Willing In General

He can do it in about four minutes and he has done it perhaps two hundred times.

Somebody sits in that chair, having moved a stack of books off it, and says the thing people come to him to say, which is some version of: I do not know if God wants me.

And he takes them to four passages, in a particular order that he has refined over about fifteen years, and it works. He can watch it work. People leave that study with something they did not have when they came in and some of them have told him so years later.

He is sixty.

He has never once believed it about himself.

He would like that stated carefully, because he is not describing despair and he would find the word embarrassing. He is not in torment. He is not under a cloud. He gets up, he works, he prays, he is not unhappy.

It is that there is a proposition he can demonstrate and cannot inhabit, and he has known this about himself since he was about thirty five, and he has treated it as a permanent and slightly puzzling feature of his own construction, like a knee that does not bend all the way.

He has tried the obvious remedies. He has read the passages about himself, deliberately, out loud, as an exercise. He has prayed about it. He once spent the better part of a year on it, quietly, and told no one, and came out the other side with a better grasp of the passages.

The general willingness of God is one of the most secure things he knows.

The willingness of God toward him in particular is not a thing he has ever had access to, and he stopped expecting to some time around his fiftieth birthday, without any drama, the way a man stops expecting to be tall.

You know the gap. Yours may not run through four passages. But you know what it is to be able to establish something completely, to be able to give it to other people, and to have it available to you in every form except the one that would matter.

He did not argue it, He said it

Let me name the pit before we go to the verse, because if this becomes an article that argues the point harder it will fail in a way you will recognize by the second paragraph, and you have already read that article and written a better one.

You are being spoken to and not asked to assent, and you were never going to be reached by a conclusion. Matthew 23:37 has no premise in it at all, only a wanting said in the first person over a name, and it is the Holy Spirit who delivers an address into one man.

The pit is the form. Everything you have on this subject is in the form of a conclusion: things you have established, correctly, from evidence, and hold securely.

A conclusion is a fine thing and it cannot do the one job you need done, because you were never going to be reached by a conclusion. You need to be addressed, and no amount of proof is an address, and fifteen years of refining an argument has not produced one because it structurally cannot.

Here is the verse.

O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets, and stonest them which are sent unto thee, how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not!Matthew 23:37

Look at its form before anything else, because the form is the point for a man like you.

It is not an argument. There is no premise anywhere in it. He does not establish His willingness from the covenant or from the prophets or from anything, and He was entirely capable of doing so and does elsewhere.

He says it. First person, out loud, over a named city, looking at it: how often would I have gathered.

That is not a proposition offered for assent. It is somebody speaking about His own desire in front of the people it is about.

And He leaves the grief in. And ye would not. He does not tidy the ending, He does not soften it into a general statement about availability, and He does not use the loss as an argument for anything. He states what He wanted and He states that it did not happen and the sentence ends there, unresolved, in public.

Take that in the armchair, and know it is not my case, it is what is written. He did not argue His willingness, He said it in the first person over a name. Matthew 23:37 is an address and not a demonstration, and it is the Holy Spirit who delivers an address into a particular man, and He does not do it by strengthening a case.

You are being addressed and not asked to agree, and you were never going to be reached by a conclusion. Matthew 23:37 carries no premise at all, only a wanting spoken in the first person over a name, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a spoken word into one man.

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 hen and her chicks is 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.