He has prayed most days for thirty one years and there has always been a face.
He did not choose it. That is the first thing to say and it matters. He never sat down and decided what God looks like; you cannot do that and he would tell you it is foolishness to try. It is simply that when he closes his eyes and says Lord, somebody is there, and the somebody has his father's face at the kitchen table, at about six in the evening, with the paper folded and a cup of tea going cold.
Not a cruel face. He wants that understood and he will say it twice.
His father was not a cruel man. He worked, and he provided, and he did not drink, and he was in that chair every evening of a childhood, and he was fair, and if you got it wrong he told you, and if you got it right he did not say much, and that was the arrangement and everybody in the house understood it.
So when he prays, that is who is listening. Fair. Present. Not warm. Waiting to see how the account comes out.
Thirty one years.
And what he has done with that, without ever deciding to, is prayed a certain way. He brings results. He brings failures. He gives an account, the way you would at a kitchen table at six in the evening, and then he says amen and gets up, and that is prayer and it has been prayer for three decades and he would have said it was going fine.
Then in February his own son said something to him on the phone. Nothing dramatic. His son said, about something entirely else, "You know you never actually tell me when you're pleased."
And he has been standing in that sentence ever since.
Because he heard, underneath it, a sound he recognized. And what he has not been able to shake is not what it says about him and his boy. It is the question that arrived behind it, at about two in the morning, which is: whose face have I been praying at.
You know the face. Yours may be somebody else's, and it may be kinder, and it may be worse. But you know what it is to have a picture arrive with the word, and to have never once put the picture next to the text.
He is not a man
Let me name the pit before we go to the verse, and let me be careful, because there is a version of this article that goes after your father and I am not writing it.
Your father is not on trial here. I did not know him. You did, and whatever the truth of him is, it is yours and it is not mine to guess at, and nothing in this article requires you to say a single word against him. That is not what is wrong.
What is wrong is smaller and more fixable. You needed a face. Every human being does; we cannot picture a person without one. And the only face to hand was the one at the kitchen table, so your mind did what a mind does, and borrowed it, and it has been on loan for thirty one years and nobody has ever asked for it back.
Here is the verse. It is in the middle of a strange story about a hired prophet, and it goes past fast.
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.
Read it as flat as it is written. Not: God is a better man. Not: God is like the best father you can imagine, only more so. God is not a man. He is not a human being at all. He is spirit, and He is neither male nor female, and every picture you have of Him that is built out of a person you have met is, at best, borrowed, and at worst a stranger standing in His place.
Take that on the step, and know it is not my sympathy, it is what is written. The face that turns up when you pray is not His face. Numbers 23:19 says God is not a man, and it is the Holy Spirit who does the prising, in a man who has had a picture on loan for thirty one years and never once compared it to the text.
And Genesis says the other half of it, right at the front, before anybody had a chance to get confused.
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 God who is neither, and it took two kinds of person to carry His image.
Now the boundary, and I put it in the same breath because on this ground we never teach one without the other. That verse does not make God part man and part woman, and it does not give Him a soft side to go with a hard one. It says the image of one God who is neither male nor female needed a man and a woman together to represent it, and therefore everything good in either of them started in Him.
Which means the warmth you have never associated with God is not missing from Him. It is missing from your picture. That is Genesis 1:27 read plainly, and it is the Holy Spirit who does the difference between a doctrine a man agrees with and a face a man sees, which is a long piece of work and He is not in a hurry.
You have been praying all of Him that ever reached you.
You are praying to God and not to the face at that kitchen table, and you were never required to keep the two joined. Numbers 23:19 says God is not a man, and it is the Holy Spirit who separates a borrowed face from the God it has been standing in front of for thirty years, and He does that gently.
That is the honest shape of thirty one years, and I want you to hold it without shame, because there is no fault in it. A boy takes the face that is in front of him. He does not audit it. Nobody hands a nine year old a doctrine of the invisible God and tells him to prefer it to the man at the table.
But you are not nine, and the record is not the song.
So here is what to do, and it is not an exercise in imagination and I am not going to ask you to picture something else instead, because a man cannot swap a face by trying. Do the smaller thing.
Say out loud, when the face turns up: that is not You.
That is all. Not a replacement. A refusal. The face arrives at prayer the way it has for thirty one years, and you say, plainly, out loud, in your ordinary voice: that is not Your face. And then you go on and pray.
You are praying to a God who is not a man, right now, tonight, whatever is turning up in your head while you do it. That is Numbers 23:19 and it does not wait for your imagination to catch up, and it is the Holy Spirit who changes what a man sees, over months, by His own means, in a man who keeps handing the borrowed face back.
And your boy on the phone in February. Leave that where it is for tonight. It is a real thing and it will keep. What I will say is this: a man who has only ever been given an account has only ever known how to take one, and the same verse that frees you from a borrowed face is the one that will eventually get to that phone call. Not tonight. It is not tonight's work.
Declare this over yourself
Say these out loud, standing or sitting, in your own voice. You are in Christ, and the authority to speak over a picture in your own head is delegated to you in Him; it does not depend on your being able to replace the picture, which you cannot. These stand on what is written in Numbers and in Genesis and are carried by the Holy Spirit, not by your imagination. What He shows you instead, and when, is His to decide, and He answers in His own way and in His own timing.
- Borrowed face I have prayed at for thirty one years, you are not the Lord, and I say so in the name of Jesus. Numbers 23:19 says God is not a man, so whoever is at that kitchen table in my head, it is not Him, and I hand the face back.
- Conclusion that came with the face, that God is fair and present and waiting to see how the account comes out, you were never in the text. It is written that male and female were both made in His image, and His Spirit is the one who changes what a man sees, which was never mine to arrange.
- Lord, You are not a man and You are not a woman, and everything good in both came out of You. I read Numbers 23:19 out loud tonight, and when the face turns up I tell it plainly that it is not Yours, and then I go on and pray to the God who actually is.
Numbers 23:19
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