I Study Harder When I Believe Less

There are four books open on the desk and it is nearly one in the morning.

You have been at this since about nine. You have three translations out and a lexicon and a commentary you do not entirely trust, and you have covered most of a page in your own small handwriting.

And the work is good. That is not in question. If you showed that page to somebody who knows what they are looking at, they would tell you it was careful and honest.

Here is the thing you noticed about a year ago and have not been able to unnotice.

The emptier you feel, the more you read.

You have gone back and checked, because that is what you do, and the pattern holds. The weeks when something in you is thin are the weeks when the light in this room is on until two. And the weeks when it is not thin, you read for an hour and go to bed.

Which means the reading is not curiosity. It is a search party.

And the suspicion that has grown up around that, over about a year, is that a man who has to run a search party at one in the morning is a man with something wrong with him, and that the size of the pile on his desk is the measurement of it.

Before we go any further, hear me.

I am not correcting you.

There is nothing wrong with a man who reads at one in the morning. That is not a symptom and I am not going to treat it as one, and I am not going to suggest you would be better off with a simpler faith, which is a thing people say to men like you and it is not kind and it is not true.

I am saying I noticed the pattern too. That is all.

The question that was kept

Here is a passage that survived the editing, which is the remarkable thing about it.

Will the Lord cast off for ever? and will he be favourable no more? Is his mercy clean gone for ever? doth his promise fail for evermore? Hath God forgotten to be gracious? hath he in anger shut up his tender mercies?Psalm 77:7-9

Six questions in a row and not one of them is answered in the verses that follow.

The psalmist does not resolve them. He changes what he does next, which is that he starts remembering, but he never goes back and marks the questions as settled. They stand in the text exactly as he asked them.

And somebody copied those questions out. And somebody else copied them again. And a community that could have quietly dropped six awkward lines from a hymn kept them, generation after generation, and put them in the book that gets read out loud in public.

That is a decision. Somebody decided those questions belonged in Scripture.

So here it is, said directly to you, at that desk with the lamp on.

You are asking questions that God Himself kept in the book. Not one day, not once you get to the bottom of it, not when the pile goes down. Right now, at nearly one in the morning with four books open, you are doing in a room what a man in Psalm 77 did in public, and the record of it was preserved rather than tidied away. That is not my comfort. That is what is written, and it is His Spirit who takes a written line and lands it on a real man at a real desk.

Now the plain thing, and there is no clause coming.

The studying is not why.

Not why the thinness. Not why anything. A search party is not evidence of a fault in the man conducting it, and the size of the pile is not a measurement of anything except how seriously you take the subject.

I am not going to add a careful sentence about balancing study with devotion, because that sentence would hand you a second thing to fail at and you are already awake.

And hear this, because it is settled rather than pending. You have questions of the kind that were deliberately preserved in the canon, and preservation is a form of approval. The word says hath God forgotten to be gracious, which is a sentence somebody asked out loud and somebody else wrote down and nobody deleted, and it is His Spirit who carries a written line into a real study at a real hour of the night.

The reading is not the problem. It never was. You have been running a search party and calling it a symptom.