The Secret Things and the Revealed

He has a shelf and a spreadsheet, and he is aware of how that sounds.

Nineteen books in two years. Three of them twice. Primary sources where he could get them and translations where he could not, and a document with positions and page references, color coded, that he has never shown a living person and would be humiliated if anybody found.

The subject is the state of the dead between here and the resurrection.

He did not start out as a man with a project. He started as a man whose wife died and who wanted to know where she is. That is the whole engine of it and he has been careful to be honest with himself about that from the beginning, which is more than a lot of people manage.

What he has now, after two years, is a very precise map of what human beings have argued about. He can lay out the positions fairly. He can tell you which ones lean on which passages and where each one goes thin. He is, in a small way, genuinely competent on the subject.

And he has less floor under him than he did in the first month.

That is the discovery and it has been arriving slowly since about the spring. Every book has produced more questions than it closed, and the map has got bigger and more accurate and less habitable, and there is a night he does not talk about where he sat with the spreadsheet open and thought: this is never going to end, is it. There is no book at the bottom of this.

Sit down at the desk. There is a reason the reading has not worked, and it is not that you read the wrong nineteen.

The verse that draws the line

Here is a sentence built for exactly the position you are sitting in, and it has two halves and everybody quotes the first one. Deuteronomy 29:29 puts both of them in one line, and the Spirit inspired the whole line rather than the famous half.

The secret things belong to the LORD our God, but the things that are revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may do all the words of this law.Deuteronomy 29:29

The first half is a boundary and the second half is a possession. Both are needed, and the wrong side of it is where two years have been spent.

Notice the word belong, used twice, and used differently. The secret things belong to God, which means they are not withheld from you out of stinginess, they are simply His. And the revealed things belong to us, which is a stronger word than most people hear in it. Not are available to us. Belong.

You have been given something rather than denied something, and Deuteronomy 29:29 says the revealed things belong to you and to your children, and the Spirit put the boundary and the gift in a single sentence so that neither could be read without the other.

And look at what the second half is for. That we may do. The revealed portion is not there to satisfy curiosity; it is there to be lived on. Which is a different kind of sufficiency than the one you have been hunting.

Why nineteen books produced less floor

Now the mechanism, because a careful man will want the failure explained rather than merely soothed.

The attempt has been to reach certainty by accumulation. That works in fields where the evidence is public and complete. It does not work here, because the material is finite and the questions are not, and every additional interpretation you read adds a position without adding a fact.

So the map grows and the ground does not. That is not a failure of diligence. It is the predictable result of applying the right method to the wrong kind of question.

The floor you are after is not made of information. It was never going to be. What is written offers a Person and a set of plain statements, and the Spirit is described as the one who bears witness rather than as a source of additional data.

And there is something else worth saying to a careful man. Your instinct to be exact is not a defect and this page is not asking you to become vague. Precision about what God has actually said is a virtue. What you have been doing is precision about what people have said God said, which is a different discipline and it does not hold anybody up at three in the morning.

What the revealed portion actually contains

Here is the practical part, and it will feel almost insultingly small.

Write down, on one page, only what is stated plainly and repeatedly, with nothing that requires an argument to reach. It is a short list. Those who are Christ's are with Christ. To depart is to be with Him and that is far better. He knows those who are His and nobody takes them out of His hand. There is a resurrection, and there is a change, and the people are brought together.

That is most of it. It fits on one side of a page in your handwriting.

You are holding a sufficient portion rather than an incomplete one. That is what Deuteronomy 29:29 calls it, the Spirit inspired it as a possession rather than as a consolation prize, and the shortness of the list is a feature of it rather than a defect.

It is worth asking why the list is short, because a careful man will assume a gap where there may be a decision. Everything on that page is stated the same way in books written centuries apart by people with no opportunity to coordinate, and everything not on it is left alone with the same consistency. That is not an accident of transmission. A God who wanted us building detailed pictures of the intermediate state would have supplied the material, and the silence is doing something: it means nothing anybody publishes next year can outrank what is already in your hands.

Then close the spreadsheet. Not burn it, and not repent of it. Close it, and read the one page instead, and notice how differently a short list of certainties sits in a man compared to a long list of positions.