He Thinks God Answers Other People

He is glad for them. He wants that said first because it is true and because people assume it is not.

When somebody tells him something happened, he is genuinely pleased, and there is no edge in it, and he is not sitting there doing arithmetic about why not him. Two of the people it has happened to are people he would give a kidney to.

The thing he has is quieter and older than jealousy.

It is a settled sense that there are two groups. There are people it happens to, and there are people who are around while it happens, and he has known which one he is in since he was young enough that he cannot remember deciding.

He does not resent it. He has built a whole way of being useful out of it. He is the man who drives people to things and helps set up and asks the good follow-up question, and every one of those is genuine, and every one of them also confirms the arrangement.

A man said it out loud the day he found out he was wrong

There is a moment in Acts where somebody discovers that a category he had believed in his whole life does not exist.

Peter has just walked into a house he was not supposed to enter, having had a vision he did not want, and here is his opening sentence.

Then Peter opened his mouth, and said, Of a truth I perceive that God is no respecter of persons. (Acts 10:34, King James Version)

Of a truth I perceive.

That is the language of a man who has just worked something out and is saying it before he has finished processing it.

And what he had believed until that morning was a two-group arrangement he had inherited, held sincerely, and never once examined, and he was wrong about it.

You are not in the group you believe you are in. Acts 10 has a man saying out loud the day he found out that God is no respecter of persons, and it is the Holy Spirit, who falls on that whole household four verses later, who settles it.

The wall is described as taken down

There is a sentence in Ephesians that names the actual barrier and says what happened to it.

For he is our peace, who hath made both one, and hath broken down the middle wall of partition between us. (Ephesians 2:14)

The middle wall of partition.

There was a literal one in the temple, with an inscription on it warning outsiders not to pass, and Paul is using a thing his readers could picture.

And the verb is broken down. Past tense, done, and done by somebody named at the start of the sentence.

Which means the two-group arrangement was a real thing, and it was addressed specifically, and the addressing is described as finished.

You are on the near side of something already taken down. Ephesians 2 names the wall and puts the breaking in the past tense, and it is His Spirit, named a few verses later as the access, who is how a man comes in.

The famous verse has no qualifier in it

There is a sentence everybody has heard, and it is worth reading for what is not in it.

For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. (John 3:16)

Whosoever.

Not a group. Not a description with a boundary anybody can be outside of.

And it is spoken in a night conversation to a man who came in the dark because he did not want to be seen, which is worth knowing given who tends to assume they are on the outside.

You are inside a word that has no boundary in it. John 3 uses whosoever rather than a category, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes an over-familiar sentence go sharp on a man who has been quietly filing himself.

Paul says the same thing with a reason attached

There is a sentence in Romans that rules out the distinction and gives the reason.

For there is no difference between the Jew and the Greek: for the same Lord over all is rich unto all that call upon him. (Romans 10:12)

There is no difference.

He names the sharpest division his readers had and says it is not operating, and then gives the reason, and the reason is about God rather than about the people.

The same Lord over all is rich unto all that call upon him. Not rich unto some. The reason there is no distinction is that there is one Lord and He is the same one on both sides of a line that used to exist.

You are calling on the same one everybody else is. Romans 10 rules out the difference and puts the reason on God's side, and it is His Spirit who makes an old argument reach a man who drives people to things.

And the invitation names who it is for

There is a call in Isaiah that is aimed with unusual precision.

Ho, every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters, and he that hath no money; come ye, buy, and eat. (Isaiah 55:1)

He that hath no money.

Read who is specified. Not everybody in general. The one with nothing.

If there were two groups, and one of them were the people who get things, this verse aims at the other one, by name, first.

You are the one the invitation specifies. Isaiah 55 names the man with nothing rather than the crowd, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes an old call land on somebody who has been standing near the door helping.