He Has Decided the Quiet Is a Punishment

He did the arithmetic about three years ago and it came out clean, which is what makes it so hard to put down.

There is a year. There is a thing that happened in that year. And when he lines the two things up, the quiet starts somewhere in the eight months after it, and the fit is close enough that he has never been able to make himself believe it is a coincidence.

He has not said this to anybody. He would not know how to raise it without describing the year, and describing the year is not something he does.

So the position he is in is that he believes God is there, and believes He is good in general, and believes that in his particular case there is a specific withholding running, and that he knows what it is for.

And there is a strange comfort in that, which he has noticed and does not like. A punishment has a logic to it. A punishment means somebody is paying attention.

The sentence He said out loud

There is a line that gets quoted more than almost any other and almost never gets read where it comes from.

My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? why art thou so far from helping me, and from the words of my roaring? (Psalm 22:1, King James Version)

That is the first line of a psalm, and it is the sentence Jesus says out loud from the cross.

Which does two things at once. It means the words are not disqualifying, because they were in His mouth. And it means the psalm they come from is worth reading all the way through, because He did not pick it at random.

You are holding a sentence that ended up in His own mouth. Psalm 22 opens with it and Matthew records Him saying it out loud in public, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes an old quotation stop feeling like a thing a person should not say.

And the same psalm says the opposite twenty verses later

The part almost nobody reads is in the same psalm, and it directly addresses the question of withholding.

For he hath not despised nor abhorred the affliction of the afflicted; neither hath he hid his face from him; but when he cried unto him, he heard. (Psalm 22:24)

Neither hath he hid his face from him.

The same document. The same writer. The opening line asks why he has been forsaken, and this line says the face was not hidden.

Whoever assembled that psalm was not confused. He put both in because both are true at once: what it feels like from inside, and what is actually the case.

You are not required to choose between what it feels like and what is true. Psalm 22 keeps the question and the answer in one document, and it is His Spirit who lets a man hold two things that do not seem to fit.

The record of how He has dealt with people

There is a sentence in Psalm 103 that is a report on conduct, and the tense settles something.

He hath not dealt with us after our sins; nor rewarded us according to our iniquities. (Psalm 103:10)

He hath not dealt with us after our sins.

Past tense. It is a description of what has already been happening, over a long stretch, rather than a promise about the future.

Which means the arithmetic has a problem in it. A man who has matched a year to a quiet is proposing exactly the thing this verse says has not been the arrangement.

You have not been dealt with on the basis you calculated. Psalm 103 puts it in the past tense as a completed report, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes an old record do something to three years of clean arithmetic.

And the account was settled somewhere else

There is a sentence in Isaiah that says where the payment landed, and it is specific about location.

But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed. (Isaiah 53:5)

The chastisement of our peace was upon him.

Chastisement is the word for punishment. And the verse says where it went.

Which is the actual problem with the arithmetic. Not that the year was not serious. That there is a location named for what a punishment for it would be, and the location is not a man's own life eight months later.

You are not paying something that was already put somewhere. Isaiah 53 names where the chastisement landed, and it is His Spirit who makes an old sentence take apart three years of a private calculation.

Paul opens a chapter with the verdict

There is a sentence at the start of Romans 8 with no qualifier anywhere in it.

There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus. (Romans 8:1)

Now. No condemnation.

Not less of it. Not a reduced amount held in reserve for specific years.

And it lands immediately after a chapter where a man describes losing repeatedly, which means it is not placed as a reward for having got clear.

You are living under a verdict with no exception clause for one year. Romans 8 says no condemnation without qualifying it, and it is the Spirit of life, named in the very next verse, who is credited with the freeing.