The Word He Had Read Past

He counted it once, which tells you something about him. Between commentaries, preparation and ordinary reading, he has been over that paragraph something in the region of a hundred times.

He knows the disputes. He knows which clause the arguments hang on and he has read men on all sides of it and can state each position fairly, which he considers a duty. He has a shelf.

And on a Tuesday in the spring, sitting at a desk with a cold cup beside him, doing nothing special, he read verse seventeen and stopped at a word he had never once looked at.

Together.

Caught up together with them. Not caught up to Him, which is what he had been carrying in his head for thirty years, and which is true and is not the whole sentence. Together with them. The dead in Christ, and the ones still living, at the same time, in the same event, with each other.

He sat there for a while.

His wife died three years ago. He has taught on that passage since. He has, and he says this without any drama, comforted people out of it. And he had somehow been operating on a version of the promise in which he goes to be with the Lord and she is also with the Lord and the two of them are in the same general vicinity of glory, which is not nothing, and which is not what the sentence says.

The sentence says together with them.

What he does not know is what to do with the fact that this is hitting him now, at fifty nine, in a way it did not hit him at fifty six when he needed it more. And whether a man who missed a word for thirty years has any business teaching anybody.

Sit down at the desk. There is nothing wrong with a text opening late.

The word is doing work

Start with the text, because that is where you live and it is worth being exact.

Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and so we will always be with the Lord.1 Thessalonians 4:17

Two prepositional relationships in one sentence, and they are not the same. Together with them. And then to meet the Lord. The second is the greater of the two and it is not the one Paul leads with, and the order is not accidental.

Remember what he is answering. The church was not confused about their own destination. They were frightened about their dead. They thought the ones who had died had been left out, and the answer he gives is not a general reassurance about heaven, it is a specific correction: they are not behind you, they rise first, and you go together.

The word is load bearing because the fear it answers was specific.

So take what you found on Tuesday. You are promised your wife's company and not only a shared address, and 1 Thessalonians 4:17 puts the word together in front of the meeting for that reason, and the Spirit inspired the order of those clauses as much as the clauses.

Why it opened now and not then

Now the thing you cannot account for, which is why a word waited three years.

There is a difference between a text being understood and a text being received, and the second one is not under your control. You can bring your whole training to a paragraph and get every clause right and still be reading it with a part of yourself that is doing a job.

Grief, oddly, dismantles that. Not immediately, and not helpfully at the time. But at some point the professional reader gets tired enough or worn enough that a sentence gets through the way it gets through to anybody, and that is usually when the ordinary words start doing something.

You were not failing at fifty six. Nothing written anywhere makes the timing of a text opening a measure of anybody's diligence, and the Spirit is described as the one who leads into truth rather than as a reward for technique.

And there is a mercy in it landing now rather than then. At fifty six you would have taken it as information and filed it. At fifty nine you sat at a desk with a cold cup and did nothing for a while, which is a considerably better use of a verse.

The shelf is not the problem

Here is the part your conscience is asking about, so let us take it directly. Does a man who read past a word for thirty years have any business teaching?

Yes. And the question, however sincerely you mean it, contains a false idea about what teaching is.

Nobody has ever handled Scripture without a blind spot. The men on your shelf all have them, and the honest ones say so. A teacher is not a person who has seen everything in a text; he is a person who keeps going back to it and reports what he finds, and a man who found something new at fifty nine is a man the text is still working on, which is exactly who you want in front of a room.

You are not disqualified by a late discovery. Nothing written anywhere requires a complete reading before a person may say anything true, and the Spirit has never worked with anybody else.

Tell them about it. Not as a confession, and not as a discovery you are pleased with. Just say that you read past it for thirty years and what it did to you when you stopped. The people in that room have their own dead, and half of them are running on the same partial version you were.