The Man Who Wanted the Word Plain

It is the part of the evening where the study is winding down and somebody has said something warm to close on, and the man on the end of the table, who has not said much for six weeks, puts his hand flat on his own Bible and says: "Can I ask something and can nobody be nice about it."

The room goes the way a room goes.

He says: "I do not know what the word blessed means any more. I genuinely do not. I have heard it four ways in this room this year and about forty ways outside it. It means somebody got a house. It means somebody survived something. It means a nice coincidence. It means money, when people are careful about how they say it. It means somebody being polite about a disappointment. I have heard a man say it about a parking space and I have heard a woman say it about a funeral, and I do not know what I am saying when I say it."

Somebody laughs at the parking space, kindly.

He does not laugh. He says: "I am not being clever. I say it in prayer. I put it on cards. My daughter asked me what it meant in July and I gave her three sentences and heard myself doing it and none of them were the same sentence."

There is a pause. The tea is cold in the cups. The man who runs the study is a good man and does not have an answer ready, which is to his credit.

And the man on the end says the actual thing, quietly: "I would just like to be told plainly. Once. Not a talk. A sentence."

If you have ever sat in a room and felt the sheer accumulated fog around a word you use every week, you know that table. And underneath his question there is a thing he did not say: I have been repeating something for twenty years and I could not defend it, and lately that has started to bother me at night.

The plain sentence, first, before anything else

He asked for a sentence, so let us not do the thing where the sentence arrives in paragraph forty.

Blessed means God's favor is resting on a person. His face is turned toward them. He has chosen to be for them and near them.

That is it. That is the word. Everything else in the Bible that uses it is a variation on where His face is pointed.

Now let me show you the verse that puts it most plainly, and I have picked this one because it has almost no furniture in it.

Blessed is the man whom thou choosest, and causest to approach unto thee, that he may dwell in thy courts.Psalm 65:4

Three things and they are all God's verbs. Thou choosest. Thou causest to approach. That he may dwell.

There is nothing there about a house, a parking space, a survival, a coincidence or a sum of money. The blessed man in that verse is the man God has picked out and brought near to Himself, and the whole sentence is built so that every action in it belongs to God and none of it belongs to the man.

That is the plain answer to your question. You are chosen and brought near, tonight, at this table, and both of those are things God did rather than things you achieved. Psalm 65 puts every verb in the sentence in His hands, and it is the Holy Spirit whom Paul calls the one by whom we have access, so the bringing near is not a thing you have to organize for yourself.

Two different meanings got the same spelling somewhere and one of them is a report on how somebody's week went. That one is not in the Bible. It is in the culture, and it has been getting into your prayers, and it is the reason your three sentences to your daughter in July did not match.

Why forty meanings could all be sincere

I want to say something about the forty, because you are not being had by forty liars.

Every one of those uses is somebody reaching for a real thing. The man with the parking space is genuinely thanking God for a small mercy and that is not silly. The woman at the funeral is saying something true about a person and about God being near, and she is not misusing the word at all. The person being polite about a disappointment is trying to keep faith with God out loud when it would be easier not to.

They are all reaching for the same idea, which is: God is toward us here. What has gone wrong is not the sincerity. It is that the word has been used so often for so many things that the middle of it has worn away, and what is left is a warm noise.

You have been standing in the fog around a word that is completely clear in Scripture, and clearing the fog does not cost you a single one of the forty. Psalm 65 says it in nine words with no decoration on it, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a worn word and makes it sharp again in a specific man on a specific Tuesday.

And there is a second thing in that psalm worth having, since we are being plain. Read the verse just before it. Iniquities prevail against me: as for our transgressions, thou shalt purge them away.

That is what comes immediately before blessed is the man whom thou choosest. The psalmist says: this is beating me, and You deal with it, and then, blessed is the man You choose.

You are chosen by a God who was fully briefed first, and the choosing came after the honest sentence and not before it. Scripture puts those two verses next to each other on purpose, and His Spirit is the one who lets a man be that honest at a table without expecting the room to go quiet on him.

What to do with the word now you have it

So here is what changes on the drive home and what does not.

What does not change: people will go on using it forty ways and most of them are being kind and you do not have to correct anybody. A man who has just got clear on a word is at his most insufferable in the following two weeks, and you can skip that.

What changes is what you mean when you say it. And what changes, more than that, is what you can hear when somebody says it over you on a bad week, because you will no longer have to check the week first to find out whether they are right.

You have a word you can defend now, which is what you actually came to that table for. The written word gives the definition in one verse without qualifications attached, and it is the Holy Spirit who moves a thing from something a man repeats to something a man knows.

And your daughter. She asked in July and you gave her three sentences. Give her the one. She will not need the other thirty nine.

What I will not do is tell you what God does next in your life, because that is a different question and I do not have it and neither does anybody who says they do. This one I do have, because it is written down, and it is the same tonight as it was when it was written.