Written So You Could Check It

The woman three seats along is crying, and you are not, and that is the part you take home with you.

It is a Tuesday in a hall with a low ceiling and stacking chairs, and somebody at the front has just finished telling forty people what God did for her. There was a hospital in it, and a phone call, and a moment in a car park where she says she stopped being afraid. The room went up. Chairs scraped. Somebody said amen loudly enough to make her laugh and wipe her face with the back of her hand.

You clapped, and you want that on the record, because you did clap and you meant it. But underneath the clapping there was a small, flat, tired voice keeping count, and it said: that is a hundred and one.

You never meant to keep a tally. It happened anyway. A hundred stories over the years, a shoulder, a court date, a marriage, the man at the back who used to drink. You have never once been able to check a single one of them, and you have never once said so out loud, because the person telling it is always sincere and the room is always warm, and there is no polite way to ask a crying woman for her paperwork.

So you drive home, and you put the kettle on, and you sit in the quiet with the sentence you would never say in that hall. I want it to be true more than anyone in that room. That is exactly why I cannot afford to be fooled again.

The account set openly where checking remains possible

Let me say the thing nobody in that hall said to you.

You are not hard. You are not proud, and you are not the one cold heart in a warm room. You are careful, and you are careful because carefulness cost you something once. Somewhere behind you there is a thing you believed completely, on somebody's word, and it did not hold. Ever since, every story that comes near you goes past a quiet question that will not switch itself off: how would I know? Scripture meets that question, and the Holy Spirit does not shame it.

That question is not unbelief. It is a wound that went and found itself a job.

I am not going to ask you to switch it off. I am going to hand it something worth working on.

Because here is what almost nobody points out about the gospel of Luke. It opens with a man explaining his method.

Forasmuch as many have taken in hand to set forth in order a declaration of those things which are most surely believed among us, even as they delivered them unto us, which from the beginning were eyewitnesses, and ministers of the word; it seemed good to me also, having had perfect understanding of all things from the very first, to write unto thee in order, most excellent Theophilus, that thou mightest know the certainty of those things, wherein thou hast been instructed.Luke 1:1-4

Read what he says he is doing. He says the account was delivered by those who were eyewitnesses from the beginning, and that he himself traced the matters carefully from the first. He has set it down in order, addressed to one named man, and he states plainly what the whole exercise is for: that thou mightest know the certainty. Not that you might feel encouraged for an evening and flat by Thursday. Certainty is the word he chose, and he chose it in the first four verses, before he describes a single event.

Then there is the ninth chapter of John, which is the most cross examined miracle in the book. A man born blind can see. The neighbors argue about whether it is even the same man. His parents are called in and questioned, and they are frightened, and they say the thing frightened parents say: he is of age, ask him. The officials call the man back a second time and press him again, wanting it not to be true.

One thing I know, that, whereas I was blind, now I see.John 9:25

Notice what that chapter actually is. A hostile examination, written down and kept. Nobody sanded off the arguing, and nobody removed the parents flinching. If you were manufacturing a story to move a room on a Tuesday night you would cut every line of it, because it slows the story and puts doubt on the page. It is in there because the man writing was not building an atmosphere. He was keeping a record. The Holy Spirit keeps it honest.

You have room to examine what is written without being expelled from faith. John keeps the questions, the repeated examination, and the man's plain answer on the page, and the Holy Spirit meets your careful reading without demanding that you manufacture certainty.

Paul does the same thing writing to Corinth about the resurrection. He lists who saw, above five hundred at once, and then adds the line only a man expecting to be checked would add: of whom the greater part remain unto this present (1 Corinthians 15:6). Most of them are still alive. Go and ask them. Standing in front of a king he said it plainer still: this thing was not done in a corner (Acts 26:26). Said to a man with the means to check.

You possess a testimony that does not hide its claim in a corner. The written Word leaves witnesses and public challenge in view, and the Holy Spirit gives you steady ground without asking you to borrow the room's emotion.

So the ground you have been asking for exists, and it turns out you have been sitting beside it for years. Scripture opens that ground, and the Holy Spirit makes it steady beneath you.

Here is the part that has to land personally, because a record about somebody else's century is only a museum. Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, and today, and for ever (Hebrews 13:8). What is written there is not the memory of a kind man in a country you have never visited. It is the character of a Person, set down by people who watched Him, and character is the one thing that carries. What is true there is true here, because He is the same there and here.

And the ground under all of it is named for us plainly. They overcame him by the blood of the Lamb, and by the word of their testimony (Revelation 12:11). Two things in one sentence, and they are not the same thing. The blood is the ground. The testimony is the record of it. Neither one is yours to manufacture.