Which One Of Them Is He Like

There were two chairs in that kitchen and he understood the whole world from between them.

His grandfather's was by the door. That is where the decisions happened, and the decisions were fair, and there were not many of them and they did not get revisited. He was not a hard man. He was a man of very few words, and the words came out at the right moments, and the family ran on them for forty years.

His grandmother's was by the window, and she was never in it, because she was at the stove, or she was at your shoulder, or she had come round the table with a cloth and was wiping something that did not need wiping so she could stand near you for a minute. She said everything. She said far too much. She fed people who said they were not hungry and was right every time.

He is fifty six now and they have both been gone a long while, and he could not tell you the day either of them died without looking it up, and he could tell you exactly where they sat.

And here is the thing that has been running underneath him since he was seven or eight, and that he has never once said out loud, and that he only found the words for last month at a funeral of all places.

He has always sorted God into the chair by the door.

Not on purpose. Not by a decision. It is simply that God is the one who decides, and the deciding happened by the door, and so the picture went where the picture went, and by the time he was old enough to examine it he had thirty years of praying to a man of very few words.

The chair by the window has never once had God in it.

He would tell you, correctly, that God is love and that God is compassionate. He can say those things. What he has never done is expect them, the way you expect a hand on your shoulder from somebody who is coming round the table with a cloth.

At the funeral last month a cousin said something about their grandmother, some small thing about the way she used to stand behind you, and he had to go outside. Not because he missed her, though he does. Because a sentence arrived that he has never been able to get rid of since.

Which one of them is He like.

You know that question. Yours may be two different people, or one, or a gap where somebody should have been. But you know what it is to have sorted God into a chair without ever deciding to, and to have left another chair standing empty your whole life.

The wrong question, kindly answered

Let me name the pit before we open the book, because the verse will do nothing if it lands on the wrong thing.

You are not asked to choose which of them He resembles, and you have both of those things in Him undivided. Genesis 1:27 says male and female, one image, one Maker, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a man out of a question he has carried since childhood.

The pit is not that you have a poor doctrine. Your doctrine is fine and you would pass any examination anybody set you. The pit is that you have been answering a question nobody should have asked you, and answering it since you were seven, and the question is: which of these two people is God like. And because a boy has to answer with the material in the room, you answered by the door, and you have been living on that answer for half a century.

Here is the verse that dissolves the question rather than answering it.

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

Read what it does with the two.

It does not put God in one of them. It says that when God made an image of Himself it took both of them to carry it. Not half each. Both, together, imaging one God, which means every good thing in the chair by the door and every good thing in the woman with the cloth came down out of the same place before it ever reached that kitchen.

And now the boundary, said in the same breath, because on this ground the picture and the line never travel separately. 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. Genesis 1:27 does not give God a masculine part and a feminine part, and it does not make Him a marriage of two things. It says the image of one undivided God needed two kinds of human being to represent it in the world.

Take that where you are sitting, and know it is not my comfort, it is what the verse says. The chair you left empty was never empty because God is not that. Genesis 1:27 puts the whole image in one God, and it is the Holy Spirit who moves a truth like that from a man's head into the room where a seven year old made his decision.

And Scripture does not leave you to work out the second half by inference. It says it in God's own voice.

As one whom his mother comforteth, so will I comfort you.Isaiah 66:13

He chose that comparison. Nobody put it in His mouth. And the line stands exactly where it stood: that is a simile God selected to describe Himself, it does not make Him a mother, He is never addressed by that title, and the picture is left in the form He gave it. What it settles for good is that the woman with the cloth was not showing you something God does not do.

You are not required to pick which of them He resembles, and you have both of those things in Him undivided. Genesis 1:27 says male and female, one image, one Maker, and it is the Holy Spirit who gets a man out of a question he has been answering since childhood.

She was showing you something of His, and she did not invent it, and neither did anybody else. That is Genesis 1:27 and Isaiah 66:13 standing together, and it is the Holy Spirit who does the work of getting that as far down as a kitchen from 1978.