The Explanation I Want

He has been at it four years and he has a lot of it written down.

Not a diary. He would not keep a diary. Notes, in a hardback book, in a hand that gets smaller when he is thinking properly, and about a third of the way through there is a page with a heading he wrote in a hotel room in the second year and has never crossed out.

The heading is: if I understood the reasoning, I could let it go.

That is the project. He would not call it a project, but that is what it is.

There is a thing in his life that does not make sense. Not a tragedy, exactly, and he has been careful with himself about not calling it one, because he knows people with real ones. But it is a genuine wrong shape, and it has been the wrong shape for four years, and he cannot make it fit anything.

So he has been building the framework that would make it fit.

He is good at this. It is what he does. He has read properly and he has thought properly and he has three or four candidate explanations and he can argue every one of them, and he keeps going because he believes, honestly, that on the day the reasoning closes he will be able to hand the whole thing over and sleep.

And on Tuesday night he was reading the page with the heading on it and he saw what he had actually written.

He had written a condition.

He had made understanding the price of trusting. He had, without ever deciding to, put terms on the table in front of God.

And you know that exactly, because there is something you have quietly decided you will trust Him with as soon as you understand it.

Understanding was never the price

Let us settle what governs this whole page. Nothing on it is being asked of you, there is no appeal at the bottom, and there is nothing in it that requires you to concede a point.

You are looking at an invitation, and the One being tested inside it is God. Follow the verb in that famous sentence and it lands on Him. He is under examination. He is the one who offered to be found out. It is written, put me to the test, says the Lord of hosts (Malachi 3:10), and the Holy Spirit is what turns a famous sentence into an invitation addressed to you.

Here it is, in its own room:

Bring the full tithe into the storehouse, that there may be food in my house. And thereby put me to the test, says the Lord of hosts, if I will not open the windows of heaven for you and pour down for you a blessing until there is no more need.Malachi 3:10

Said to a nation, in one decade, about one building, where the store room had emptied and the families who worked there had gone home hungry. It is a sentence about people eating. And notice what God offers in it, because it bears on everything you have written down: He does not offer an explanation. He offers Himself, to be found out, by people who had drawn a conclusion about Him. The Holy Spirit is what turns a sentence that is true into a sentence that is true about you.

Now the framework, and it deserves genuine respect rather than a warning about the dangers of thinking.

You were not wrong to read and think. Scripture is full of people arguing with God at length and it does not scold them for it: Job runs to forty chapters, and Habakkuk opens by asking how long, and Asaph writes down the whole of his reasoning about the comfortable wicked and it is preserved in the middle of the Bible (Psalm 73). Nobody in this house is going to tell you to stop using your mind. Your mind is not the problem. The Holy Spirit is the One who takes a line spoken in one decade and makes it live in an ordinary room today.

The problem is the heading.

A condition is safe. If understanding is the price, then trusting is not something you do this evening in the dark. It is something that happens later, after the argument closes, at a point you control.

And the price of that is what you saw on Tuesday: the argument has not closed in four years, and on the current terms it may not close at all, and so you have arranged a life in which trust is permanently deferred by a clause you wrote yourself.

You are dealing with a Father and not a proposition, and He has never once made understanding the condition of anything. Jesus put it in family terms: which of you, if his son asks for a fish, will give him a serpent, or if he asks for an egg, will give him a scorpion (Luke 11:11). The child in that sentence does not understand the household economy. He is not asked to. The Holy Spirit is the one who takes a line like that off a page and sets it beside a hardback book at eleven at night.

Now the thing about explanations, and this is where the text is most direct.

God did not answer Job's question, and He answered Job. Thirty-eight chapters of the best argument in the ancient world, and what arrives at the end is not a solution to the problem of suffering. It is God, in person, asking questions of His own, and Job's reply is that he had heard of Him by the hearing of the ear but now his eye sees Him (Job 42:5). The reasoning never closed. The man was satisfied anyway, and by something better than a reason. His Spirit is what makes that a door rather than an evasion, and it is worth saying plainly: that is not an argument against thinking. It is a report of what actually happened to the best thinker in the book.

And here is the part your careful mind will want stated properly.

Trust does not require understanding, and it never has, because trust is not a conclusion about a proposition, it is a posture toward a person. It is written that we walk by faith and not by sight (2 Corinthians 5:7), and that faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen (Hebrews 11:1). Neither of those is a request to stop reasoning. Both of them describe a relation to somebody rather than an assessment of an argument. The Spirit is the one who makes that read as relief for a man who is good at arguments.

Now where the trust actually goes, and it is one action rather than a resolution.

Trust is not a technique and it has no steps, so nobody here is going to give you any and nobody is going to hand you the missing premise. It has an object. One real thing, out loud, handed over tonight, with the argument still open.

Not money. Nothing on this site will ever ask you for that or route anything anywhere, including here. One real thing: the wrong shape, the four years, the page with the heading on it.

You are owed nothing for trusting Him, including an explanation, and that is exactly what makes it trust rather than a settlement. It is written that we have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, Abba, Father (Romans 8:15). Nobody says Abba at the end of a successful argument.

And one last thing.

If you find this hard, you are not failing at it. A man who thinks for a living will find handing over an open question harder than most, and finding it difficult is not evidence about your faith. It is evidence about how you are made, and He made you that way and has never once asked you to be somebody else.