He Watches Everybody Else Describe Hearing God

There are eight chairs and it goes round, and he has worked out roughly what he will say by about the third person.

That is the part that has started to bother him. He is not lying exactly. What he says is true, and it is usually something about a passage he read, and it is always the kind of answer that does not require him to have had anything happen.

Then somebody says something about being woken at four in the morning with a name, or a sentence that arrived in a car, and he watches everybody nod, and he nods too.

He does not think they are making it up. He has known most of them for years. Two of them he would trust with anything.

Which is what makes it worse, because if they are telling the truth, then the problem is not that people are fooling themselves. The problem is a room where a thing keeps happening to everybody in it except one man, who is now on his second year of preparing an answer by the third person.

A prophet took up a position and waited

There is a sentence in Habakkuk that describes what a man does when nothing is coming, and it is not passive.

I will stand upon my watch, and set me upon the tower, and will watch to see what he will say unto me, and what I shall answer when I am reproved. (Habakkuk 2:1, King James Version)

I will stand upon my watch.

That is a man taking up a position. A watch is a station with hours attached to it, and the whole job is being there while nothing happens, because if something were happening you would not need a watchman.

And he says it after a chapter of complaining, and before an answer comes.

You are doing a job with a name rather than failing at one. Habakkuk 2 has a man describing the waiting as a station he takes up, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes an old military image reach a man in a circle of chairs.

The book records eras where it was scarce

There is a line at the start of Samuel that reports on a stretch of time.

And the word of the LORD was precious in those days; there was no open vision. (1 Samuel 3:1)

Precious there means scarce. And no open vision is a straight statement about a period.

It is written as a fact about an era, the way you would write about a drought, and it is not a comment on the spiritual condition of anybody in it.

Which is worth having, because a man in a room where it is happening to everybody else has quietly concluded that scarcity is always a report on a person.

You are not the explanation for a scarcity. 1 Samuel 3 reports it about a period and not about a man, and it is His Spirit who makes an old report take something off somebody in a circle.

Two men had it happen and could not identify it

There is a walk in Luke where the whole thing happens and neither of the two men in it knows.

Jesus walks seven miles with them, explaining the entire collection, and they do not recognize Him.

And they said one to another, Did not our heart burn within us, while he talked with us by the way, and while he opened to us the scriptures? (Luke 24:32)

Did not our heart burn within us.

That is said afterwards, in a room, in the past tense, and it is the two of them working it out together after the fact.

While it was happening, they had nothing to report. If somebody had gone round a circle of eight chairs on that road, both of them would have said something about a passage.

You are not able to tell from inside what was going on. Luke 24 has the recognition arriving after the walk and not during it, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a delayed realization sound like the normal shape rather than a shortfall.

Isaiah names this exact person

There is a verse in Isaiah that describes somebody in this position with unusual precision.

Who is among you that feareth the LORD, that obeyeth the voice of his servant, that walketh in darkness, and hath no light? let him trust in the name of the LORD, and stay upon his God. (Isaiah 50:10)

Read who is being described. Somebody who fears the Lord. Somebody who obeys. And who walks in darkness and has no light.

All of those in one person, in one sentence, with no suggestion anywhere that the third item contradicts the first two.

The verse assumes such a man exists in the room and speaks directly to him.

You are the person that verse was written for. Isaiah 50 puts the fearing and the obeying and the darkness in one sentence, and it is His Spirit who makes an old address feel like it was aimed at a specific chair.

And Paul names the ordinary arrangement

There is a short sentence in Corinthians that says which of the two modes is standard.

For we walk by faith, not by sight. (2 Corinthians 5:7)

Not by sight.

He is not describing a lesser tier for people who do not get things. He is naming the mode, and he is doing it as somebody who had his own road and his own light and then spent the rest of his life on this one.

Walking is what a man does for years at a time. It is the long arrangement, and the other thing is the exception, which is the opposite of how a room of eight chairs makes it feel.

You are on the standard arrangement rather than the reduced one. 2 Corinthians 5 names it in five words, and it is the Holy Spirit who is described everywhere as what a man walks in.