I Think The House Is Telling Me Something

You have been building a case for about six weeks and you have never once written any of it down.

Exhibit one is the timing, which you have gone over more than anything else. Four months. Not four years. Four months, in the first winter, on the one thing that could not be left.

Exhibit two is the conversation you had with your wife in March, the one where you said you had a feeling about it and she said she did too and you both decided that was probably God.

Exhibit three is the second thing, in August, which was smaller and which you would not have noticed at all except that you were already counting.

And the verdict you have been quietly arriving at is that you were wrong in March. That the feeling was you, and that you called it God, and that the house has been saying so ever since in the only language a house has.

You have not said any of that out loud, to her or anybody. It is a case being built in private by a man in a cold house, and the trouble with a case built in private is that nobody ever gets to cross examine it.

The oldest reading there is

Let me tell you how old this reading is, because it will help to know that you did not invent it and that it has a long history of being wrong.

When a tower fell in Jerusalem and killed eighteen people, everybody in the city did exactly what has been happening in this house for six weeks. They looked at a bad thing and asked what it meant about the people it happened to.

That is not a superstitious ancient error. That is what a human mind does with a misfortune, in every century, including this one, including in a utility room with a flashlight.

You have made the oldest reading there is, and a mind that looks for a message in a catastrophe has never once been a mind with something wrong with it. It is written in Luke 13 that Jesus asked whether those eighteen were sinners above all men that dwelt in Jerusalem, and the Holy Spirit is the one who raised the question in order to answer it.

And I want you to notice that Jesus brought this up Himself.

Nobody asked Him about the tower. He raised it, deliberately, because He knew what the city was saying about those eighteen families, and He went and took the reading apart in public before anybody had the chance to defend it.

You have a case that has already been heard, and no verdict of that kind has ever once stood once it was said out loud in front of Him. Luke 13 has Him introducing the tower without being asked, and the Spirit of God is the one who thought it needed dealing with before anybody raised it.

Think ye that they were sinners above all

Here is the passage, and the answer is one word.

Or those eighteen, upon whom the tower in Siloam fell, and slew them, think ye that they were sinners above all men that dwelt in Jerusalem? I tell you, Nay. (Luke 13:4, King James Version)

Nay.

That is the whole correction. Not a qualification, not a more nuanced version of the same reading. A flat no.

And notice how He frames it before He answers: sinners above all men that dwelt in Jerusalem. That phrase is doing the work. He is pointing at the assumption inside the question, which is that a worse thing happening means a worse person, and He is refusing it.

You are not a man who got a worse house because he made a worse decision, and no misfortune anywhere has ever once been a measure of the person it happened to. The written word answers that question with one flat word, and the Holy Spirit is the one who left it that bare.

And I want to be honest about something, because this site does not deal in convenient halves.

Jesus does go on in that passage to talk about repentance, and He does say something serious. But look at what He does not do. He does not go back and say that the eighteen deserved it after all. The correction stands. What He does is turn the whole thing away from reading other people's disasters and toward the state of the person listening, which is a different subject entirely.

The reading is refused and it is not quietly reinstated three verses later.

You have been handed a refusal that does not get taken back, and nothing in that chapter has ever once returned to say the tower meant something about the eighteen. Luke 13 answers Nay and never revisits it, and the Spirit of God is the one who kept that line straight.