Let All the Earth Keep Silence

The word was disengaged, and it was not said to him, which is worse.

It came back to him the way these things do, third hand, softened in the telling and therefore unarguable, and it had been said in a planning conversation about who might be asked to do something.

He always seems a bit disengaged.

He is sixty and he has been in that congregation for twenty-six years.

What he does in a service is stand still. That is the whole offense. He does not close his eyes and he does not lift his hands and he does not move, and he looks straight ahead, and he is, if you asked him, entirely present. He is thinking about the words. He is aware of God in the room in a way he could not describe without embarrassing himself.

But he is not doing anything, and in a room where everybody else is doing something, not doing anything reads as not being there.

And here is what has happened in the eighteen months since it came back to him. He has started half believing it.

Not the whole thing. But he has begun to watch himself during the singing, and to wonder whether the stillness is presence or whether it is the residue of something that went out of him years ago and he has not noticed.

The command given to the whole earth

Habakkuk ends a passage about idols with one sentence about the living God, and the sentence is an instruction about posture.

But the LORD is in his holy temple: let all the earth keep silence before him.Habakkuk 2:20

Read who it is addressed to. Not the quiet ones. Not the reserved. All the earth.

And read what it commands. Silence. Stillness before God is not being permitted here as an option for people who cannot manage more; it is issued, to everybody, as the fitting response to the fact that God is in His temple.

This is the same book that ends with the prophet saying he will rejoice in the LORD and joy in the God of his salvation, which is not a quiet sentence. Habakkuk contains both, and does not treat them as rivals.

You are standing in the posture Scripture commands an entire earth to take. That is not me finding cover for a temperament; Habakkuk 2:20 issues silence to everybody as the response to God's presence, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a prophet's sentence and lays it beside a man standing still in a fourth row.

What stillness is being mistaken for

Now let me name the confusion cleanly, because it is a category error and once you see it you cannot unsee it.

In most rooms, a person doing nothing is a person not participating. That is true at a meeting, at a match, in a workshop. Doing is the currency, and stillness reads as absence, and everybody learns this so early that nobody notices they have learned it.

Then that reading walks into a room where the subject is God, and it does not fit at all, because in front of God stillness is a posture and not an absence. It is what the whole earth is told to do. But the reading arrives anyway, because it is automatic, and so a still man gets read as an absent one by people who are not being unkind and are simply using the only interpretation they have.

You have been read by an instinct that works everywhere except in the room it was used in. The written word issues silence to all the earth as the fitting response to God's presence, and the Holy Spirit does not measure a man's engagement by his movement.

And this cuts both ways, as it must. The ones with their hands up are not performing. Movement in front of God is not the opposite of reverence; the same Scripture has people dancing and shouting and falling down. What has gone wrong is not that anybody is doing the wrong thing. It is that one posture in that room has been treated as the readable one and the other as a blank.

You are not a blank in that room, and no reading anybody makes of you from the front has ever been the assessment. Scripture gives the silence as an instruction rather than as an allowance, and the Holy Spirit has been meeting a man standing still for twenty-six years.