The Clause I Had Read A Hundred Times

Your daughter is tracing a line with her finger and asking what a word means, and you are answering, and somewhere in the answering the ground moves.

The scroll of paper is unrolled across the desk. The light is good. Your son is leaning over the other side of it with his chin nearly on the wood.

And the clause you are explaining is one you have read a hundred times.

You know its structure. You know what it is doing grammatically and you know two things about how it has been translated that most people never notice. You could talk about that clause for an hour and it would be worth listening to.

You have always read it as history.

Not deliberately. It is simply what a careful reader does with an ancient document that describes something that was arranged a long time ago: he reads it as a record of an arrangement.

And this afternoon, with a nine year old's finger on the line, it occurred to you for the first time that it is not a record. It is an instrument. It is the thing itself, and instruments name parties, and you are one of them.

Let me say something before anything else.

I am not correcting you.

A hundred careful readings are not a hundred wasted readings, and reading a text closely before reading yourself into it is the right order, and it is more than most people ever do.

I am saying I saw what happened when she put her finger on the line. That is all.

In whom we have obtained

Here is the clause, and the verbs are what to watch.

In whom also we have obtained an inheritance, being predestinated according to the purpose of him who worketh all things after the counsel of his own will.Ephesians 1:11

We have obtained.

Not we are promised. Not we may receive. The verb is in the perfect, which is the tense for an action completed with results that continue, and Paul chose it in a sentence about an estate.

And obtained is a legal word. It is what happens when a thing passes into your hands with the transfer complete. It is not the language of an offer.

And then the second half, which explains why the perfect tense is safe. Him who worketh all things after the counsel of his own will. The reason the transfer is finished is that the one making it is not waiting on any other party's cooperation.

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

You have obtained rather than been offered. Not one day, not once you understand the clause better, not when you have read it another hundred times. Right now, with a child's finger on the line, you are a named party in an instrument rather than a reader of a record. That is not my sentiment. 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, about what just happened.

I want to name it, because a man like you will otherwise spend three weeks working out what to call it and will end up calling it an insight.

It was not an insight. There have been insights about that clause for twenty years and none of them moved the ground.

What happened is that the document stopped being about the past and became a document with your name in it, and that is not a category of understanding, it is a change in where the reader stands relative to the text.

And here is the part I want to say carefully, because you will want it to be more dramatic than it was: it happened while you were explaining a word to a nine year old, and that is a perfectly good way for it to have happened, and it does not need a better setting.

And hear this, because it is settled rather than pending. You have an inheritance obtained in the perfect tense, and the obtaining did not wait on your reading. The word says we have obtained, which is a completed transfer with continuing effect, and it is His Spirit who carries a written line into a real study on a real bright afternoon.

You are a party to it. That is the whole of what changed, and it changed nothing about the document.