The Word That Flinches

She says it eleven or twelve times a day, and every one of them costs her something so small that she has never once mentioned it.

Father. It opens the prayer at the meal. It opens the prayer in the car. It opens the two minutes she gets in the morning after the school run, sitting in the driver's seat in a car park with the engine off, and it is the first word every time because it is the word she was taught, and because it is the right word, and because it is the word Jesus gave people to use.

And every single time, something in her chest goes tight. Not painful. Not dramatic. About the size of a held breath that nobody would notice from outside.

She is forty three. She has been a believer since she was twenty two. She has read a great deal, she has led a group, she has sat with women in the worst hours of their lives and said true things that helped.

And she has never told anybody about the tightness.

Partly because it is so small. You cannot bring a thing that size to another person; there is nothing to hand over. Partly because she does not know what it is, and she suspects that finding out would involve a conversation about her own family that she has no appetite for and that nobody has earned.

But mostly this. She has worked out, over about eleven years, that the tightness is not about the word. It is about the picture that arrives with the word, and the picture is of somebody entirely fair and entirely correct who is looking at her the way you look at a form that has been filled in wrong.

She would not say that out loud. If you asked her what God is like she would say kind, and mean it, and be able to defend it from four passages.

The picture does not consult the doctrine. That is the whole trouble. The doctrine lives in her head and the picture lives somewhere lower down and older, and when she says the word at the meal, it is the picture that turns up.

You know the tightness. Perhaps yours is at a different word. But you know what it is to hold a belief in one part of yourself and a picture in another, and to have the picture win every time, quietly, without ever declaring itself.

Not a man, and I mean that as it is written

Let me name the pit before we go near a verse, because if I get this wrong the verse will land on the wrong thing.

The pit is not that you have a bad theology of God. Your theology is fine. The pit is that you have been carrying a picture you did not choose, that arrived before you could evaluate it, and that has been running your prayer life underneath your beliefs for twenty years. And because it is a picture and not an argument, no amount of reading has touched it, and you have concluded, somewhere quiet, that this is simply how it is going to be.

Now here is the sentence. It is in the middle of a strange chapter about a man and a donkey and a king trying to buy a curse, and it goes past so fast that most people file it under honesty.

God is not a man, that he should lie; neither the son of man, that he should repent.Numbers 23:19

Read the first four words on their own. God is not a man.

Yes, the sentence is making a point about God not lying. And the reason it can make that point is a fact it states flatly on the way past: God is not a man. He is not a human being. He is not male the way your neighbor is male, and He is not female either, and He is not a larger and better version of anybody you have ever met. He is God, and Scripture says so with no ceremony at all.

Take that where you are sitting, and know it is not my opinion I am handing you. You have been picturing something that is not Him. That is written into Numbers 23:19 in the plainest words the Bible has, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a sentence like that and prises it away from a person's chest, which no amount of your own reading has managed.

And then Genesis, at the very front, does something that ought to have made every one of us stop.

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

Male and female. Both, made in the image of one God who is neither.

I want to be exact here, because this is the line the whole of this site stands on and I am not going to blur it to make you feel better. God is neither male nor female. He is spirit. Scripture uses a father's language for Him constantly, and it also, deliberately and repeatedly, uses a mother's, and both are pictures He chose for Himself. Genesis 1:27 does not make God half of one thing and half of another. It says that when God made an image of Himself, it took two kinds of human being to carry it, and that everything true and good in either of them came from Him and not from somewhere else.

Which means every tender thing you have ever received from a woman came out of God before it came out of her. I am not decorating the verse; that is what the verse says about where the image came from, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a line like that land somewhere lower down than the head, which is where your picture lives.