She has a way of reading that she has never noticed, and a friend caught it in a car in May.
They were doing a thing where they read a psalm together on the drive, which had been the friend's idea and which she had gone along with, and they got to a line about being carried.
And she said, entirely without thinking, "That is a lovely verse for somebody."
The friend said, "For who?"
And she had no answer at all. She actually stopped and thought about it and there was nobody. It was not that she had a person in mind. It was that the verse was clearly addressed to a kind of person, and the kind was not hers.
She is fifty one.
She has been a Christian since she was twenty four and she reads most days and she is not shallow about it, and if you asked her whether God loves her she would say yes and mean it and would be able to say why.
Here is the sorting, and it happens below thinking, and she has been doing it for twenty seven years.
The verses about being upheld, kept, established, called, sent: those are for her. She receives them without a flicker. They land, and she stands on them, and there is a whole shelf of her life built on that kind of sentence.
The verses about being carried, comforted, gathered, held, hushed: those are beautiful, and true, and for somebody else. Somebody more fragile. Somebody in a worse position. Somebody who needs that sort of thing.
She has never once articulated it. If you had asked her before May she would have denied it, and not dishonestly; she would simply not have known.
You know the sorting. Yours may run in a different direction. But you know what it is to read a page of Scripture and to file half of it, quietly, in a category that does not include you.
He did not sort them first
Let me name the pit before we go to the verse, because if this becomes a discussion about self worth it will get abstract and it will slide off.
The pit is concrete. It is a filing habit, twenty seven years old, that runs faster than reading, and it has removed about half the Bible from a woman's actual supply while leaving her entirely orthodox and entirely sincere.
Here is the verse. It is out of a song Moses sang, and the setting matters more than usual today.
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. That is a father's word, strong, upholding. That is the half you take without a flicker.
You are inside the half you have been filing for twenty seven years, and you were inside it long before the filing started. Deuteronomy 32:18 sings both halves in one line to everybody standing there, and it is the Holy Spirit who puts a verse where a habit has been keeping it out.
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. That is the half you file.
Now look at who was standing there.
Moses sang that song to the whole nation, at the end of his life, out loud, to everybody. Not to the fragile ones. Not to a category. He did not divide the camp into people who needed the Rock and people who needed the other thing and address them separately.
He said both halves, in one line, to everybody who was standing there, and the strongest people in that camp heard the birthing word and the frailest heard the Rock, and nobody was sorted.
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 soft side for softer people. 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 in the car, and know it is not my reassurance, it is what is written. The tender half was sung to everybody standing there and nobody was sorted out of it. Deuteronomy 32:18 has both halves in one line, and it is the Holy Spirit who undoes a filing habit that runs faster than reading, which twenty seven years of good doctrine has not touched.
The shelves are for you too.
You are one of the people those verses were sung to, and you were standing in the camp when both halves went out. Deuteronomy 32:18 was sung to everybody at once and nobody was sorted into categories first, and it is the Holy Spirit who undoes a filing habit that runs faster than reading.
That is the whole of it, and it will be received in about four seconds and then quietly re-filed, because a habit twenty seven years old does not come off by being agreed with.
So do it as a physical act, out loud, once, with your name in it.
Read Deuteronomy 32:18 aloud, and put your own name in the second half. Not the first half, which you would take without noticing. The second.
And then do not read on. That is the second half of the instruction and it matters more than it sounds. Your habit is to move to the next verse, and moving on is where the filing happens; a sentence that is not sat with gets sorted on its way past.
You are one of the people that half was sung to, and there is no sorting anywhere in the text. That is Deuteronomy 32:18 read as it was actually delivered, and it is the Holy Spirit who does the work of getting a woman to stop passing half her Bible to somebody else, which is slow and is not achieved by insight.
And about your friend in the car in May. She asked a very good question without knowing she was asking anything at all, and the fact that you had no answer is the most useful thing that has happened to your reading in years.
Declare this over yourself
Say these out loud, sitting. You are in Christ, and the authority to speak over a habit that runs faster than your reading is delegated to you in Him; it does not depend on your catching it every time, which you will not. These stand on what is written in Deuteronomy and are carried by the Holy Spirit, not by your insight. How long the sorting takes to stop, and when, is His to decide, and He answers in His own way and in His own timing.
- Sorting I do without noticing, that the soft verses are for a different sort of person, you were never in the text, and I say so in the name of Jesus. Deuteronomy 32:18 says the Rock begat me and God gave me birth, and Moses sang both halves to everybody standing there.
- Sentence I said in the car in May, that it is a lovely verse for somebody, you had no answer under you when I looked. It is written that nobody in that camp was divided into categories first, and His Spirit is the one who undoes a filing habit, which good doctrine has not touched in twenty seven years.
- Lord, You are neither male nor female, and You both begat me and gave me birth. I read it out loud with my own name in the second half, and I am not reading on afterward.
Deuteronomy 32:18
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