a voice that is not being added to gets quieter, and what will happen over the next years, if you keep reading, is that it will slowly be replaced by your own, because you are producing far more hours at that table now than he ever did with you.

You are already reading in your own voice most of the time, and the cadence you notice is the one you notice because it is unusual. It is written that the anointing you received from Him abides in you and teaches you about everything (1 John 2:27), and it is the Holy Spirit who is the teacher who stays, which is why the reading did not stop working when he did.

And the four and five checks, which are costing you.

Notice what they are for. They are not for accuracy, because your readings at ten minutes were sound and you know that, and none of the extra checks have ever overturned one. They are for permission.

You are asking a commentary for permission to have seen something, because the man who taught you to see it turned out to be false, and some part of you thinks that means your seeing needs a second signature.

You are seeking a countersignature on your own understanding and no such requirement exists. Scripture says the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God, and we have received the Spirit who is from God that we might understand the things freely given us by God (1 Corinthians 2:10-12), and it is the Holy Spirit who does the giving of understanding, and He has not asked anybody to have it notarized.