Twenty One Days Of Nothing

Three weeks is not a long time unless you are inside it.

He is a careful man. That is the whole trouble with him, and it is also why he is worth listening to. He does not exaggerate, he does not catastrophize, and if you asked him about this he would give you an accurate account with no embellishment whatsoever.

Here is the accurate account.

He asked God about something specific. Not vaguely. He set aside time for it, deliberately, the way you would set aside time for anything that mattered, and he did that for three weeks.

And in three weeks there was nothing.

No sense of anything. No arriving thought. No verse that stood up. No door. No word from anybody. Nothing that a careful, honest man could describe as an event.

And at the end of it he made an inference. Not a wild one. A reasonable, modest, evidence-based inference of the kind he makes about everything else, and it was this: there was nothing there.

Because that is what a careful man does with three weeks of no data. He concludes an absence.

And he was wrong, and the way he found out he was wrong is not the point of this message, because it will not be the same for you and I am not going to promise you a mechanism.

The point is what he said afterwards, in a room, at about midnight, with a cup in his hands.

I built the whole account out of the part I could see.

So let me ask you.

What are you assuming happened during the part you could not see?

He was told the count out loud

There is a chapter near the end of Daniel that is one of the strangest and most useful passages in the whole Bible for anybody in a wait.

Daniel has been mourning and praying about something for three weeks. Twenty-one days, and he tells us the number, and he tells us what he did without any of it: no choice food, no meat, no wine, no oil.

Twenty-one days of asking and nothing at all coming back.

And then something does come, and the very first thing it says to him is this.

Do not be afraid, Daniel. Since the first day that you set your mind to gain understanding and to humble yourself before your God, your words were heard, and I have come in response to them.Daniel 10:12

Read the first four words and then do the arithmetic. You are looking at a man who kept an accurate record for twenty days and reached a conclusion that was wrong, and the Holy Spirit was moving through every single one of those entries.

Since the first day.

Now sit with the arithmetic, because the arithmetic is the whole message.

Day one: heard. Response dispatched.

Days two through twenty: from where Daniel was standing, nothing. Not one thing. A careful man, keeping an honest record, would have written no response on twenty consecutive days, and every one of those entries would have been accurate as a report of what he could observe, and every one of them would have been wrong as an account of what was happening.

The next verse says there was a resistance in the way. I am not going to build a whole system on it tonight and I am not going to speculate beyond what the text says, because that is where people go wrong with this chapter.

What the text plainly says is this: the delay was not the absence of an answer, and Daniel had no way whatsoever of knowing that from the inside.

Hear where you stand.

You are not looking at the whole account. Scripture puts your words were heard on the first day at the end of twenty-one days of nothing, and the Holy Spirit has not once made the visible part of a story the whole of it.

And here is the precise thing, because you are a precise person and a vague comfort will not hold you.

Your inference was not irrational. It was the correct inference from the available data. That is what makes this so hard for careful people, and it is why the careful ones often carry this worse than the excitable ones do.

You did not fail at reasoning. You reasoned properly from an incomplete set, and the incompleteness is structural and permanent and not a defect in you. Nobody in the whole of Scripture ever gets to see the middle of it while they are in the middle of it. Daniel only found out because somebody came and told him, and the telling was itself the arrival.

I built the whole account out of the part I could see.

That is not a confession of unbelief. It is a description of being a human being in time.