He Was Sitting At The Entrance

He has moved further back into the house every year for about nine years and nobody has noticed, including him.

It started with the front room, which he stopped using because of the window.

Then it was the kitchen, which faces the street, and where you can be seen from the path if somebody comes up it.

Now it is the back room, and he sits in the back room, and the back room is where he waits.

Waits for what, he could not say. Something to change. Somebody to call. A reason.

And I want to be careful with him because this is not laziness and it is not even sadness exactly. He is a competent man who does the shopping and pays his bills and would present as entirely fine.

It is a slow withdrawal that each year justified with a small practical reason, and the reasons were all good, and the result of nine good reasons is a man who sits at the back of a house waiting for something that would have to come all the way through the house to reach him.

Nothing has come all the way through the house.

So let me ask you.

Where in the house are you sitting?

The verse tells you where he was sitting

There is a line in Genesis that most people read straight through on the way to the story, and the detail in it is not decoration.

The LORD appeared to Abraham near the great trees of Mamre while he was sitting at the entrance to his tent in the heat of the day.Genesis 18:1

At the entrance to his tent.

The text could have said in his tent. It did not. It tells you precisely where the man was sitting when the visit arrived, and then in the next verse he looks up and sees three men standing nearby, and he runs.

You cannot look up and see somebody standing nearby from the back of a tent.

Genesis 18 puts the man at the opening rather than inside, and the Spirit who gave that account kept the seating in the sentence rather than trimming it, so where you sit has never once been a neutral fact about your afternoon. You are somewhere right now, and the somewhere is doing work.

Now, my friend, I am going to be careful here in the way this house is always careful, because there is a bad version of this teaching and I refuse to preach it.

I am not telling you that God could not reach a man in a back room. He could. He does. I would not put a limit on Him to make a point, and anybody who does is selling something.

And I am not going to tell you that nine years of withdrawal was a sin, because it was not, it was nine reasonable decisions made one at a time by a tired man.

I am telling you what the text bothers to record. It records where he was.

Genesis 18 mentions the heat of the day in the same breath, which is the hour a man has every excuse to be inside, and the Spirit left both details standing together, which means the most reasonable hour to be in the back of the house was exactly the hour he was sitting at the opening. You are allowed the front of the house in the heat of the day.

And watch what the position made possible. He saw them. He ran. He got water and bread and he stood under a tree while they ate.

None of that begins with him being holy. All of it begins with him being able to see the track.

Genesis 18 has the whole encounter starting with a man looking up from where he sat, and the Spirit was in that arrival and not in his posture, so sitting where you can see the road has never been a way of forcing anything. You are not demanding; you are looking up.