Quick and Powerful, With You Sitting There

He put it into words on a Thursday, driving, and it startled him because it came out sounding final.

He said, out loud, in an empty van: the words have gone dead.

He did not mean it as blasphemy and he would be upset to have it taken that way. He meant it the way you would say a battery has gone. There was a time when a sentence would come off the page and land in him and stay all day, and there was a time before that when he did not know that was unusual, and now he reads and it is print.

He is fifty-three. He does not read much now. He has not made a decision about that and would deny having made one; he has simply stopped putting himself in the way of it, the way a man stops turning a key that has not worked for a while.

And the logic underneath, which he has never examined because it seems obvious, runs like this: I have gone flat. A flat man reading is a flat transaction. Therefore there is nothing in it for me at present and I will wait until something changes.

He is not angry about it. That is what would worry me most if I were sitting across from him. He has accepted it, the way you accept the weather.

What Hebrews says the word is

Hebrews makes a statement about Scripture, and the thing to notice is that it is a statement about the word and not about the reader.

For the word of God is quick, and powerful, and sharper than any twoedged sword.Hebrews 4:12

Is quick. That old word means living, and it is in the present tense, and it is a description of what the thing is, not of what happens when it meets somebody.

Read the sentence again and look for the reader in it. There is nobody there. There is no clause about a receptive heart, no condition about a man's current state, no mention of what the person holding it brings to the encounter.

The liveness is a property of the word. It is stated flatly, the way you would state that iron is hard, and the hardness of iron does not vary with the mood of the man picking it up.

You are handling something that is alive independently of you, and its being alive was never a report on your condition. That is not me rescuing a text from your experience; Hebrews 4:12 makes the liveness a property of the word itself, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that and stands it beside a man who said a final-sounding thing in a van on a Thursday.

The mistake in the logic

Now let me go at the reasoning, because you are a sensible man and this is a reasoning error rather than a spiritual failure.

Your logic assumes the transaction is symmetrical. Flat man plus book equals nothing. That would be sound if the book were inert and everything depended on what you brought.

But you are describing an encounter with something that Hebrews says is living and sharp and active, and a live thing does not require the other party to be lively for it to be what it is. A man sits down next to a fire in a bad mood; the fire is not affected by the mood.

You have been reasoning about a live thing as though it were a dead one. The written word calls itself quick and powerful in the present tense with no condition attached, and the Holy Spirit is not made inactive by a man who has gone quiet in himself.

And I want to name the thing that troubles me most in what you said in the van, because it is not the sentence. It is the acceptance. You have stopped being bothered. A man who says the words have gone dead and is upset about it is in a wrestle; a man who says it and shrugs has settled something.

You have not stopped believing. You have quietly stopped expecting, which is a different loss and a quieter one and it does not announce itself.

You are still in reach of the very thing you have stopped expecting, and nothing was withdrawn when you stopped. Scripture says the word is living and effective without naming a single condition in the hearer, and the Holy Spirit has been the one keeping it so through however long a man has left the key in his pocket.