The Night It Was Clear

It lasted about four hours and it happened at a kitchen table between eleven at night and three in the morning when he was thirty one, and he has been trying to get back to it ever since.

He is not a man who has experiences. He would tell you that himself, with a certain dryness. He reads, he thinks, he checks things, and he had come to God the way he comes to everything, which is slowly and with reservations recorded.

And then one night, with a book open and a cold cup of tea, the whole thing simply cohered.

That is the only word he has ever found for it. It cohered. All the pieces he had been holding separately for years snapped into one shape, and it was not emotional, it was intellectual and it was overwhelming, and he sat at that table until three in the morning knowing things with a certainty he has never had about anything before or since.

He promised God everything at that table. He wrote it down, because that is what he does. The paper is in a drawer.

The certainty was gone within two weeks. Not the beliefs. The certainty. He still holds all of it as true and probable and well supported, and he has never once come close to that four hours again.

He is fifty one.

And here is his rule, which he considers reasonable and has never examined: a man does not commit on a probability. He committed once, on a night when he actually knew. To do it again from where he stands now, at seventy percent, would be an act of will rather than an act of knowledge, and he does not respect an act of will dressed as knowledge.

So he waits. He has waited twenty years for the shape to come back.

You may be waiting for certainty. You may have had one hour of it and be unwilling to move without it, and you may be a person who has quite properly refused to talk yourself into things all your life.

Not in heaven, not across the sea

Now let me put you in front of a passage that was written for exactly your objection, and notice that Moses raises it before anybody else does.

He is at the end of the whole thing, and he is telling a people what is being asked of them, and he anticipates the excuse. It is not in heaven, he says, that thou shouldest say who shall go up for us to heaven and bring it unto us. Neither is it beyond the sea, that thou shouldest say who shall go over the sea for us.

And then:

But the word is very nigh unto thee, in thy mouth, and in thy heart, that thou mayest do it.Deuteronomy 30:14

You have something God placed within reach, and its nearness was never a function of how sure you feel. Deuteronomy 30:14 answers two distance objections by denying that there is any distance, and the Holy Spirit is the one who put it that close and has kept it there.

The distance was never the problem

Look at what he is dismantling. Both of the excuses he names are distance excuses: it is too high, it is too far, somebody would have to go and get it.

And his answer is not to argue about the distance. His answer is that there is no distance. It has been put very near. In thy mouth, which is to say available for you to say, and in thy heart, which is to say available for you to hold, and then the purpose clause: that thou mayest do it.

Now notice what the nearness is not conditioned on. Not on your certainty. Not on the shape cohering. The word is near because He put it near, and its nearness is a fact about His action and not a variable that moves with your epistemic state on a given Tuesday.

You have something placed within reach by God Himself, and its nearness has never depended on how sure you feel. Deuteronomy 30:14 is where that is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes it out of a farewell speech and sets it on a kitchen table at two in the morning.

And now let me take your rule seriously, because it is the best objection in these seven categories and it deserves a real answer.

You said: a man does not commit on a probability, and an act of will dressed as knowledge is not respectable.

The second half of that is right and I would defend it with you. The first half is not, and here is why: you commit on probabilities constantly and always have. You married on one. You took a job on one. You got on an aircraft this year on one. In every serious decision a reasoning man makes, the commitment exceeds the certainty, and that is not a failure of rigor, it is what commitment is. If certainty were available there would be no need for the word.

You have never once in your life waited for certainty before acting, except here. Scripture puts the word in the mouth and the heart precisely so it can be done rather than resolved, and the Spirit of God is the one who has kept it that close for twenty years.

What the four hours were

Let me say one more thing, carefully, about that night, because I am not going to explain it away and I am not going to promise it back.

It was real. Something was given to you at that table and it was not a trick of tiredness, and the fact that it was intellectual rather than emotional does not make it less of a gift; it makes it a gift given in the currency you actually use, which is a courtesy.

But a gift is not a threshold. It was given once, unasked, and it cannot be produced on demand, and treating it as the condition of return means the condition is one you can never meet.

You were given something in your own currency and have turned it into a toll. That is what it means that the word is very near and not in heaven, and His Spirit is the one who has kept it near while you waited for the shape.