What It Really Says in the Greek

He never says it unkindly. Wilf wants to be clear about that from the start, because he has thought about this a long time and he is not going to be unfair about a man he likes.

The phrase is: of course, what it really says in the original is.

And then it comes. And it is usually interesting, and about half the time it changes the sense of the thing, and Wilf has learned real things from it over about eight years.

He is sixty-eight. He has been reading the same book since he was nineteen.

And what he noticed in March, sitting in the front room with his boots still on, is that he now does something before he speaks in any group about any passage.

He runs it past that man in his head first.

Not literally. He does not ring him. But he holds his own reading up and asks himself what would come back, and if he cannot answer it, he does not say it.

And a great many things now do not get said, and Wilf could not tell you when that started.

The worst of it is not in the group. It is at home.

Because he reads on his own, early, at the kitchen table, and he has done for forty-nine years, and about a year ago he began to notice that when something lands on him he waits.

Half a second, maybe. Just enough to check whether he is allowed it.

He has never once mentioned this to the man in question, who would be genuinely upset by it, because he is not a proud man and he is not doing anything to anybody on purpose. He has a gift and he uses it and it serves that church.

But Wilf has read that book for forty-nine years, and he now waits half a second before believing what it just did to him.

And you may have somebody like that. Not an enemy. Somebody good, whose knowledge is real, standing quietly between you and a page.

Nehemiah shows the reading and the explaining as one thing serving the crowd

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

You are not out of your depth in your own Bible. You never were. Scripture describes the day the book was read to a whole town who could not read it themselves, and it says exactly what the object of the exercise was, and it is the Holy Spirit, not a man with a language, who gives a person understanding. Set it down here on this bench. It is heavy and it has been at the kitchen table with you all year.

Now hear it, and notice where the sentence puts its weight.

They read from the Book of the Law of God, making it clear and giving the meaning so that the people understood what was being read.Nehemiah 8:8

So that the people understood.

That is the purpose clause and everything else in the verse is in service of it. The reading, the making clear, the giving of the meaning: all of it aimed at ordinary people ending the day able to hold what was in the book.

And notice who ends up with it. Not the readers. The people. The whole crowd, standing in a square, most of whom could not have read a word of it themselves.

That is what the explaining is for, and it is what it is measured by. And you are that crowd, and this is what you were promised.

Understanding is what the exercise is for, and it lands on you. That stands written, and His Spirit is the one who gives it, and He has never once run the giving through a checkpoint first.

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 the man is wrong. He is usually right, and about half the time it changes the sense, and you have learned real things and said so. Scripture has men in this very passage doing exactly what he does, and His Spirit gave him the gift he uses.

And nothing here says the original languages do not matter. They do. People have gone badly astray reading a translation as if it were the last word, and the work of the men and women who spend their lives on manuscripts is a gift to the church and God gave it on purpose.

The point is only about the half second, and Scripture puts the whole aim of the reading on the people understanding, and His Spirit is the one who does that in a man at his own table.

Here is the tender part, and Scripture is gentle with it. Forty-nine years is a long apprenticeship.

You are not an amateur near a book. You are a man who has been in it since he was nineteen, and what it does to you at six in the morning is not a guess awaiting approval. His Spirit has been doing that in you for forty-nine years and He has never once required a second opinion.