Everything She Knows About Grace Came Through Him

She has been reading the same Bible since she was thirty-one.

It is falling apart in the way those do, and there is a rubber band round it now, and the margins are full because she is a person who writes in margins.

And a great many of those margins are his.

Not his handwriting. Hers. But the sentences are his: the way he explained a passage, the thing he always said about that chapter, the little formula he used for one particular difficulty that she has repeated to about forty people over the years because it works.

Twenty years of Wednesdays.

He was the best teacher she has ever sat under and she is not going to pretend otherwise now. He was clear, and he was warm, and he took the text seriously and never showed off with it, and she learned more from him about grace than from every other source in her life put together.

And what came out about his life came out.

She is not going to describe it and it is not her business to. It was real. It was not a misunderstanding, and it went on during those twenty years, and people were damaged by it.

She has been trying to read since March.

What happens is this. She opens it, and she gets three or four verses in, and his explanation arrives, in her own head in her own voice, and it is correct, and that is the awful part. It is correct. She checks it and it holds up.

And then she cannot get past the fact that it is his.

So she reads a bit, and she closes it, and she does something else, and she has not had a proper morning with that book in five months, and she has told nobody, because how do you say that out loud in a way that does not sound like you are excusing him.

And you have a voice in yours. Somebody whose explanations are still the ones that come, and who turned out to be somebody else, and you have quietly stopped opening the thing they taught you to love.

The seat and the man sitting in it

There is a sentence Jesus says to a crowd about their own teachers, and He says it about men He is about to criticize at length, in the same chapter, in the strongest language He ever uses about anybody.

The scribes and the Pharisees sit on Moses' seat, so do and observe whatever they tell you, but not the works they do. For they preach, but do not practice.Matthew 23:2-3

Read the whole instruction, because most people quote half of it.

Do and observe whatever they tell you. And then, in the very next breath, but not the works they do.

He separates the two completely. The teaching, insofar as it is Moses being read, stands. The lives of the men doing the reading do not. And He does not tell the crowd to work out which parts of what they had learned were contaminated, because that is not how it works: what was true was true because of the text and not because of the men.

You are permitted to keep what is true and it does not need decontaminating. It is written that they sit on Moses' seat, so do and observe whatever they tell you, but not the works they do (Matthew 23:2-3), and it is the Holy Spirit who lets a woman hold that distinction without either defending a man or losing twenty years.

Now the awful part, which is that his explanations are correct.

You said it yourself. You check them and they hold up. That is not a trap and it is not a haunting. It is evidence about the text rather than about him, because a true reading of a passage is true whoever says it, and the reason his explanations survive your checking is that he was reading it right and not that he had some hold over you.

You have a shelf of accurate understanding and its accuracy has nothing to do with him at all. Scripture says the sum of Your word is truth, and every one of Your righteous rules endures forever (Psalm 119:160), and it is the Holy Spirit who is the one who actually opens a text to a person, which He was doing on all twenty years of those Wednesdays whether the man at the front knew it or not.

And the thing you have told nobody, because of how it would sound.

You are afraid that keeping what you learned amounts to excusing him. That is the whole of the knot, and it is worth saying plainly that it does not.

Nothing about your understanding of grace touches what he did or what it cost anybody. Those two things are not connected by any thread at all except that they passed through the same room. Throwing away your understanding would not repay one person he hurt, and keeping it does not take one thing away from them either.

You are not holding anything that belongs to somebody who was hurt, and giving it up would not return it to them. It is written that the Lord is near to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit (Psalm 34:18), and it is His Spirit who is with those people specifically, which is a work of His that your reading in the morning neither helps nor hinders.

And the margins.

They are your handwriting. That is not a small detail. Whatever the sentences originally were, you wrote them, in your hand, over twenty years, usually after you had thought about them, frequently after you had disagreed and come round.

You did the writing, and what is in those margins is your own understanding in your own hand. Scripture says the anointing you received from Him abides in you and teaches you about everything (1 John 2:27), and it is the Holy Spirit who has been the teacher inside the teaching, which is why so much of it went in and stayed.