Hidden From The Wise

He got two terms in.

He had wanted it since he was fourteen. He had saved for it. He had a shelf of books that he had bought one at a time out of a wage, and he had read most of them twice before he ever sat in a classroom.

Then his mother got ill and there was no one else, and he went home, and by the time it was over there was no money and no place and no way back in.

That was twenty-six years ago.

And here is what he has done since, quietly, without ever putting it into words even to himself.

He has kept reading. He reads more than most people who finished. He has worked through things that would give a graduate student trouble, alone, at a kitchen table, at eleven at night, with a dictionary.

And he has not once trusted a single conclusion he has reached.

Every time he arrives somewhere in the text, he does the same thing. He goes looking for somebody with letters after their name who has said it too. And if he finds one, he believes it. And if he cannot find one, he assumes he has made a mistake, and he puts it away.

Twenty-six years of thinking, and not one thought of his own that he has been willing to stand on.

Because behind everything is one settled conviction. There is a room where the real understanding happens, and he did not get through the door of it, and everything he has done since is an amateur outside a window.

So let me ask you.

Which room do you believe the real understanding is happening in?

He said it out loud and He was laughing when He said it

There is a moment in Luke that I want you to hear with the tone left in, because the tone is half the meaning and we usually read it flat.

The seventy have come back from a mission and they are astonished at what happened, and Jesus responds in a way Luke describes very precisely.

Full of joy through the Holy Spirit. That is the reporting clause. He is not making a solemn theological point. He is delighted.

And this is what He says.

I praise You, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because You have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children. Yes, Father, for this is what You were pleased to do.Luke 10:21

Keep the reporting clause in when you read it. He is full of joy, and He is thanking His Father for the route in. You have been taught at that kitchen table for twenty-six years, and the Holy Spirit was the one doing the teaching whether or not anybody ever countersigned it.

Now be careful, because there is a lazy reading of this verse that is wrong and does real damage, and it is the reading that makes learning the enemy. That is not what He is saying, and He was not an uneducated man, and Paul was the most trained person in the New Testament and God used every hour of it.

Here is what He is actually saying. The route in is not the one anybody would have designed.

Hidden and revealed are both His Father's doing. Understanding is not extracted by qualified people who have earned access. It is disclosed, by a Person, to whoever He pleases, and He has a documented preference that has surprised absolutely everybody since the beginning.

Now hear what this does to a man at a kitchen table at eleven at night.

You are not outside a window. Scripture says these things are revealed by the Father to little children and Jesus rejoiced in the Holy Spirit when He said it, and the Spirit is the One who has been teaching you at that table for twenty-six years.

Look at what you have actually been doing. You have been treating your own understanding as a claim requiring external validation, and Scripture treats understanding as a gift requiring a Giver. Those are different economies. One of them has a door in it and the other does not.

And I will say the hard part, because you would want the accurate version and not the comfortable one.

Some of your conclusions over twenty-six years have been wrong. Of course they have. That is true of everybody who has ever thought about anything, including everybody in the room you never got into, and it is why the Church has always read together rather than alone.

But the corrective for being sometimes wrong is other people, not a certificate. You have been using the absence of a certificate to do the work that fellowship was supposed to do, and it has cost you every thought you ever had.

The fire this house is named for fell in a stable in Los Angeles in 1906 through a man who had listened to a Bible class from a hallway because he was not permitted in the room where they taught it.

The Father has a documented preference and it has never once been a secret.

And you have been taught at that table, whatever you have refused to call it. Luke 10 says the Father reveals these things to little children and that Jesus was full of joy in the Holy Spirit when He said so, and disclosure never once been something a qualified person extracted.