Somebody asked him at a table, without meaning anything by it, what God is like. And he answered well, and it took about four minutes, and afterward he could not stop thinking about it.
He said: just. He said: faithful, and he meant covenant faithful, and he said it in a way that made two people at that table sit forward. He said mighty. Sovereign. Holy. He said the God who does not change, and he quoted a verse for it. He said the judge of all the earth who will do right. He said patient, which he pronounced as long suffering, and he explained the difference. He said, and this is the one he is proudest of, that God is not far off, and he had a passage for that too.
Nine. He counted them afterward, in the car, on his fingers, which is not a thing he would tell anybody.
And here is what happened next, and it happened without any drama at all. His wife asked him, that same night, standing at the sink, what he had said. He told her the nine. She listened, and dried a pan, and said, "And what did you say about His kindness?"
He said something. He is not sure now what it was. He knows it took about six seconds and that he moved on.
He is fifty two years old. He has read the Bible right through eleven times. He teaches a men's study on a Wednesday and they come, and they come because he is good.
And there is a gap in him the exact shape of a word he does not have.
He would tell you the theology is right. It is right. Everything on the list is true and he could defend every item of it under pressure, and none of it is what he is thinking about at three in the morning.
At three in the morning he is thinking: I have nine words for how strong He is. I have no words at all for how He is with me.
You know that gap. You may have a longer list or a shorter one. But you know what it is to be entirely correct about God and to have a whole region of Him that you have no vocabulary for, and to have got so used to the silence in that region that you stopped noticing it was silent.
Both halves, and one God
Let me name the pit first, because if I aim at the wrong thing the verse will do nothing for you.
The pit is not ignorance. You are not an ignorant man and this is not a reading problem. The pit is that you have a full vocabulary for one half of what Scripture says about God and almost none for the other, and a person can only receive what he has words for. You cannot be comforted by a God you have no language for being comforted by. So the comfort has been arriving, probably for years, and finding nowhere to be filed.
Here is the verse, and it is the third paragraph of the Bible, and it is doing something enormous that almost everybody reads past.
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 needed to carry it.
Now the line, and I am going to draw it in the same breath as I teach the picture, because on this site we do not do one without the other. God is neither male nor female. He is spirit, and Numbers 23:19 says flatly that God is not a man. Genesis 1:27 is not saying that God is part male and part female, and it is not saying He has a feminine side. It is saying something stranger and better: that the image of one God who is neither took both a man and a woman to represent, and therefore every good thing in either of them is downstream of Him.
Take that at your own table, and know it is not my kindness to you, it is what the verse says. You have been missing words for something that has always been His. Genesis 1:27 puts both halves of the image in one God, and it is the Holy Spirit who supplies a man with vocabulary he did not grow up with, which no amount of reading it through an eleventh time has managed.
And Scripture does not leave the picture at Genesis and hope you work it out. It goes and says the thing directly.
As one whom his mother comforteth, so will I comfort you.Isaiah 66:13
That is God, speaking about Himself, in the first person, choosing the comparison Himself. Not a poet reaching for something. God says: the way a mother does that, that is the way I will do it with you.
And the boundary stands exactly where it stood a paragraph ago and I will say it again rather than let it drift. That is a simile God chose for Himself. It does not make God a mother, it does not make Him a woman, and He is never to be addressed by a title Scripture does not give Him. What it does is settle, permanently, that the tenderness you have no word for is not a foreign import into your doctrine. It was in the text before you were born.
The nine words were never wrong. They were nine of a larger number. I am not softening your list; every item on it is true and stays. His word says He comforts as a mother comforts, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a sentence like that and puts it somewhere a man can reach it at three in the morning.
You have been describing half of it. Not wrongly. Half.
You are not short of words because His tenderness is thin, and you were made in the same image that carries the other nine. Genesis 1:27 says male and female, in one image, from one Maker, and it is the Holy Spirit who supplies a word a man has never had, which no list has ever grown on its own.
So here is the turn, and it is small and it is a language exercise rather than a spiritual technique, and I want you to do it exactly like that.
Go and find the words. They are in the book you have read eleven times and you have been reading past them because you had nowhere to put them. He comforts as a mother comforts. He gathers like a hen gathers her chicks and He said so with grief in His voice. He carries a people the way a man carries his son, and He also says He gave them birth. He remembers the way a nursing mother remembers, and says He remembers better.
Write them down. Actually write them, because a man who has nine words on his fingers is a man who counts things, and this will work for you in a way that a feeling will not.
And then take the second list with you into the same room where you take the first one. That is not sentiment being added to your doctrine; it is the rest of your doctrine arriving, and it is the Holy Spirit who moves a truth from a page into the part of a man that is awake at three in the morning.
I want to be careful about one thing, because a man like you will hear an instruction where there is none. Nobody is asking you to feel anything by Friday. You may write ten words and feel nothing at all, and that will not mean the exercise failed. It means a vocabulary is being built, and vocabulary is built slowly and used later, usually at a moment nobody planned.
You are not missing a word because He is missing the thing, and you were made in an image that carries both. Genesis 1:27 says male and female, one image, one Maker, and it is the Holy Spirit who supplies to a man the word he has never had for something he has known for years.
You are made in the image of a God who is neither male nor female and who carries the whole of both. That is Genesis 1:27 and it is not an interpretation, and the half of Him you have no words for has been there the entire time, in the same book, in the same hand.
Declare this over yourself
Say these out loud at the table. You are in Christ, and the authority to speak over a gap in your own understanding is delegated to you in Him, not earned by the number of times you have read the book. These stand on what is written in Genesis and in Isaiah, and they are carried by the Holy Spirit and not by your recall. When the words come, and how they come, is His to decide, and He answers in His own way and in His timing.
- Short list I have carried for God, you are not the whole of Him, and I say so in the name of Jesus. Genesis 1:27 says male and female were both made in His image, so everything good in either of them came out of Him, and my nine words were nine of a larger number.
- Silence in the region of Him I have no vocabulary for, you are not evidence about God. It is written that He comforts as a mother comforts, He said it about Himself in the first person, and His Spirit is the one who hands a man the words he did not grow up with.
- Lord, You are neither male nor female, and the whole of both is in You. I read Genesis 1:27 out loud tonight and I put one tender thing You have done for me on the list where it belongs, and I thank You that it was in the book the whole time I was reading past it.
Genesis 1:27
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