I Know Who Said It

The question was, "Where does it say that?"

And Ari knew immediately who said it. Three of them, in fact. He knew which one had argued it first and which one had refined it and which one had gone after both of them in a footnote that is genuinely funny if you know the field.

What he could not do was find the verse.

He got there eventually, by working back through a book on his own shelf to the reference and then to the passage, which took about four minutes and involved two books that were not the Bible.

The young man who asked was perfectly happy. He got his answer and it was a good answer and he wrote it down.

Ari has not stopped thinking about it since.

He has a good shelf. Not showing off: it has been assembled over about twenty-five years and there is nothing on it he bought to look at. Commentaries. Two histories of the second temple period. Three on the Reformation and a fourth he has been told to read and has not. Atlases. A book on how the text came down to us that he has read twice and would defend in an argument.

He can tell you where a manuscript family comes from. He can tell you what a scholar means by a phrase and why the phrase matters and where the argument has moved in the last thirty years.

And that Thursday evening he went home and did an arithmetic he had never done, and it took about ten minutes, and the answer is this: in twenty-five years as a grown man he has read, straight through, in one go, perhaps four books of the Bible.

Four. Out of sixty-six.

Everything else he has met in fragments, quoted inside somebody else's argument, three verses at a time, with a paragraph on either side telling him what it is doing there.

He stood in front of the shelf a long time and worked out that if he stacked what he owns about the book beside the book itself, the about is four feet and the it is one spine, about an inch and a half.

Now let me say the thing that has to be said before anything else, and I mean it.

The four feet are not wasted.

Found, and eaten

Jeremiah is having the worst year of a bad life when he writes this, and in the middle of a complaint he says a sentence that stops you.

Your words were found and I ate them, and Your words became for me a joy and the delight of my heart; for I have been called by Your name, O Lord God of hosts.Jeremiah 15:16

Your words were found and I ate them.

Not: I studied them. Not: I established their provenance. He eats them, which is a word about taking a thing into yourself until it is not a separate object any more, and it is the same picture Ezekiel gets with the scroll and John gets in Revelation, and in all three the person is told to eat.

You cannot eat a description of a meal.

That is the whole of it, and it is not an insult to descriptions. A good one is a real service and somebody worked hard on it and it may be the reason you went looking. But there is a kind of hunger it cannot touch, and if you have been living on them for twenty-five years you have been reading the menu with genuine appreciation and going to bed hungry.

So hear this said over you, standing in front of your own shelf on a Thursday night. You are not a fraud and the twenty-five years were not a detour, and the thing you are missing is not more competence, it is one evening with everything else shut. That is written into a man who ate the words in the worst year of his life, and it is the Holy Spirit who is given as the teacher inside a person, and He has never asked anybody to qualify first.

Now let me guard the shelf, because I am not going to stand here and tell a man his books were vanity.

They were not.

That book on how the text came down to us is why you are certain what you are holding. The histories are why the letters have a city in them and not a fog. The commentaries are two thousand years of the church thinking hard so that you do not have to start from nothing, and a person who despises them is not humble, he is just alone.

There was a movement five hundred years ago that everybody quotes for putting the book into ordinary hands, and the same movement built universities and trained its ministers in three languages and argued in public for decades. Both things. It never occurred to them that these were rival positions.

And they said, constantly, in every generation, that the reason for the learning is the reading. The apparatus serves the meal. It was never the meal.

So the problem is not the four feet. It is that the inch and a half has never been opened on its own.

Twenty-five years of meeting this book inside somebody else's argument. Three verses at a time, always with a frame, never with the whole shape of a thing arriving in one sitting the way a letter arrives when somebody reads it in one go, which is how every letter in the New Testament was designed to land.

You have never let it be long.

That is the actual loss, and it is not a moral failure and nobody could have told you, because from the outside you look like exactly the man who has read it.

His words were found, and the finding was joy, and the joy is the point of the sentence. That is what is written, and the Spirit of God is the one who takes what is God's and makes it known, and He does that in the reading rather than in the reading about.