Two Gods And A Choice

She has never said this to a living soul and she is not certain she has ever said it to herself in words.

There are two of them.

The first one runs Monday to Friday. He is the one she prays to before a meeting, and He is fair, and He is watching, and the relationship is essentially professional. She brings Him things she has done and things she has not done. She is respectful. She is, if she is honest, slightly braced. When she prays to that one she sits up straighter, and she has caught herself doing it, and she found it funny once and does not anymore.

The second one turns up when she is finished. Late, usually. On the sofa with the lamp on and everybody in bed and a day behind her that took more than she had. She does not pray properly to that one. She says things like, I have got nothing left, and, please. And something in the room is kind.

She has never put the two of them side by side. That is the whole point. They live in different hours and different postures and they have never met, and if you asked her whether she believed in two Gods she would be genuinely offended, and she would be right to be, because she does not. She believes in one. She has said the creed a thousand times and meant it.

But she has been running two, in practice, for about fifteen years, and only one of them ever gets the weekdays.

She is thirty nine. She leads things. People would tell you she has a strong faith and they would not be wrong.

And here is the sentence she got to in the car last Tuesday, which is why we are having this conversation. She thought: I do not think the kind one is allowed to be in charge.

Not that He is not real. That He is not the serious one. That the sofa God is a sort of concession, a night rate, and the Monday God is the actual management.

You know both of them. Perhaps yours are arranged differently. But you know what it is to have two pictures on a rotation, and to have decided, without ever saying it, which of them is the grown up.

He is not two

Let me name the pit before the verse, because the verse will glance off if it lands on the wrong thing.

You are in front of one God, and you were never choosing between two of them. Numbers 23:19 says God is not a man, and a God who is not a man keeps no separate temper for the days you are worn out, and it is the Holy Spirit who joins the two pictures.

The pit is not that you doubt God. You do not doubt Him at all; you have too much of Him, in two pieces, and the pieces have never been introduced. And because one of them holds the office hours and the other only ever gets you at the end of your strength, you have quietly concluded that the tenderness is a supplement and the sternness is the substance. That is exhausting, and it is not a doctrine you would ever have signed, and it has been running your week for fifteen years.

Here is the sentence, and it is a demolition.

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

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

The verse is making a point about God not going back on His word. It makes it by stating, flatly, on the way past, that God is not a human being. Which means He is not male the way a man in your office is male, and He is not female either, and He is not two of anybody, and He is not a stern committee with a kind member on it. He is God. He is spirit. He is neither male nor female, and Scripture says so plainly, and it is the same book that then reaches for a father's language and a mother's language both, to tell you who this one God is.

Take that in the car, and know it is not my reassurance, it is what is written. The stern one you meet on Monday is not a whole God and never was. Numbers 23:19 says God is not a man, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a sentence that plain and puts it underneath a picture that has been running unexamined for fifteen years.

And Genesis, at the front of everything, says the thing that finishes the argument.

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

One image. Two kinds of person to carry it. Which means the firmness and the tenderness are not two departments with different opening hours. They are one God, and everything good in both a man and a woman came out of Him and not out of anywhere else.

And here is the boundary, said in the same breath, because this site does not teach the picture without it. Genesis 1:27 does not make God part male and part female, and it does not give Him a feminine side. It says one God who is neither took two kinds of human being to image. He is never to be prayed to as Mother, and no title Scripture does not give Him is invented for Him. The mother pictures in the Bible are similes God chose for Himself and they stay in that form, and they are more than enough.

You are standing in front of one God, and you were never choosing between a weekday one and a tired one. Numbers 23:19 says God is not a man, and a God who is not a man does not run two tempers, and it is the Holy Spirit who joins what a woman has been alternating between for years.

The kind one is the same one, and He is allowed to be in charge, because He is in charge, and He always was. That is not my softening of your Monday; it is what one God means, and it is the Holy Spirit who welds two pictures back into one in a woman who has been alternating between them without noticing.