Until You Understand It All

The kitchen table had been a desk for eleven years, which you could tell by the ring marks and by the fact that nobody had eaten a meal on it since the children left.

She worked at it after ten o'clock, when the house went quiet. Three books open at once and a fourth holding the third one flat. A notebook on the right hand side with a fresh page every session and the date at the top, and on that page, in her small upright hand, the questions.

She was on her fourth notebook.

Tonight the big commentary was open at a page about the two covenants, and she had read the same paragraph four times and could feel it sliding off her the way a heavy sentence does at eleven at night. She wrote the question down. What does it mean that one is founded on better promises? Then she looked at it and added, underneath, because she was honest: And how would I know if I understood it or not.

Now, she was not a cynic. That is the thing to get straight. She was not sitting there looking for a hole in it, and she would have been embarrassed if you had suggested it. She was careful. She had been careful her whole life, at work and with money and with what she said about people. She was the sort of person who reads the whole of a form before she signs the bottom of it, and had once held a whole house sale up for a week over one clause about a hedge.

So she was doing with God what she did with everything. Reading it properly first.

Eleven years of reading it properly first, and not one sentence, in all that time, that put her inside it. Not one. She had said many true things about God to other people and had never once said anything to Him that closed the gap, because that would have been claiming a thing she could not yet explain, and she did not do that.

She turned the page and the next page was worse.

Now come and sit in her chair for a minute, because I think it fits you.

Maybe your version is not four notebooks. Maybe it is a podcast queue you are working through, or a question about suffering you have been carrying since you were fifteen, or just a general sense that other people got issued an understanding you did not and you had better not go in until you have caught up. Whatever it looks like, the shape is the same. You have decided, honestly and quietly and without ever putting it in words, that stepping inside something you cannot yet explain would be a kind of dishonesty.

Tonight I am going to show you who did the reading, and when.

The man who read nothing

Go back to the oldest scene there is on this subject. A field at the end of an afternoon, animals split and laid out in two rows, a strip of bare ground down the middle, a man who has been promised everything and has nothing.

Everything about that day says contract to a modern person. It looks like the moment where terms get agreed.

Then the sun goes down, and a deep sleep falls on Abram, and he is out. Flat. And a smoking furnace and a burning lamp come down that path between the pieces, alone, while he lies there.

And it came to pass, that, when the sun went down, and it was dark, behold a smoking furnace, and a burning lamp that passed between those pieces.Genesis 15:17

He did not read the clauses. He did not ask what the better promises were founded on. He was unconscious while the whole thing was being sworn over him, and the swearing was not one bit less binding for it, and nobody in the entire Bible ever suggests that his being asleep weakened his claim.

You are inside an oath you did not have to follow in order to be inside, and you were inside it before you had the vocabulary for a single part of it. That is not me lowering the bar to be kind: Genesis 15:17 has the man face down in the dirt while the fire walks, and the Holy Spirit takes that and stands you exactly where he was standing, which is nowhere, because he was lying down.

Who does the teaching

Here is the part that will change the shape of your evenings.

For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, saith the Lord; I will put my laws into their mind, and write them in their hearts: and I will be to them a God, and they shall be to me a people.Hebrews 8:10

Read what God says He will do, and notice where it sits.

I will put my laws into their mind. The understanding is not the entrance requirement. The understanding is one of the things He does to people who are already inside. It is a term of the covenant, and it is His term, on His side of the page.

You have been standing outside a house trying to complete a course that is only taught indoors.

You have never been asked to arrive understanding it, and you are not being asked tonight either. Hebrews 8:10 puts the writing in God's hand and the mind it gets written into is yours, and His Spirit is the one who does that writing, patiently, over years, from the inside out.

Nobody hands a child the deeds

Think about how a person actually joins a family.

A child does not qualify for a household by understanding it. A child arrives, and is fed, and is warm, and is spoken to by name, and understands absolutely nothing about the mortgage, the wiring, the arrangement between the two adults, or the reason there is a spare key under the third plant pot. Understanding comes later and comes gradually and comes from living there.

Nobody sits an infant down and says: when you can explain the tenancy, we will let you in.

And here is the thing your carefulness has been hiding from you. Your instinct is a good one. In every other part of your life, reading before signing is wisdom, and I am not going to insult you by calling it a fault. But it is aimed at the wrong object. You have been treating this as something you sign, and it is not signed. It was cut, by Someone else, while a man slept, and the reading you have been trying to finish first is reading He does in you afterwards.

You are already being taught, and you were being taught in every one of those eleven years at that table. Scripture says the laws go into the mind by His hand, and the Holy Spirit has been at that work in you on nights when you closed the book feeling like you had got nowhere.

There is a part that is yours. Covenant always has terms and I will not pretend otherwise. God's part is the oath and the teaching, and both are His and settled. Your part is one sentence. Not a formula, not the right words, not a paragraph you have to get correct. One honest sentence, said out loud, that puts you on the inside of a thing you cannot yet explain.