The Judge of All the Earth

It always starts the same way and she can feel it coming about four seconds before it arrives.

She is lying there. The heating has clicked off. And her brain, unhelpfully, produces the memory of her grandmother in the blue chair with the crossword, and then the loop begins.

Did she ever actually say anything. She went to church at Christmas. She said God bless you when you left the house, every time, without fail, in a way that sounded like it meant something. She had a Bible in the sideboard that nobody ever saw her open. She once told a story about a hospital corridor and something she prayed and did not finish the story because somebody came in with a tray.

Twenty three years of loving that woman and no way at all of knowing.

She has tried three things. She has tried telling herself it is not her business, which lasts about a week. She has tried working it out from the evidence, which is what the loop is and it never terminates. And she asked somebody once, obliquely, in a way she thought was subtle, and got an answer so confident in one direction that it made her feel worse rather than better.

She is not asking anybody to lie to her. That is the thing. She would rather have nothing than have a stranger's opinion delivered in a warm voice.

Sit down here. Nobody on this page is going to tell you an answer that nobody has.

The question underneath the loop

Start by getting the question right, because the loop is running on a version of it that cannot be answered by anybody, including you.

You are not asking whether God is fair. You have not really doubted that. You are asking whether God is careful. Whether a quiet woman with a Bible in a sideboard, who said one unfinished thing about a hospital corridor, could have been missed by a system that was not paying attention.

That is the fear, and it is a fear about competence rather than about justice. Nothing written anywhere presents God as a mechanism, and the Spirit is not administering a line.

Here is the sentence that goes at it, and it is spoken by a man arguing with God about a city.

Far be it from you to do such a thing, to put the righteous to death with the wicked, so that the righteous fare as the wicked! Far be it from you! Shall not the Judge of all the earth do what is just?Genesis 18:25

Abraham is not flattering God there. He is pressing Him, hard, in an argument he does not appear to think is disrespectful, and the Spirit left the whole exchange in the record rather than tidying it. And the question he lands on is the one you are asking at two in the morning: is the One doing this going to do it properly?

The account leaves the question standing as its own answer. Nobody in Scripture ever corrects Abraham for asking it.

So take it as it stands in the dark. You are dealing with the Judge of all the earth and not with a filing system, and Genesis 18:25 is where a man put that question to God and was not rebuked for it, and the Spirit kept the whole argument in the book.

Nothing is missed

Now the specific fear, which needs answering with something more than reassurance.

Your grandmother's inner life was not visible to you. That is true and it is not going to change. What is also true is that it was never the thing being assessed by you, and the One doing the assessing is described in Scripture as seeing what nobody else sees.

He is described as knowing the heart, repeatedly, in a way that is presented as basic to who He is. He is described as searching, as understanding thoughts from far off, as being acquainted with all a person's ways. That is not a comforting figure of speech. It is a claim about a capacity, and the claim is the answer to your fear about competence.

There is nothing about that woman He did not see. That is written throughout, and the Spirit who inspired those descriptions is not offering you an estimate.

And here is a second thing that will be worth more to you at two in the morning than any argument. The Bible in the sideboard, the God bless you at the door, the unfinished sentence about a corridor: you have been reading those as insufficient evidence. They are not evidence at all, in either direction, and that is the point. You were never given the instrument for this. Nobody was.

That is worth sitting with rather than hurrying past, because it takes the loop apart at the joint. A loop needs a scale. It needs the possibility that if you weigh the sideboard against the Christmas services against the unfinished corridor story, some number comes out. There is no scale. There never was one, for anybody, about anybody, and the reason is not that God is being secretive; it is that what He is looking at is not the sort of thing a granddaughter was ever built to see. What is written puts that whole assessment somewhere else on purpose, and the Spirit did not withhold an instrument from you that anybody else was given.

What you can do with the loop

Here is the practical part, and it is not a technique for stopping the thoughts.

The loop will keep starting. What you can change is what you do at the fourth second, when you feel it coming.

Do not argue with it. It is built out of an unanswerable question and you cannot win. Instead, hand the woman over out loud. Say her name, and then say one sentence about who God is, and then stop talking. Not a plea, not a case for the defense, not a review of the sideboard. A handover.

You are allowed to put her down. Nothing written anywhere makes you the custodian of her standing, and the Spirit does not require you to hold a question He has never asked you to answer.

That is not giving up on her. It is putting her in the hands of the only One who has the information, which is where she has been the whole time, and which the loop has been quietly disputing every night since the funeral.