Still the Man at the Griddle

He does the pancakes. He has done the pancakes for eleven years and he is very good at it and he uses two spatulas.

Two hundred and forty on a good morning, and the line does not back up, and he does not talk while he does it. People come past and say something and he says something back, three or four words, and they go and sit down and he turns the next batch.

He is sixty two.

At home it is the same. His wife of thirty nine years has a phrase for it that is affectionate and accurate, which is that supper at their house is three words and a hand on the table.

Eighteen months ago he asked, at his kitchen table, on his own, at about five in the morning, to be filled with the Holy Spirit.

He would tell you plainly, if you got him to talk about it at all, which would take some doing, that he meant it entirely and that he thinks something happened.

And he is exactly the same man.

Same three words. Same two spatulas. Same hand on the table. And somewhere in the last eighteen months, without any moment he could point to, a suspicion has settled in him that he keeps turning pancakes to avoid.

The sentence, unsaid: the filling went past me and I have been standing here as if it did not.

You may know that griddle. The asking honestly made, and the same man doing the same thing eighteen months later.

God filled a craftsman and sent him back to the bench

There is a sentence in Exodus that most people skip because it is in the middle of the building instructions, and it is the first time in the whole Bible that God says He has filled somebody with His Spirit.

Not a prophet. Not a king. A man named Bezalel, who worked with his hands.

And I have filled him with the spirit of God, in wisdom, and in understanding, and in knowledge, and in all manner of workmanship.Exodus 31:3

Read the last three words. All manner of workmanship. That is joinery and metalwork and stone cutting and cloth. It is the vocabulary of a trade.

The first man in Scripture described as filled with the Spirit of God is a craftsman, and the filling goes straight into his hands, and the next thing that happens is that he goes and does the work he was already good at.

You are in the oldest company in the book, and Exodus 31:3 has God fill a craftsman with His Spirit and name workmanship in the same sentence, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a line from a set of building instructions and lands it on a man with two spatulas on a Saturday morning.

Nobody gets swapped in that chapter

Consider what does not happen to Bezalel, because it is the whole answer to eighteen months.

He does not become a preacher. He does not start speaking differently. There is no verse where his personality is described as altering and no suggestion anywhere that the filling turned him into somebody louder or somebody else.

He goes back to the bench. The same hands, doing the same trade, filled.

That is the pattern the Bible sets on the very first occasion it uses this language, and it sets it on purpose, and it has been sitting in the middle of a chapter about curtain hooks for three thousand years.

You have not been swapped for a louder version, because the written word fills a craftsman and sends him to his bench without changing one thing about who he is, and His Spirit is what turns a passage people skim into eighteen months making sense.

And notice the four things named. Wisdom, understanding, knowledge, workmanship. Not one of them is volume. Not one of them is a manner. All four are capacities poured into a man who then goes and uses them where he already was.

You are being filled in the capacities rather than in the manner, and Exodus 31 lists four things and none of them is a personality, and the same Spirit named in that verse is the one who fills.

Three words is not an empty vessel

Now the suspicion he turns pancakes to avoid, which deserves saying out loud.

He has been treating his own unchanged quietness as a readout. Eighteen months, no difference in him that anybody could measure, and the only honest conclusion available on that reasoning is that nothing was given.

But there is no verse anywhere that offers a change of temperament as the receipt. Bezalel got wisdom and workmanship and went back to a bench, and nobody in Exodus asks whether he became more talkative, because it would not have occurred to anybody that this was the question.

And there is something worth saying about the griddle itself. Two hundred and forty pancakes with no backup in the line, for eleven years, by a man who says four words and does not need thanking, is not the behavior of an empty vessel. It is the behavior of somebody running on something.

You were never going to be handed a change of manner as the proof, because Exodus 31:3 fills a craftsman for the work and describes no alteration in the man, and it is His Spirit who makes that a relief rather than one more thing for a quiet man to keep to himself.