The One Who Does Not Sleep

He can build the case in about four minutes and he has built it for other people, successfully, more than once.

He knows the passages. He knows the objections to the passages, and the responses to the objections, and where the responses go soft. He has read the people who disagree with him and can put their view better than most of them can, which is a habit he learned from a teacher he admired and has kept.

And at about ten past three most nights he wakes up and runs the check.

It is not dramatic. There is no cold sweat. He simply surfaces, in the dark, and something in him wants confirmation that he is still in, and it is not asking for the argument, because the argument is right there and it does not touch it.

He has tried the obvious thing, which is to rehearse the case at three in the morning, and it does exactly nothing, and he has been intellectually interested in that for a while now.

Because he is a man who thinks about how thinking works, and the interesting datum is this: a conclusion he holds with high confidence, that he can defend at length, that he genuinely believes, cannot reach the thing that wakes him at ten past three.

He is forty six. He has never mentioned this to anybody in the small group he leads on a Thursday.

Sit down. There is a verse that goes at this and it does not offer another argument.

He does not sleep

Here it is, and notice that it is not a proposition. It is a picture, and the picture is of somebody awake.

He will not let your foot be moved; he who keeps you will not slumber. Behold, he who keeps Israel will neither slumber nor sleep.Psalm 121:3

The subject of every clause is Him. He will not let. He who keeps you. He will neither slumber nor sleep. There is nothing in the passage for the person being kept to do, which is a strange feature for a psalm about safety unless the point is exactly that.

And it is stated twice, which is how Hebrew poetry leans on something. Not slumber. Not slumber nor sleep. Somebody is deliberately hammering the same nail.

You are kept by somebody who is awake at ten past three, and Psalm 121:3 says He neither slumbers nor sleeps, and the Spirit inspired that as an image rather than as a syllogism because He knew which one reaches a person in the dark.

Why the argument cannot reach it

Now the interesting datum, and it was rightly noticed.

Arguments live in one system. What wakes you at three lives in another. They are not in communication, and no amount of quality in the first will do the work of the second, which is why you can hold a position with high confidence and still be checked awake by something that has no interest in your reasoning.

That is not a defect in your faith and it is not a hidden doubt masquerading as insomnia. It is the ordinary architecture of a human being, and it is why Scripture is full of images and psalms and repeated concrete pictures rather than being organized as a set of propositions. If a proposition were sufficient, the book would look completely different.

That is worth pressing on, because it explains a great deal about how Scripture is put together. There is remarkably little in it that reads like a systematic treatment, and an enormous amount that reads like a shepherd, a rock, a fortress, a hen with chicks, a father running down a road. Those are not concessions to people who cannot follow an argument. They are the form the material takes because they are the form that reaches the part of a person that wakes up at three, and the Spirit chose that form for exactly the man you are.

You are not being asked to think your way into rest. Nothing written anywhere makes the strength of your reasoning the ground of anything, and the Spirit was the one who inspired a psalm of pictures rather than an argument for people awake at night.

And notice what your three in the morning is actually doing. It is running a check for confirmation. A check is the behavior of a system that believes it is responsible for an outcome. Yours has never been told it is off duty.

Telling it that it is off duty

Here is the practical part, and it is not a technique for going back to sleep.

Say the verse out loud. In the dark, in an ordinary voice, without building anything around it. He who keeps me will not slumber.

Not because saying words has power in itself, which is a superstition and you would spot it immediately. Because a spoken sentence enters through a different door than a rehearsed argument, and the thing that wakes you at ten past three is not reading, it is listening.

You have something to say into that hour. It stands written in Psalm 121:3 as a picture of a keeper who does not sleep, and the Spirit carries what He inspired into a bedroom at three in the morning in a way that a well constructed case does not.

And expect it to be undramatic. This is not the kind of thing that resolves in one night, and a man who expects a decisive result is running the check again in a different costume.

One more thing about the hour itself, for a man who likes a mechanism. Three in the morning is when a body is at its lowest ebb chemically, which is why almost everybody who wakes then finds their worst material waiting for them. It is not a spiritually significant hour and nothing is being revealed to you in it. It is simply the time your defenses are thinnest, and the material that gets through is not truer for having got through then.