More With Us Than With Them

Midnight, three books open, one lamp, and a man reading the same chapter for the ninth time as though the roof of the house depends on it.

The rest of them went up at half past ten. He heard the last door. He heard the pipes settle. He has been down here since, at a table he has had since before the children, with a cold cup he has moved twice and not drunk from, working through a passage that has been sitting on him since a conversation two Sundays ago that he cannot now reconstruct properly and cannot let go.

He is not enjoying it. That is the thing his family would be surprised by, because from the outside this looks like a man who loves study, and he does, and this is not that.

This is arithmetic.

Somewhere in the last few years he arrived at a private position that he has never once stated, that he would argue against if somebody else said it, and that governs almost every night of his life: that his household is safe to the degree that he has understood things correctly. That there is a right reading and a wrong reading, and the wrong reading leaves a gap, and the gap is where trouble gets in. So he reads. And when he finds a thing he cannot settle, he does not sleep, because a thing unsettled is a gap left open over people he loves.

Ninth time through. It has not resolved. It is twelve minutes past midnight.

That is you, and your table might be a screen, or a spreadsheet, or a set of decisions you go over at three in the morning looking for the one you got wrong.

Two plain things before anything else. If your version of this includes somebody frightening you or hurting you, nothing on this page is telling you to keep the arrangement and absorb it; tell one person today who can act, your doctor, a crisis line where you live, one friend who will come and sit down. And whatever this is, it is not a person. Not whoever said the thing two Sundays ago. Not anybody upstairs. Scripture is direct that the struggle is not against flesh and blood, and that is a mercy rather than a technicality, because it means you can stop losing to somebody you also love.

A young man does the arithmetic and it is wrong

There is a morning in 2 Kings where somebody gets up early, looks at what is around the town, and does the counting, and the counting is accurate and the conclusion is wrong.

And he answered, Fear not: for they that be with us are more than they that be with them.2 Kings 6:16

Notice what the servant had actually done. He had gone out and looked. He had assessed correctly what was visible. He was not careless, he was not faithless in any way anybody could name, and he came back with a total that was true as far as it went.

And the answer he gets is not count again. It is not you should have had more faith about the numbers. It is a statement that the arithmetic was already settled and had been settled before he woke up, on the basis of a set of facts he did not have and could not have got by looking harder.

Then Elisha prays, and the young man sees, and what he sees does not change anything at all. It was all there before he saw it. The seeing is a mercy to him. It is not a change in the situation.

You are not holding this house together by understanding it correctly, and the arithmetic was settled before you came down to this table. That is not a comforting line for a man at midnight: 2 Kings 6:16 states the sum as already true before anybody has seen anything, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a settled thing settle in a body that has been reading for its family's safety for years rather than the amount of clarity anybody can reach by twelve minutes past.

Not knowing is not a gap

Here is the belief underneath, and it needs saying plainly because it has been running his nights.

The belief is that an unresolved question is an opening. That comprehension is a kind of covering, and that a chapter he cannot settle is a place where the covering is thin, and that his family is standing under the thin place while he works.

That is not anywhere in Scripture. Not once. There is no passage in which a household's protection is indexed to the head of it having understood the text properly, and there is no passage where confusion is a breach.

If it were true, every believer with a hard question would be exposed, and the whole of Scripture would be an examination with the stakes set at the lives of the people you love. That is not a God anybody could live with and it is not the God who is actually there.

You have never once left your family uncovered by failing to resolve something, and the covering has never run through your comprehension. The written word settles the sum before the servant's eyes are opened, and the Spirit of God is the one carrying what a man is not built to carry, never the man's understanding.

And let me be exact about the thing that matters most on this page. Nothing that has happened to your household is a report on how well you read. If something hard comes, it will not come through a chapter you could not settle. Nobody buys protection with study and nobody forfeits it by going to bed at eleven. That arithmetic does not exist in Scripture, and where it has been implied to you it was implied wrongly.

You have not been sitting an examination that God has been marking at this table. The word puts the sum on His side in a sentence with no conditions attached to it, and His Spirit has been around this house every night, including the ones you spent looking for the answer.

Keep reading, by the way. The reading is good and the love of it is real. What comes off is the weight underneath the reading, not the reading.