Eleven Years of Studying Power

He has read everything.

That is not a boast and he would be uncomfortable with the sentence. It is a description of eleven years of evenings. Commentaries, the primary sources, the historical accounts, two languages worth of lexical work on the relevant terms, and an argument with himself in the margins of about forty books.

He is fifty five and he could teach a semester on this and it would be good.

He can tell you what the word rendered power means in each of its main uses. He can tell you the difference between three positions on the question and give the strongest form of each. He has never once caricatured anybody he disagrees with, which is rarer than it sounds.

Here is the thing he has never written in any margin.

In eleven years nothing has ever sent him anywhere.

He has not knocked on a door. He has not said an unwelcome true thing to anybody. He has not been moved to do one action he would not otherwise have done, in eleven years of reading about a thing that is described in every source he owns as moving people.

He is aware of this. He has been aware of it since about year six. And what he has done with the awareness is read more, which he can see, from a certain angle, is funny.

The sentence, unsaid: I have the most complete map anybody I know has of a country I have not been to.

You may know that shelf. Eleven years of reading, and nothing that ever moved you off the chair.

Not in word only

There is a line at the start of Paul's earliest letter that describes what happened when he arrived in a particular town, and it is built out of four things joined together.

For our gospel came not unto you in word only, but also in power, and in the Holy Ghost, and in much assurance.1 Thessalonians 1:5

Read the structure. Not in word only. That phrase does two things at once and both of them matter to a man with forty books.

It affirms the word. The word was genuinely there and Paul is not embarrassed about it and does not set it aside. And then it adds three more things to it in a single string, with the conjunctions doing the work: power, and the Holy Spirit, and much assurance.

You have never been asked to give up the word, and 1 Thessalonians 1:5 says not in word only rather than not in word, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a description of a week in a Greek town and lands it on a man with a shelf and eleven years of margins.

What arrived was one event

Consider how those four are joined, because they are not a sequence and they are not a hierarchy.

Paul is describing one arrival with four aspects to it. The word came, and it came in power, and it came in the Holy Spirit, and it came with assurance, and the four are held in one sentence about one visit to one town.

Which means the thing he has been studying is not a category separate from the thing he is good at. It is the same event with more in it than he has been receiving.

And that removes the choice he has quietly assumed he would one day have to make. He has half expected that receiving would require him to become a less careful man, and that somewhere in the transaction there would be a moment where he was asked to stop asking questions. There is no such moment in that sentence. The word is the first item on the list and it is not demoted by anything that follows it.

You have been receiving one part of something that arrives whole, because the written word joins the word and the power and the Spirit into a single account of a single arrival, and the Holy Spirit is what turns a piece of syntax into something a careful man can actually ask for.

And notice the last of the four. Much assurance. That is not a doctrinal category and it does not appear on any of his lists. It is a word about a settled inward certainty, which is precisely the thing eleven years of reading has not produced in him and which he has been too honest to pretend it has.

You have been reading toward something that verse offers directly, and 1 Thessalonians 1 names assurance as part of the arrival rather than as the reward for enough study, and the same Spirit who was in that week is the one who fills.

The eleven years were not a detour

Now the thing that has to be said clearly, because this article could be read as a scolding and it is not one.

The reading was not wasted and it was not avoidance, whatever the funny angle suggests. A man who has spent eleven years making sure he understands something before he claims it has behaved with more integrity than most, and there are people who would have claimed a great deal more on a great deal less.

He is also, and this matters, correct about most of it. The map is a good map. What is being offered is not a correction of the map.

You were never wrong to read, because 1 Thessalonians 1:5 affirms the word and then adds to it rather than displacing it, and it is His Spirit who makes that a relief rather than a rebuke to eleven years of careful evenings.