He Was In There With Them

Round two is music and Dawn is absolutely certain it is nineteen eighty four and Ray is absolutely certain it is nineteen eighty six, and the pen has been taken off both of them and given to Priya, who is the only one at this table anybody trusts with a pen.

Six of you. A plate of sandwiches in the middle that arrived without ceremony. The answer sheet has a coffee ring on it already. Somebody at the next table has just got the picture round wrong in a way that is going to be repeated for a fortnight, and the man doing the questions taps the microphone twice every single time even though it is plainly working.

It is a good evening. Genuinely. These are your people and they are on decent form.

Sixteen days ago you were in a room with somebody who had a folder open in front of them, and by the time you came out of that room your life had a before and an after in it.

Nobody at this table knows.

That is not their fault and it is not a complaint about them. You have not told them, for about nine reasons, some of them sensible, and two of them the sort of reason a person only admits to at three in the morning. And so you sit here inside the noise, and you laugh at the right moments, and you write nineteen eighty five as a compromise, and there is a thickness of glass between you and everybody in this room that arrived sixteen days ago and has not lifted since.

Everybody else's life carried on. Yours stopped in one afternoon. And the strangest cruelty of the whole thing is that the carrying on is not unkind. It is just carrying on, the way a river does.

The middle of the story, and only the middle

There is a furnace in the book of Daniel and everybody knows how it ends, and I am not going to use the ending on you.

I want to be honest about that before we start, because a fortnight of people arriving at an ending on your behalf is quite enough. So: I do not know how yours goes. I am not going to tell you it will be fine, and I am not going to hint at it, and I am not going to explain to you why any of this is happening, because I do not know that either and anybody who says they do is guessing in a confident voice.

What I want is the middle. Three men have been thrown into a fire. And a king who is watching from outside stands up so fast that he startles his own officials, and says something that has been kept in the record for two and a half thousand years because of what he counted.

Look, I see four men walking about in the fire, and the appearance of the fourth is like a son of the gods.Daniel 3:25

Four. Three went in. Four are in there.

Now read what the fourth is doing, because the verb is the whole thing. He is not standing at the door of the furnace calling instructions. He is not waiting at the far end where they will eventually come out. He is walking about in the fire. Inside it. On the same ground, in the same heat, at the same hour, while it is still burning and while nothing at all has yet been resolved.

You are accompanied inside this, right now, at the table, in the middle of a thing that has not finished and has not been explained. That is what the written record says rather than what I would like to be true for you, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a sentence a pagan king said out loud and makes it a present fact for somebody sixteen days into their own afternoon.

What the fourth one did not do

Zev's kind of reading is mostly about noticing what a text does not say, and there are three absences here and each of them is a comfort.

He did not stop it starting. Nothing in the account has the fire prevented, damped, or made smaller before they went in. It was heated, they were bound, they went in, and the accompaniment began where the fire was rather than instead of it.

He did not explain it. There is no speech in the middle of that furnace. Nobody is given a reason. The one thing everybody wants in a crisis, which is a sentence that makes it make sense, is not what is handed over in there.

And He did not require them to be composed about it. The text does not report a single word from the three men while they are in the fire. Not a prayer, not a hymn, not a declaration of confidence. It reports where they are and who is with them, and that is all it reports, and that is apparently enough for it to be written down.

You have company that did not arrive on the condition that you be handling this well, and the written record makes no comment at all on how those three were coping. His Spirit is called the Helper, which is a word about presence rather than a word about advice, and He is not standing at the mouth of anything waiting for you to sound better.

The glass, and what it is actually made of

Now let me say something about the table, because the loneliness in that room is real and I am not going to talk you out of it either.

The glass is real. There is a genuine difference between a person who knows and a person who does not, and sitting in a warm room where nobody knows is one of the loneliest experiences a human being has. None of that is imagined and none of it is ingratitude toward good friends.

But notice what the glass is made of. It is made of information. It is the gap between what is happening to you and what the people at that table have been told, and it is a gap in their knowledge and not a gap in your accompaniment.

The fourth figure in that furnace was not there because the three had explained themselves to anybody. Nebuchadnezzar had not been briefed. The officials had no idea. The company was in the fire regardless of who outside it had been informed, and the king only found out by looking.

You have not been waiting for somebody to be told before God would come in. He was already walking about in there when the count was still three as far as anybody outside was concerned. Daniel 3:25 is a witness from a man who had no idea what he was looking at, and the same Spirit who put that verse in the record is the one keeping you company at a table where nobody has been briefed.

You were not left alone at that table for a single minute of that quiz, and being unknown in a room has never once been the same thing as being unaccompanied in it. The word puts a fourth figure in a fire that nobody outside had been told about, and His Spirit does not wait to be introduced to a person's friends before He stays with them.