A Stranger to the Author

Twenty years. You could sit an examination in any part of it tomorrow without preparing.

You know the textual history. You know which of the difficulties are genuine and which are manufactured by people who have not read the primary sources. You have opinions about three commentators that you would defend at length and one that you would not say out loud in a room.

You have taught it. People have been genuinely helped, and some of them are teaching now.

And if somebody asked you whether you know the Author, you would not be able to answer honestly in a sentence.

Not because you would want to lie. Because the true answer is long and it makes you look worse than you are: you know an enormous amount about Him, you believe all of it, you have arranged your working life around it, and if He walked into the room you would have the relation to Him of somebody who has read a great deal of a man's correspondence and never met the man.

That comparison is not modest self-deprecation. It is precise, and you arrived at it about two years ago and have not been able to unarrive.

The subject is essentially complete. That is the strange part. There is more to learn and there always will be, but the shape of it is finished in you, and completing it has not produced the thing that everybody assumed it would.

What this page will not do

I am not going to tell you the twenty years were vanity. They were not. People are standing up straight because of work you did, and the person who tells a scholar his scholarship was pride has usually never had to defend anything.

I am not going to tell you that simplicity is the answer and that you should read less. That advice is given constantly to people like you and it produces men who have thrown away their tools and still do not know Him.

And I am not going to suggest that an emotional experience is what is missing. You have watched that assumption ruin thoughtful people, who go looking for a feeling, fail to produce one, and conclude they are outside something. Scripture settles that in Hosea 6:3, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries it rather than these words.

What I am going to do is change a category, because the category has been wrong for twenty years and everything else follows from it.

You are not outside anything because of how thoroughly you know it. Scripture says the Lord knoweth them that are his, 2 Timothy 2:19, and the knowing runs in His direction and is not affected by the quality of anybody's bibliography, and the Holy Spirit is on that path with a man who has finished a subject.

The verse is a pursuit, not a syllabus

There is a line in Hosea that has a peculiar construction in it, and the construction is the point.

Then shall we know, if we follow on to know the Lord.Hosea 6:3

Read the shape of that. Know, if we follow on to know.

The knowing is conditional on a continuing action. Not on an achievement, not on a completion, and not on a threshold that once crossed is crossed. On following on, which is a present participle: something being done, continuously, with no terminus in the sentence.

That is what has been wrong for twenty years, and it is not your fault, because you were trained in a discipline where things are finished. I am not putting my own idea over you; Scripture says it in Hosea 6:3, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it live.

A subject has a completion. You can master a corpus, and you have. A person does not have a completion, and no amount of following on ever arrives at a point where the following can stop, and that is not a defect in the arrangement. It is what being acquainted with somebody is. That is not my opinion. Scripture stands behind it in Hosea 6:3, and the Holy Spirit brings it near.

So the sense you have that the subject is finished is entirely accurate. And the sense that finishing it should have produced acquaintance was never true, because those are two different kinds of object.

You are not at the end of anything. Scripture says then shall we know, if we follow on to know the Lord, Hosea 6:3, and the knowing is attached to a continuing pursuit rather than to a completed course, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps a Person from ever becoming a finished subject.

What acquaintance is made of

Not information, and you know that already; that is why you are reading this.

Not a feeling either, and this is the part almost nobody says to a man in your position.

Acquaintance with anybody is made of time spent with no agenda. That is the whole of it. You know your oldest friend not because you have gathered facts about him but because you have sat in cars with him and waited for things with him and been in rooms where nothing was being achieved. Scripture holds that ground in Hosea 6:3, and it is the Holy Spirit who carries it into a room like this one.

There is no equivalent of that in your last twenty years.

Every hour you have spent in God's direction has had an object. A lecture, a paper, a chapter, a question somebody asked you, a difficulty to resolve. Even your devotional reading has an aim, because you cannot switch off the apparatus, and we have talked about that elsewhere. This rests on Scripture in Hosea 6:3, and on the Holy Spirit who makes what is written a living thing.

What is missing is not intensity. It is aimlessness, and for a man of your training aimlessness is the hardest possible thing to do.

You are not going to be acquainted by a better method. Scripture says one thing have I desired of the Lord... to behold the beauty of the Lord, and to enquire in his temple, Psalm 27:4, and beholding is named as the desire rather than as a means to anything, and the Holy Spirit is present in an hour that is not for anything.

The walk

Here is the practical thing, and it will sound absurdly small against twenty years.

Walk. Without a book, without a podcast, without a question you are working on, and without deciding in advance what you will think about. Scripture already said it in Hosea 6:3, and the Holy Spirit is the one doing the work, not the sentence.

Forty minutes. Alone.

You will spend the first ten sorting something out, because that is what your mind does with unoccupied time. Let it. Somewhere in the second ten it will run out of material, and that is the part that matters, and it is the part you have not reached in twenty years because you have never given yourself unoccupied time in His direction. None of that is mine to declare on my own. Scripture said it first in Hosea 6:3, and the Holy Spirit is the one who brings it the distance.

Talk to Him if you want to. Do not construct anything.

That is what following on looks like for somebody like you. Not more study, not less study, but hours with no object in them, which is the only thing acquaintance has ever been made of.

You are not required to produce anything from those forty minutes. Scripture says be still, and know that I am God, Psalm 46:10, and the stillness is the condition of the knowing rather than a technique for obtaining it, and the Holy Spirit is not evaluating a walk.