The Question The Boy Asked

The boy is fourteen and he comes because his mother brings him, and he says almost nothing, and on the twelfth of March he asked a question that has not left the room since.

They were in Genesis. Somebody had read the twenty seventh verse out loud, the way you do, and there was that small pause a group leaves after a verse before somebody says something safe.

And the boy said: "Is God a man?"

Not cheeky. He is not a cheeky boy. He asked it the way you ask about anything you have not been able to work out on your own, which is to say flatly, and slightly too loudly, and while looking at the table.

And the man leading the study gave a good answer.

He said that God is spirit and that God is not male or female, and he took them to Numbers 23:19, which says God is not a man, and he explained that the fatherly language in Scripture is real and true and does not mean God has a body or a sex, and he said that Genesis 1:27 puts both male and female in the image, which tells us something about God and nothing about God having halves.

Every word of that is correct. He has checked it since, twice, and it is correct.

The boy said, "Okay."

And that was the end of it, and they moved on to the next verse, and somebody made a joke about the biscuits.

He is fifty three years old and has led that study eleven years and he has thought about those four minutes for five months.

Because here is what he cannot get past. The boy did not ask a doctrinal question. Boys of fourteen do not sit in a room of adults for eight months saying nothing and then produce a query about the metaphysics of the divine nature.

The boy asked whether God is a man. And a man who has never once been comforted by God, and has only ever been told about a Father, and has a house and a history nobody in that room knows anything about, is not asking about metaphysics.

He was asking whether there is any of the other thing in Him.

And he was given a definition, and he said okay, and he has not asked anything since.

You know that moment. You may not lead anything. But you know what it is to give an entirely correct answer to a question that was not the one being asked, and to have felt the room close afterward.

The verse is a door

Let me name the pit before we go on, because if this reads as a criticism of your answer it will do nothing for you or for the boy.

Your answer was not wrong. Not one clause of it. The pit is that you handed a boy a fence when he had asked for a gate. Both are made of the same material and they do opposite things, and a person who has spent his life being careful about accuracy will reach for the fence every time, because the fence is where the errors are, and he can see them coming.

So let us read it again, and let us read it as what it is.

So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.Genesis 1:27

Look at the shape of that sentence. It says image, image, and then it says male and female, and the two are held together in one line without any explanation offered.

And take that where you are sitting, before we go one step further into the boundaries. You are looking at a verse that has your own answer in it, and you have been reading it as a fence. Genesis 1:27 puts the whole image in one God, and it is the Holy Spirit who turns a definition into a door, which is not a thing a careful man can do for himself by checking it twice.

One God. One image. Two kinds of human being required to carry it.

You have every part of the answer already and you have never once said the two halves in the same breath. That is not a criticism of your accuracy; it is what is written in Genesis and in Isaiah sitting in one man's hands, and it is the Holy Spirit who joins them, usually about five months later, in the middle of the night.

Now the boundary, in the same breath, because on this ground the picture is never taught without it and I am not going to be the one who starts. God is neither male nor female. He is spirit. Numbers 23:19 says God is not a man, plainly, in the middle of an argument about something else. Genesis 1:27 does not make God part male and part female, it does not give Him a feminine side, He is never addressed by a title Scripture does not give Him, and the mother pictures in the Bible stay exactly what they are: similes God chose to describe Himself.

Every one of those sentences was in your answer in March. Here is the one that was not.

Which means the tenderness a boy has never had from anybody came out of God before it ever came out of a human being. That is what Genesis 1:27 says about the source of the image, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a line like that into a fourteen year old, which no definition has ever done on its own.

And Scripture does not make you infer it. God says it about Himself.

As one whom his mother comforteth, so will I comfort you.Isaiah 66:13

That is His own comparison, chosen by Him, in the first person, and it stands inside every boundary you drew in March. It does not make God a mother. It does not make Him female. It settles that the thing the boy was reaching for is in God and was in Him before the world was made.

You had the door in your hand and you described the wood it was made of. I am not scolding you; that is what a careful man does under a fourteen year old's gaze, and it is the Holy Spirit who gives a teacher the second answer, which usually arrives about five months later in the middle of the night.