I Can Recite It And I Still Dig

Ilan taught it in eleven sessions once and people said it was the best thing they had done.

He can give you the whole architecture. What the burial means and what it does not, why the tense matters, the difference between a thing being finished and a thing being felt. He has answered this question for other people probably forty times and answered it well, and at least two of them have told him it changed something.

And most weeks, usually on a Sunday evening, he goes back and digs.

Same ground. Same twenty minutes. He gets it all up, examines it thoroughly, puts it back, and goes to bed.

He has been doing this for about fourteen years, and the maddening part, the part that has begun to feel almost funny in a way that is not funny, is that he can narrate the whole thing while it is happening.

He can tell you, in real time, which distinction he is currently violating. He knows the tense of the verb in the passage he is contradicting by being there. He could stop halfway through and give a clear and accurate lecture on why what he is doing is unnecessary, and then he would finish the twenty minutes.

He is forty-one and he has never told anybody this. Partly pride, though less than you would think. Mostly it is that the sentence has no ending. I understand it completely and I do it anyway. There is nowhere for that sentence to go and no advice anybody could give him that he has not already given somebody else.

You may know that Sunday evening.

Maybe you know the material. Maybe you have taught it. Maybe you can hear yourself narrating while you do the thing, and have concluded, reasonably, that if understanding did not close the gap then nothing will.

The gap is in the letter

Here is something worth knowing, and I think it will land differently on you than on most readers.

The gap you are describing is in Romans. Explicitly. In the middle of the argument, by the man making the argument, about himself.

The whole of Romans 7 is a man describing exactly this: knowing what is right in complete detail, consenting to it, approving it, and doing something else. It is not a lapse in the letter. It is a section.

And then it lands here.

O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death? I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord.Romans 7:24-25

Look at the shape of the question and the shape of the answer.

The question is who. Not what, not how, not which principle have I misunderstood. Who.

And the answer is a person, not a proposition. He does not answer his own question with a clarification. There is no better formulation coming. The next thing that happens in the letter is a name.

And the gap you have been treating as a failure of understanding is named in the letter itself. The written word gives a whole section to a man who knows and does otherwise, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that reach a man on a Sunday evening who can narrate himself.

And what closes it is a person rather than a better formulation. The word answers a who with a name and not an explanation, and the Spirit is the one who does the delivering rather than another distinction well drawn.

What you expected the understanding to do

Now let me name the actual assumption, because I think it is the load-bearing one and it is nearly invisible.

You expected that understanding it well enough would stop it.

That is not a stupid assumption. It works for a great many things and it has served you extremely well and it is why you are useful to forty people. It just happens not to be the mechanism here.

And when it did not work, you did the natural thing, which was to conclude that you must not understand it well enough yet, and you went and understood it better. Repeatedly. For fourteen years.

Which means the digging and the studying have been the same action performed with different tools.

And you are not required to think your way out of this. The word says the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life, and it puts the giving of life in Him rather than in the correctness of a reading, and the Spirit is the one who supplies what no amount of accuracy manufactures.

And nothing about you is under review. The word says there is now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, and it comes immediately after that chapter rather than before it, and the Spirit supplies that to a man who has just narrated himself through twenty minutes.

And nobody here is asking you to know less

Let me be plain about that, because it is the misreading available to a man like you and it would be a waste.

Nothing here suggests you study less or hold your material more loosely. The eleven sessions were good. Two people told you it changed something and they were not being polite.

The correction is direction, not dilution. What has happened is that a tool that is excellent for one job has been applied for fourteen years to a job it was never for, by a man who had no reason to suspect it would not work.

And what you know is real and it is not the thing that saves you. The word says I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord in answer to a question about deliverance, and the Spirit is the one who makes that a relief rather than a demotion of everything you have built.