She has taught it thirty or forty times and she is very good at it.
God is spirit. God is not a man and not a woman. Male and female both bear the image, which tells you something about the God imaged and nothing at all about God having parts. She does the Numbers verse, she does Genesis 1:27, she does the bit where people usually go wrong, and she does the boundary before anybody in the room has time to wander over it.
Two people have written to her about that lesson. One of them said it settled something that had bothered her for eleven years.
Here is the part that has been sitting on her since a Tuesday in May.
She was praying, in the car, in a supermarket car park because that is where her praying happens, and something went wrong and she asked God to help with it, and she noticed, with the sort of clarity you get maybe twice a year, exactly who she was talking to.
A man. Very fair. Slightly impatient, in the way of somebody with a great deal on and a queue outside.
And she teaches, thirty or forty times, that He is not that.
She wants to be precise about her own condition, because she is a precise woman. This is not hypocrisy. Hypocrisy is teaching what you do not believe, and she believes every word of it and would go to the wall for it. It is not ignorance either; nobody in that room knows the material better.
It is that the definition has never once been allowed into the car park.
It lives in the classroom. It is beautifully kept, it is accurate, it is available on demand. And the picture in the car has never met it, and the picture is the one that turns up when something goes wrong at half past four on a Tuesday.
She is thirty six. She has been teaching nine years.
And what she said out loud in that car, and has not been able to unsay, was: I have been curating this.
You know the classroom and you know the car park. Yours may be a different pair of rooms. But you know what it is to hold something perfectly in one part of your life and to have it never once cross the corridor.
A door, and not a fact
Let me name the pit first, because if this lands as an accusation of insincerity it will be both wrong and useless.
You are holding a door and not only a definition, and you have the right to walk through what you have been teaching. Numbers 23:19 does not change when a teacher turns it inward, and it is the Holy Spirit who moves a sentence out of a lesson and into a picture.
The pit is that you have been treating a door as a fact. A fact is a thing you hold, check, keep accurate and hand to people. A door is a thing you go through. Numbers 23:19 and Genesis 1:27 have been, for nine years, extremely well maintained facts in your possession, and they were built as doors, and a door that is only ever polished does not take anybody anywhere.
Here is the first one.
God is not a man, that he should lie; neither the son of man, that he should repent.Numbers 23:19
You could teach that in your sleep. So do not teach it. Stand in it.
God is not a man. Which means the fair, slightly impatient figure with a queue outside is not the Lord. Not a poor version of Him. Not Him on a bad day. Not Him. He is not male the way that figure is male, and He is not female either, and He is not any human being scaled up. He is God, and He is spirit, and Scripture says it flat.
Take that in the car park, and know it is not my correction of your teaching, it is the teaching arriving where it was always meant to go. The figure you have been praying to on Tuesdays is not Him. Numbers 23:19 says God is not a man, and it is the Holy Spirit who moves a definition out of a classroom, which is a piece of work no amount of preparing the lesson better has ever achieved.
And the second door.
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 to carry it, one God who is neither. You know the boundary and I will say it anyway, because on this ground it never travels separately from the picture: that verse does not make God part male and part female, it does not give Him a feminine side, 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 teach that beautifully. Now hear it as a thing said to you.
You are holding a door and not only a fact, and you have every right to walk through what you have been teaching. Numbers 23:19 is written plainly and it does not alter when a teacher turns it inward, and it is the Holy Spirit who moves a sentence from a lesson into a picture.
The impatience is not in Him, and the queue is not real, and neither of those has ever been true of God. That is Numbers 23:19 applied rather than filed, and it is the Holy Spirit who does the applying, in a woman who has stopped curating and started standing in the doorway.
Do it in the deep end. That is the whole of tonight and it is not more information.
You are holding a definition that is true, and you have every right to say it over the picture instead of beside it. Numbers 23:19 says God is not a man, and it is the Holy Spirit who moves a sentence out of a lesson plan and into the place where a person actually pictures God, which teaching it accurately has never done.
You are not short of material. Another lesson will not help and neither will a better articulation. What has never happened is that the two rooms have been put together, on purpose, out loud, with you in the car.
So describe the picture. Out loud, in the car park, exactly as it is. A man. Fair. Slightly impatient. A queue outside.
Say it plainly, without softening it, because you are a precise woman and precision is the gift you actually have here.
Then read Numbers 23:19 over it, out loud, and say: that is not You.
You are speaking to a God who is neither male nor female, right now, on a Tuesday, in a car park, whatever has been arriving in your head while you did it. That is your own lesson, spoken over you instead of by you, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes it the last few feet, which is the part nobody can teach themselves through.
And I want to take something off you before we finish, because it has been the sharpest edge of this.
Curating is not a sin. You said it in the car like an accusation and it is not one. A person who guards a doctrine carefully for nine years, and gets it right, and settles something that had bothered a woman for eleven years, has done real work and God is not indifferent to it. Nothing about the classroom is being taken away.
The only thing being asked is that the teacher gets taught.
Declare this over yourself
Say these out loud in the car, engine off. You are in Christ, and the authority to speak over your own picture of God is delegated to you in Him; it is not earned by how well you can teach the material. These stand on what is written in Numbers and in Genesis, carried by the Holy Spirit and not by your preparation. How the picture changes, and how fast, is His to decide, and He answers in His own way and in His own timing.
- Definition I have held and never applied, you were meant to be a door, and I say so in the name of Jesus. Numbers 23:19 says God is not a man, and I am standing in that tonight instead of handing it to a room.
- Fair and slightly impatient figure with a queue outside, you are not the Lord, and you do not get another Tuesday. It is written that male and female were both made in the image of one God, and His Spirit is the one who moves a truth the last few feet, which is not a thing I can prepare my way through.
- Lord, You are neither male nor female and everything good in both came out of You. I read Numbers 23:19 out loud in this car park and I describe the picture honestly and I say the definition over it, and I am not going to sit here afterward marking my own work.
Numbers 23:19
This message is free, and always will be. There is nothing to unlock, nothing to subscribe to, and nothing you owe for having received it.
