I Expect The Verdict

He prays every day and it happens in a corridor.

Not a real one. He would put it differently if you asked him; he would probably say he does not know how to describe it. But if you press him, what he will say is that praying feels like waiting to be seen about something.

There is a door. There is a decision that has already been taken about him, on grounds he does not fully know, and he goes in, and what happens in there is that he finds out where he stands this week.

He is fifty six and he has prayed like that since he was in his twenties.

It is not terror. He wants that said, because it sounds worse written down than it is. He is not shaking outside that door. It is the ordinary, low, permanent readiness of a man who has always assumed that the relationship consists of a ruling.

And most days the ruling is fine. That is the strange part. He comes out most days and it has gone all right, and he gets on with his life, and if you asked him whether God is good to him he would say yes without hesitating and he would be telling the truth.

He simply has never once walked into that room for any other reason.

Here is what happened in October, and it is why he is up at midnight reading things.

His granddaughter, who is seven, came in from school and did not say anything at all. She came round the table to where he was sitting and stood against his side and put her head down on his shoulder and stayed there for about two minutes, and then went off and got a drink and started talking about somebody's shoes.

Nothing had happened. He asked, later, and there was nothing.

And he sat at that table afterward with the feeling of a seven year old's weight still on his shoulder and thought: I have never once done that.

You know the corridor. Yours may look different from the inside. But you know what it is to arrive at prayer with a posture built for a ruling, and to have never once come in for the other reason, because there is no other reason in the shape you have.

Neither of them is a ruling

Let me name the pit before we go to the verse, because if this becomes an article about God not judging you it will be careless, and you would notice.

God does judge. That is real and it stands and it is not being taken off the table by anything here, and a man of fifty six who has read his Bible does not need a version of God with the judgement removed.

The pit is narrower and it is this: judgement has become the whole of the relationship, and it has done so without any decision being made, so that a man who genuinely believes God is good to him still cannot walk into a room with Him for any purpose other than to find out where he stands.

Here is the verse. It is from a song Moses sang at the end of his life.

Of the Rock that begat thee thou art unmindful, and hast forgotten God that formed thee.Deuteronomy 32:18

Two halves in one line, and one God in both.

The Rock that begat thee. A father's word, and a strong one, and a Rock is a thing that does not move and does not have opinions that shift, which is a comfort to a man who expects rulings even if he has never noticed the comfort.

You were begotten and you were given birth, and both of those were done to you before there was anything to rule on. Deuteronomy 32:18 carries both halves in one line, and it is the Holy Spirit who gets a word like that into a man who walks into every room to find out where he stands.

And the second half, in the Hebrew, is the word for a woman bringing a child to birth, which is why a good many translations render it as the God who gave you birth.

Now here is what matters for a man in a corridor. Neither of those is a verdict.

Begetting is not a ruling. Giving birth is not a ruling. Both of them are things that happened before you had done anything at all, and neither of them can be revised on the basis of how your week has gone, and neither of them requires an appointment.

Here I draw the line in the same paragraph, because on this ground the two never travel apart. God is neither male nor female. Numbers 23:19 says God is not a man, and He is not a woman either; He is spirit. Deuteronomy 32:18 does not make God half a father and half a mother, and it does not give Him a lenient side to go with a strict one. It uses two pictures, both chosen by Him, for one God whom neither exhausts. He is never addressed by any title Scripture does not give Him, and the pictures stay in the form He gave them.

Take that at the kitchen table, and know it is not my leniency, it is what is written. The two things this verse says God did for you happened before there was anything to rule on. Deuteronomy 32:18 has both halves in one line, and it is the Holy Spirit who changes the shape a man arrives in, which thirty years of correct doctrine has not managed on its own.