Have You Not Read

He has signed up twice and not gone twice, and the second time he paid.

Ari is forty-seven. The class is on a Tuesday at seven, at a college about twenty minutes away, and it is a beginners' course in a language he has believed for about fifteen years is the door he is standing outside of.

He did not not go because of time. He wants to be honest about that, at least in his own head, because time is what he told his wife.

He did not go because of what he thinks is on the other side of the door.

He has built it up. He knows he has. In his picture of it, there is a room where people who can read that language sit and see the actual thing, and everything he has been doing for twenty-six years is a photograph of it, at some remove, sincere and secondhand.

And he does not want to walk into that room at the very bottom, at forty-seven, and be given a sheet of the alphabet.

He would rather stand outside and believe it is in there.

That is the honest version and he arrived at it in June, in a car park at that college, twenty minutes early, and then he drove home.

He has read the whole Bible four times and parts of it more than he could count. He teaches the fourteen-year-olds. He is not lazy and nobody who knows him would say so.

And there is a sentence he has said to himself for fifteen years without examining it: I do not really know what any of it says.

He said it out loud in the car that evening and heard how it sounded.

And you may have a door like that. A language, a degree, a course, a shelf. And you may have been standing politely outside it for years.

Jesus argues from the text with people who only had it read to them

Take this off before we go a step further, because you have carried it fifteen years and it was never yours.

You are not standing outside the door. You never were. Scripture has Jesus settling a hard question by asking whether His hearers have read a passage, in front of ordinary people who mostly could not read at all, and it is the Holy Spirit, not an alphabet sheet, who opens a text to somebody. Set it down here on this step. It is heavy and you have carried it into two car parks.

Now hear it, and hear what He assumes about the people He is talking to.

Haven't you read, he replied, that at the beginning the Creator made them male and female?Matthew 19:4

Haven't you read.

He says that, or something extremely like it, again and again. It is His ordinary move. And it is not a rebuke about scholarship: it is an appeal to a text He expects the room to have access to.

And notice the crowd around Him. Most of them could not read a word. They had it read aloud to them in a room once a week, in a language a good many of them spoke imperfectly, and He argues with them from it anyway, and He expects it to land, and it does.

He assumed you have it. That stands written, and His Spirit is the one who opens a passage to a person, and He has never once made an alphabet the entry point.

Now let me be careful here, because there is a ditch on this side and I have no intention of putting you in it.

Nothing here says learning the language is a mistake. It is not. Go to the class. The people who spend their lives on manuscripts have given the church something enormous, and Scripture gains detail under that work and God has raised up such people in every century.

And nothing here says a translation is identical to the original. It is not, and honest translators say so in their own prefaces, and pretending otherwise is not faith.

The point is only about the room you have built behind the door, and Scripture has Jesus arguing from the text with people who could not read, and His Spirit is the one who made it land on them.

Here is the tender part, and Scripture is gentle with it. You are not afraid of the alphabet.

You are forty-seven and you are afraid of being a beginner in front of people, and that is an ordinary human thing that has nothing to do with Hebrew. His Spirit has had you in that book for twenty-six years and He has never once thought of you as secondhand.