Not A Man, And I Read It Wrong

He has preached that verse. That is the part he keeps coming back to.

Not once. Four times that he can find in his own files, over about eighteen years, and every one of the four is about the same thing, and the thing is true, and he would preach it again tomorrow.

God does not lie. God does not change His mind the way we change ours. What He has said He will do, He does. He is not fickle, He is not moody, He does not go back on a covenant because the mood in the room has shifted. That is what Numbers 23:19 is doing, and it is doing it in a strange chapter about a hired prophet who has come to curse a people and cannot get the curse out of his mouth.

Four sermons, all of them about faithfulness.

And then in April, in a hospital corridor, at about ten past two in the morning, waiting for somebody's surgery to finish, he read it on his phone because he could not think what else to do, and he stopped at the fourth word.

God is not a man.

He had read that verse, by his own reckoning, more than a hundred times. Every single one of those times, the sentence had been about honesty. It had never once been about what God is.

He sat in a plastic chair with a phone in his hand and thought: I have been picturing a man.

Not a wicked one. Not even a stern one, particularly. A very good man. The best man he could conceive of, scaled up, made larger and wiser and infinitely more patient, and put on a throne. That is what had been arriving, for eighteen years of ministry, every time he prayed, and he had never examined it because the picture had never announced itself, and because his doctrine was correct, and because a man does not audit what he is not aware of.

He is forty seven. He has led people well. He is not in crisis.

He is just in a plastic chair with four words in front of him and a picture that has never once been questioned.

You know the reading. Yours may be a different verse. But you know what it is to have taken half of something a hundred times and to have been entirely right about the half you took.

Stop at the fourth word

Let me name the pit before we go on, because if this lands as an accusation it will do nothing.

You are reading a sentence about what God is, and you were never handed it as a remark about honesty. Numbers 23:19 says God is not a man in its first four words, and it is the Holy Spirit who lands a verse a man has read a hundred times.

The pit is not carelessness. You are not a careless reader; you are a careful one, and the care is exactly how this happened. You read that verse in its context, correctly, took its argument, correctly, and preached it, correctly. The pit is that a sentence can be perfectly understood as an argument and never once be allowed to be a description, and the description was sitting in the first four words the whole time.

So read it again and stop where he stopped.

God is not a man, that he should lie; neither the son of man, that he should repent.Numbers 23:19

God is not a man.

The verse uses that as a premise. It can only argue what it argues because that is true first. God is not a human being. He is not male the way you are male. He is not female either. He is not a very good man scaled up, and He is not the best father anybody ever had with the limits taken off, and He is not anybody you have ever met with the volume turned up. He is God. He is spirit, and He is neither male nor female, and the Bible states it in the middle of an argument about something else, the way you state a thing everybody already knows.

Take that in the plastic chair, and know it is not my correction of you, it is what the verse says. You have been praying to a picture, and the picture is not Him. Numbers 23:19 says God is not a man in words that could not be plainer, and it is the Holy Spirit who prises a picture like that off a man who has been entirely correct in his doctrine for eighteen years.

And now the door that opens.

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.

Which means that once God is not a man, the whole question of where the tenderness in a human being came from has one answer, and it is the same answer as the question of where the strength came from. Both halves of that image are His.

And here is the boundary, in the same breath, because on this ground the picture never travels without the line. Genesis 1:27 does not make God part male and part female, and it does not hand Him a feminine side. It says that the image of one God who is neither took a man and a woman together to represent it. He is never addressed as Mother and no title Scripture does not give Him is coined for Him; the mother pictures in the Bible are similes God chose for Himself and they stay in that form.

You are reading a sentence about what God is, and you were never given it as a footnote about honesty. Numbers 23:19 says God is not a man in its first four words, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a verse a man has read a hundred times and lands it once.

The scaled up good man you have been picturing was always going to run out at exactly the point you needed a different half of God. That is what a half picture does, and it is the Holy Spirit who supplies the rest of it, over time, in a man who has stopped and read four words.