Somebody Answered Him Out Loud

He has confessed the same thing to God about a hundred times and every single time the room stayed exactly as quiet as it was before.

He would tell you that is fine. Theologically he knows it is dealt with, and he is not superstitious, and he does not think God owes anybody a noise.

But a hundred times.

And each time it goes the same way. He gets to the end of the sentence and there is nothing, and then there is a small pause where something in him is listening, and then he gets up and puts the kettle on and the whole thing is filed again for about eleven days.

Eleven days is roughly the cycle. He has never measured it but that is about the shape of it.

And here is the part that has begun to worry him. He has started to hear the silence as the answer.

Not as absence. As content. As a considered reply that means something like we are not discussing that, and he has begun to arrange himself around that meaning without ever having decided it was true.

He said something to me once that I have not forgotten. He said: I know it is forgiven. I have just never heard it.

So let me ask you.

Who has ever answered you out loud about it?

The answer came back in the same breath

There is a moment in Second Samuel that is over almost before it starts, and I think it is one of the kindest passages in the Old Testament for reasons that have nothing to do with the story around it.

A king has done something appalling and it has been named to his face by a man standing in front of him.

And what the king says is five words in English and two in Hebrew. It is the shortest confession in Scripture.

I have sinned against the Lord.

And then, without a gap, in the same verse, this.

Nathan replied, The Lord has taken away your sin. You are not going to die.2 Samuel 12:13

Second Samuel 12 puts the pardon in the mouth of a person standing in the room in the same breath as the confession, and the Spirit who sent that prophet arranged for it to be heard rather than only known, so needing to hear it out loud has never been a failure of faith.

Read the order. The king does not go away and pray about it for eleven days. He speaks, and a human voice in the room answers him, immediately, with a sentence in the past tense.

Has taken away. Done. Reported to him by somebody he could see.

Now I am going to be very careful here, and you would want me to be.

I am not telling you that you need a particular person, or a particular office, or any arrangement that anybody has ever argued about. Nothing here requires that, in any direction, and I am not going to hand out a ruling that would leave half the people reading this outside their own article.

What I am telling you is about ears.

Second Samuel 12 has the whole transaction completed audibly, and the Spirit was in the hearing as much as in the pardon, which means a hundred silent repetitions were never the same thing as one sentence spoken into a room.

You have known it for years. You have not heard it once.