He Knows The Text Better Than He Ever Has

He would not say this out loud, but it is true and he knows it: he reads better now than he has ever read.

Thirty years of careful work. He sees structures now that he would have walked past at forty. He catches a repetition four chapters apart and knows what it is doing. He can hold a whole book in his head and see the shape of it, which took two decades to be able to do and which he does not take for granted.

It is the best years of his reading life and he is aware of that.

And about two months ago, in the middle of a Tuesday, he tried to remember the last time he had said anything to God that was not about a passage.

Not prayed. He prays. He prays about people and about the day and he says grace and he means it.

Addressed Him. Spoken to Him about Him, or about nothing in particular, the way you talk to somebody you know rather than about a subject you are working on.

He could not find one.

He went back a long way. There were plenty of good moments and all of them had a text in the middle of them, and the text was the thing being addressed and God was the subject the text was about.

That is the sentence he arrived at and could not put down: I have been reading letters from Him for thirty years and I am not sure I have spoken to Him.

And there is no way to say that to anybody without it sounding either absurd or like false modesty from a man who is known for exactly this.

So it has sat with him since June.

And you have this. Your understanding has never been better, and everything you have with God is mediated by a subject, and you cannot say so because of who people think you are.

Now my eye sees You

There is a sentence at the end of Job spoken by a man who had been talking about God accurately for thirty-nine chapters, mostly better than everybody else in the book.

He was not wrong. God says so afterward, explicitly, and rebukes the others for not speaking rightly.

And here is what he says.

I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you.Job 42:5

I had heard of you.

Not: I was wrong. Not: what I said was false. Heard of, which is a phrase about knowing at second hand, and it is being contrasted with something that has just happened to him.

And what has just happened is not new information. He is not given any answers. He gets no explanation of anything he asked about, and the entire content of the encounter is that God speaks and he is present for it.

Now my eye sees you.

You have been hearing of Him accurately for thirty years and there is a seeing that is a different thing entirely. It is written, I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you (Job 42:5), and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a distinction like that land in a man who has never once said anything careless about God in his life.

Now the sentence you could not put down.

I have been reading letters from Him for thirty years and I am not sure I have spoken to Him.

That is not absurd and it is not false modesty. It is a precise observation about a real distinction, made by somebody with the vocabulary to make it, and the reason nobody says it out loud is that it is difficult to say and easy to misunderstand.

You have described something true and the difficulty of saying it is not evidence against it. Scripture says my sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me (John 10:27), and knowing and following are both relational words in that sentence, and it is the Holy Spirit who supplies the hearing, which is not the same operation as reading well.

And the thirty years, which are not being reduced here.

The structures you can see now are really there. The repetition four chapters apart is doing what you think it is doing. Thirty years of careful attention to a text that God wrote is thirty years well spent and nobody on this page is calling it second best.

The letters are from Him. They are not a substitute for Him, and they were never meant to be, and a man who has read them this well is in the best possible position to notice the gap.

You are the person most likely to see this precisely because you read that well. It is written that the word of God is living and active, discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart (Hebrews 4:12), and it is His Spirit who did that discerning on you in the middle of a Tuesday, using thirty years of your own reading to show you what was missing.

And the fact that Job got no answers.

That is worth staying with. He asked a great many questions, most of them good, and he was given none of them.

What he was given was a Person speaking, at length, about entirely other things, and it settled him completely.

You are not short of answers, and what settled that man was not information. Scripture says the Lord spoke to Moses face to face, as a man speaks to his friend (Exodus 33:11), and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that kind of address possible, which requires nothing to be understood first.