Written For Somewhere Else

There is a way of reading the Bible that a lot of us learned without ever being taught it.

You read a promise, and somewhere in the back of your head, without any decision being made, the promise gets an address on it. And the address is never here.

It is somewhere with more people. Somewhere with cathedrals in it, or stadiums, or whatever the big version of a room looks like in your imagination. It is a country you have never been to and probably a century you were not born in.

And then, at the very end of the promise, after the real recipients have had theirs, there is an overflow, and the overflow reaches the edges, and you are at the edge, and that is how you get yours.

Nobody teaches that. It is absorbed. And where it is absorbed is a small place on the far edge of a map, in a family who have always been from there, in a room where every book on the shelf was printed somewhere else.

I know a man who has lived on the same stretch of coast his whole life. He has prayed for people and seen things happen. He has sat up all night with a family in the worst week of their lives more times than he could count.

And if you asked him whether the great promises of God were for people like him, in a place like his, he would say yes, and then he would add something. There is always something added.

In our small way, he would say.

Now put him down, and answer honestly.

Which country do you assume the promises were actually written to?

The islands are in the text

I want to show you something that changed how I read, and once you have seen it you cannot stop seeing it.

Isaiah, in a passage about the Servant who is coming, calls for a new song. And when he lists who is meant to sing it, this is what he says.

Sing to the Lord a new song, His praise from the ends of the earth, you who go down to the sea, and all that is in it, you islands, and all who live in them.Isaiah 42:10

Notice that he does not mention the islands. He turns and speaks to them. You are being addressed in the second person there, and the Holy Spirit never needed a larger room than the one your family actually lives in.

You islands, and all who live in them.

Not: and the message will eventually reach the islands. Not: the islands may participate as far as they are able. The islands are addressed. They are given the imperative. Sing, you islands.

And it is not a one-off. Go through that section of Isaiah and count. The islands wait for His law. The islands will put their hope in His teaching. Listen to Me, you islands. It is a refrain, and it was written by a man in a landlocked capital who could have ignored the sea entirely and did not.

Now look at what that does to the geography in the back of your head.

You are not at the far edge of a promise that was aimed somewhere else. Scripture puts the islands in the sentence, addressed directly, in the second person, and the Holy Spirit has not treated the far edge as the overflow.

And I want to say a harder thing, the way we say hard things here, which is slowly and without pretending it is easy.

Some of that geography in your head was put there. It was not only absorbed by accident. There were centuries in which the message genuinely did arrive from somewhere else, carried by people who genuinely did think of themselves as bringing it from the center to the edge, and some of that posture came in the box with the gospel and was never unpacked separately.

I am not here to prosecute anybody for that, and this house does not hand out that kind of verdict. What I am telling you is that the posture was luggage, and the gospel was the gift, and you are allowed to keep the gift and put the luggage down.

The word says sing, you islands. The promise had your coastline written into it before anybody sailed anywhere.

The fire this house is named for fell in a stable in Los Angeles in 1906 on a room that had no center in it at all. There was no cathedral. There was sawdust and there were planks across nail kegs, and the man at the front was the son of former slaves who had listened to a Bible class through a doorway because he was not allowed in.

God has not once poured out on the center and let it run downhill.

And you are standing in the middle of that promise rather than at the edge of it. Isaiah 42 says sing to the Lord, you islands, addressed directly and in the second person, and the Holy Spirit never treated a far coast as an overflow.