I Think The Cost Is A Verdict On The Decision

You have started reading them.

Not reading them the way a man reads a bill, which takes about eleven seconds and involves an amount and a date.

Reading them. Looking for what is being said. Whether the timing means something. Whether three in one quarter is a pattern and what the pattern would be indicating and what the right response would be if it were.

You would not describe it that way to anybody. If your wife asked what you were doing at the table you would say you were going over the bills.

And what you are actually doing, on some of those evenings, is interpretation.

It started in the spring, after the second repair on the house, when you said something in the car about whether you should have waited a year. And she said probably not, and you both left it, and it went into you and stayed.

And it has been growing since, quietly, and it has got to the point where a piece of paper arriving in this house is no longer an expense. It is a communication, and you have appointed yourself the man who has to work out what it says.

The job nobody assigned

Let me name what has happened, because it is exhausting and it is not required of you and I do not think anybody has ever told you that.

There is a man in this house decoding providence.

Not obeying God. Not trusting Him. Decoding Him. Working out, from circumstances, what is being communicated, and then working out what should be done about the communication, and doing all of that alone at a kitchen table on a Tuesday evening with a stack of paper.

That is a full time occupation and nobody in scripture is ever given it.

You have appointed yourself to a post that nobody created, and a stack of ordinary bills has never once been a message that required decoding. The Holy Spirit is the one sitting at that table with a man doing an impossible job, and it is written in Deuteronomy 29 that the secret things belong unto the Lord our God.

And look at what the job does to you, because it never finishes.

If a bill is a message, then every bill is a message, and every one has to be read, and the reading never resolves because there is no key and no confirmation and nothing to check the interpretation against.

So each one produces a new reading, which replaces the last one, and none of them ever settles, and the man doing it is not lazy or faithless. He is simply doing a thing that cannot be done.

You have been doing a job with no possible completion, and a man who cannot finish an impossible task has never once been a man who failed at it. Deuteronomy 29 divides the secret things from the revealed and gives only one of them to us, and the Spirit of God is the one who drew that line rather than leaving it open.

The secret things belong unto the Lord

Here is the verse, and it is one of the most practically liberating sentences in the whole Bible.

The secret things belong unto the Lord our God: but those things which are revealed belong unto us and to our children for ever, that we may do all the words of this law. (Deuteronomy 29:29, King James Version)

Two categories, and an allocation.

The secret things, which means what God has not disclosed, belong to Him. They are His property. Not withheld to be worked out by the clever, not hidden as a test, not available to whoever thinks hard enough at a kitchen table. His.

And the revealed things belong to us and to our children.

You have been trying to take possession of something that was allocated to somebody else, and the reason behind a repair bill has never once been in the category assigned to you. The Holy Spirit is the one who made the division, and the written word divides the two and hands over only one.

And notice the purpose clause on the end, because it tells you what the revealed half is for.

That we may do all the words of this law. The revealed things are given so that they can be acted on. The whole allocation is practical. You get the part you can do something with, and He keeps the part nobody could act on anyway.

Which means the interpretation you have been attempting at that table is not merely difficult. It is not yours, it was never going to be answered, and the time it has taken has been taken out of the half that is.

You have been given the actionable half and nothing else, and no man anywhere has ever once been handed the reasons alongside the instructions. Deuteronomy 29 attaches a purpose clause to the revealed half only, and the Spirit of God is the one who kept the other half in His own hands.