The Invitation Was General

She reads properly. That is the thing to establish first, because what follows sounds like carelessness and it is the opposite.

She has read the whole book through four times. She marks things. She looks up what a word meant. When somebody at that Tuesday group says something loose about a verse she can usually tell them, kindly, what the passage is actually doing.

She is thirty eight.

And there is one operation she performs, silently and instantly, on every promise she reads, and she has performed it so many thousands of times that she has never once seen herself do it.

She converts the second person into a category.

It happens like this. She reads he shall cover thee with his feathers, and by the time the sentence has finished she is holding a different sentence, which is: God covers those who trust Him.

Both are true. That is what makes it invisible. The category version is not a distortion, it is a perfectly sound generalization, and she could defend it from the text.

But watch what she has done. She has taken a sentence addressed to a single person and converted it into a statement about a class of people, and then she has checked whether she is in the class, and she usually decides that she probably is, and the whole transaction takes less than a second and ends with her holding a fact instead of having been spoken to.

She has never in her life read a promise and been the one addressed.

She said something on a walk in the spring that she did not mean to say. Her friend had stopped and turned back on the path with a hand out and said something about a verse being for her, and she said: I do not think anything in that book is for me in particular, I think I am inside things.

And then she said it was fine, and it is fine, and they walked on.

You know the operation. Yours may run on different words. But you know what it is to be handed a sentence in the second person and to have quietly filed it under general provision before you have finished reading it.

It says thee

Let me name the pit before we go to the Psalm, because if this becomes an article about claiming promises you will be suspicious of it, and you should be, and so am I.

You are the one addressed in that verse, and you were addressed before you had converted a word of it. Psalm 91 leaves the third person by its third verse and stays in the second, and it is the Holy Spirit who carries a written word to somebody in particular.

The pit is not that you disbelieve. It is a reading habit, performed by somebody who reads well, and it has one effect: it makes it impossible for you to ever be addressed. A woman who converts every second person into a third person before the sentence lands has built a house with no door in it.

So read this one exactly as it stands, without the operation.

He shall cover thee with his feathers, and under his wings shalt thou trust: his truth shall be thy shield and buckler.Psalm 91:4

Look at what the Psalm actually does grammatically, because you are the kind of reader who will find this interesting and I am counting on that.

It opens in the third person. He that dwelleth in the secret place of the most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty. That is a category sentence, and it is the sort you are comfortable with, and if the Psalm had continued that way you would have had no trouble at all.

Then in the second verse it turns. I will say of the Lord, he is my refuge. First person.

And by the third verse it has turned again and it is speaking to somebody: surely he shall deliver thee. Thee. And it stays there. Thee, thy, thou, for verse after verse, all the way through the covering and the shield and the terror by night and the thousand falling at thy side.

The Psalm starts general and refuses to stay there. That movement is deliberate. It is the text itself declining to leave a person in the category.

Take that on the path, and know it is not my emphasis, it is what is on the page. It says thee, and it says it for verse after verse, and it is not a class statement. Psalm 91 puts every action on His side and addresses it to one person, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes what is written and delivers it to somebody in particular, and He is not restricted to the general any more than the Psalm is.

You are the one being spoken to, and you were the one addressed before anything got converted. Psalm 91 turns out of the third person and stays in the second for verse after verse, and it is the Holy Spirit who delivers a written word to somebody in particular.

And here I draw the line this site always draws, in the same breath. 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. The feathers and the wings are one of the ways Scripture describes Him with a mother's picture beside a father's, and both are His own, and it does not make the Spirit a woman and it does not make God a goddess.