She does that verse every term and she does it well, and she has the notes to prove how well.
The Rock and the birth. Two halves in one line. One God who is neither male nor female, and Scripture reaching for a father's language and a mother's both, and the boundary drawn carefully so that nobody in the room wanders off with something the text does not say.
People remember that lesson. Two women have written to her about it in five years, which for a Tuesday evening class is a great deal.
She is thirty nine.
Here is what she noticed in the car park in September, and it is the reason for this.
She had just taught it. She had been good. And she got in the car and the day had been hard for reasons that had nothing to do with the class, and she went to pray, and what came out of her was: give me strength for tomorrow.
Which is a fine prayer. It is a right prayer.
And she sat there and worked out, in about four seconds, that it is the only prayer she has prayed for herself since she was twenty four.
She teaches both halves every term and she has drawn on one of them her entire adult life.
The Rock: constantly. The other half: never. Not once, not in a hospital, not in the two bad years, not in the week after the thing in March. She has never in her life asked God to be tender toward her, and she could tell you exactly what the Hebrew word means and how translations render it and why it matters.
You know that gap. Yours may not be in a classroom. But you know what it is to hold a true thing out to other people in both hands and to have used only one of them for yourself for as long as you can remember.
The half you have never drawn on
Let me name the pit before we go back to the verse, because if this becomes an accusation of hypocrisy it will be both wrong and lazy.
You are not living off a ration, and you were given both halves of Him at once. Deuteronomy 32:18 names the Rock and the birthing in one line about one God, and it is the Holy Spirit who opens to a teacher the half she has been handing out accurately for over twenty years.
Hypocrisy is teaching what you do not believe. You believe every clause of it and you would defend the tender half against anybody who tried to soften it or explain it away, and you have done exactly that in that room more than once.
The pit is that you have a supply and a syllabus, and they are not the same thing, and the syllabus has two halves and the supply has one, and nobody teaching a Tuesday class has any reason ever to notice the difference.
So here is the verse, and today you are not teaching it.
Of the Rock that begat thee thou art unmindful, and hast forgotten God that formed thee.Deuteronomy 32:18
The Rock that begat thee. You live on that. Every prayer since you were twenty four has been aimed at that half, and it has held, and you have not been let down once, and that is worth saying plainly.
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. You have taught that clause perhaps forty times.
You have never once addressed it.
And the line, which you draw better than I do, goes 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 soft side. 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.
You have a half you have never once drawn on, and you were never rationed to the other one. Deuteronomy 32:18 puts the Rock and the birthing in a single line about a single God, and it is the Holy Spirit who opens to a woman what she has been handing out every term since she was twenty four.
Take that in the car park, and know it is not my correction, it is your own lesson turned round. The half you have taught forty times and never drawn on is available to you tonight. Deuteronomy 32:18 has both in one line, and it is the Holy Spirit who moves a thing from a syllabus into a supply, which no amount of teaching it better has ever done.
Nobody stopped you and there has never been a rule.
You are inside the half you have been teaching, and you were inside it long before you started teaching either one. Deuteronomy 32:18 puts both halves in one line about one God, and it is the Holy Spirit who moves a sentence out of a class and into the woman who has been saying it every term since she was twenty four.
That is the whole of it and it is why this is not a heavy article. There is no repentance owing here and nothing has gone wrong. A supply and a syllabus drifted apart over fifteen years, quietly, in a woman who is very good at her subject.
So close the gap with one sentence, out loud, in the first person.
Not: God gave me birth, as a doctrine, which you can say in your sleep. Say the thing it means, about yourself, to Him.
"You are tender toward me."
That is four words and it will be one of the hardest things you say this year, and the difficulty is not spiritual, it is muscular. You have said it about God to a room forty times. You have never said it about yourself to God once, and the two are different acts and only one of them has ever been practiced.
You are dealt with by the God who gave you birth, and that half is not a topic, it is a supply. That is Deuteronomy 32:18 read as a sentence about you, and it is the Holy Spirit who moves it the last few feet, which is the part no teacher can do for herself by preparing harder.
And your prayer in the car park was not wrong. Give me strength for tomorrow is a good prayer and God has answered it for fifteen years and will again.
There was simply another thing to ask for, in the same line, in the lesson you had just given.
Declare this over yourself
Say these out loud in the car with the engine off. You are in Christ, and the authority to speak over a gap fifteen years wide is delegated to you in Him; it is not earned by how well you teach the passage. These stand on what is written in Deuteronomy and are carried by the Holy Spirit, not by your preparation. When the supply opens, and how, is His to decide, and He answers in His own way and in His own timing.
- Half I have lived on since I was twenty four, you are true and you have held and you are not all of it, and I say so in the name of Jesus. Deuteronomy 32:18 says the Rock begat me and God gave me birth, and I have taught one of those forty times and never once addressed it.
- Drift between my syllabus and my supply, you have gone unnoticed for fifteen years and you do not get another term. It is written that both halves stand in one line about one God, and His Spirit is the one who moves a thing the last few feet, which preparing harder has never done.
- Lord, You are neither male nor female, and You both begat me and gave me birth. I say it out loud about myself in the first person, and I am not drawing the boundary afterward, because there is nobody in this car but me and You.
Deuteronomy 32:18
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