He got to the end of the clause with three notes already made and nothing at all having happened to him.
It is one of the tenderest sentences in the prophets and he has known that for years and would tell anybody so. He has taught it twice. He has an observation about its placement in that chapter which is genuinely good and which he has never heard anybody else make.
And on a Thursday evening in his own study, reading it for himself, with nobody to prepare for, this is what he did with it: he noticed the form of the verb, and thought about the comparison being introduced in the first person, and reached for something else on the shelf to check a suspicion about the structure of the surrounding lines.
Twenty minutes went by. It was a good twenty minutes and he enjoyed them.
And then he sat back and understood that the sentence had been about God's tenderness toward a person, and that he had been the person, and that he had spent the whole of it in the machinery.
He is fifty five.
Here is the part that made it worse rather than better. It is not that he cannot feel things. He wept at his daughter's wedding and had to leave the room during a piece of music in February. He is not a dry man.
It is specifically the text. The moment a sentence of Scripture arrives, the apparatus comes on, and it comes on before anything else has a chance, and it is fast, and it is the best thing about him.
He wrote one line in his notebook that evening and it was not about Isaiah. It said: I had the verb before I had the verse.
You know the apparatus. Yours may not involve Hebrew. But you know what it is to have a first move so fast and so good that nothing ever reaches you before it, and to have built the thing yourself, out of love, over years.
It was addressed to a person
Let me name the pit before we go on, because if this becomes an argument against study you will dismiss it inside a sentence and you will be right to.
Nothing here is against study. The apparatus is a gift and it has fed people and it will go on feeding them, and the observation about the placement in that chapter is a real observation and should be published somewhere.
The pit is narrower than that. It is that you have one relationship with the text, and it is the analytical one, and there is no second one, so a sentence addressed to a person has nowhere to arrive. It does not bounce off. It goes straight into the machinery, which is the only door, and the machinery does what it is for.
So here is the sentence, and I want you to notice its grammar for one moment only and then leave it alone forever.
As one whom his mother comforteth, so will I comfort you.Isaiah 66:13
The you is singular in effect and it is aimed. That is the only technical thing I will say, and I say it because you will want it, and because it happens to be the whole point: this is not a proposition about the divine nature. It is a thing said to somebody.
And notice who chose the comparison. God did, about Himself, in the first person, in His own words, and He did not choose it in order to be analyzed.
Here I draw the line in the same paragraph, because on this ground the picture never travels without it, and you would want it drawn properly. God is neither male nor female. Numbers 23:19 says God is not a man, and He is not a woman either; He is spirit. Isaiah 66:13 is a simile God selected to say what His comfort is like. It does not make God a mother, He is never addressed by any title Scripture does not give Him, and the picture stays exactly the shape He gave it. Scripture reaches for a father's language for Him constantly and a mother's deliberately, and this is one of the motherly ones, and it is His own.
Take that at your desk, and know it is not my correction of a scholar, it is the sentence doing what it was always doing. You were the one being comforted on Thursday evening, and the notes came second. Isaiah 66:13 was addressed to a person, and it is the Holy Spirit who gets a sentence past an apparatus, which no discipline of yours has ever managed on its own.
Take the instrument out of the room.
You are allowed to be spoken to by a sentence you already understand, and you were the one it was addressed to the whole time. Isaiah 66:13 says so will I comfort you, and it is the Holy Spirit who delivers a written word to a particular man, which no amount of correct parsing has ever done on its own.
That is the shape of tonight, and for you it is specific and it is physical.
Read Isaiah 66:13 out loud in English. Not because English is better; obviously it is not, and you know more about that than I do. Because the English is the version your apparatus has the least to do with, and tonight we are not feeding the apparatus.
Say it with your own name in it.
Then close the books. All of them, and put the notebook in a drawer, because a notebook within reach is an open door and you will go through it at about second twenty with something genuinely worth writing down.
Then sit for one minute and do not examine what is happening.
You are being comforted, and it is not a text tonight, it is a thing being said to you. That is Isaiah 66:13 read as an address rather than an object, and it is the Holy Spirit who does the comforting, and He is not deterred by a scholar and He does not compete with one either.
And I want to say the thing about the twenty minutes on Thursday, because you have been treating them as a failure and they were not.
You spent twenty minutes with a sentence about God's tenderness. Most people give it four seconds on the way to somewhere else. You did not fail to receive it because you love the text too little.
You simply have one door, and it is a magnificent door, and tonight we are going in a window.
Declare this over yourself
Say these out loud at the desk with the books shut. You are in Christ, and the authority to speak over an apparatus you built out of love over thirty years is delegated to you in Him; it does not depend on your being able to switch it off, which you cannot by wanting to. These stand on what is written in Isaiah and are carried by the Holy Spirit, not by your reading. How He gets in, and when, is His to decide, and He answers in His own way and in His own timing.
- First move that takes every sentence apart before anything can happen, you do not get this one, and I say so in the name of Jesus. Isaiah 66:13 says God comforts as a mother comforts, and it was said to a person and not offered to a reader.
- Belief that the only honest way to hold a verse is to examine it, you were never in the record. It is written that He chose that comparison Himself and that He is neither male nor female, and His Spirit is the one who carries a sentence past an apparatus, which no discipline of mine has managed.
- Lord, You comfort me the way a mother comforts, and You were saying it to me on Thursday. I read it out loud in plain English with my own name in it, and the books are shut and the notebook is in the drawer, and I let the good thought go past.
Isaiah 66:13
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