The Lexicon on the Kitchen Table

The lexicon takes up a third of the kitchen table, and she has to move it every time somebody wants to eat.

It is red and it is heavy and it was not cheap. She has been going through one psalm with it for six weeks, one line at a time, and she has a notebook beside it where she copies the words out in an alphabet she is learning slowly, letter by letter, the way you learn anything at forty three after a full shift.

Her aunt came round and asked what she was up to, and she said, just studying, and moved a plate.

Here is what she has not said to her aunt, or to anybody. She has come to believe that her Bible is the watered down one. That what she has been reading her whole life is a translation of somebody else's inheritance, and that under every English word there is a Hebrew one with a shape to it, and that the shape is where the actual meaning lives, and that the people who can see the shapes are getting something she is not. She heard a man online say that a certain word about provision does not mean what the English says at all. She has not been able to unhear it.

So there is a red book on the table, and a notebook, and a woman who works a full shift and then sits down at nine at night to chase a root, because she believes the root is where the door is.

And every so often, in the middle of it, she feels something that is not study at all. It is closer to hunger with a rope tied to it. She is not learning because it is beautiful. She is learning because she is afraid she has been kept outside.

You know that table. Yours may be a phone with three Bible apps on it and a habit of switching versions until one of them says something better. It may be a study group where you take down every reference someone else quotes. It may be that you have never learned a letter of anything and simply feel, when a passage is read out, that everybody else is hearing a deeper version.

Move the book. Sit down and let the food come. I want to tell you where Scripture says the treasure actually is, and it is not in a language.

There is no code, and the treasure is stored in a Person

Let me say the plain thing straight away, because the name over this door promises a secret and I will not have a tired woman reading on in hope of one.

There is no code. There is no root word about money that changes the arithmetic. There is no arrangement of Hebrew letters that opens something the English keeps shut. Now hear me carefully, because I am a teacher and I love the study: knowing the languages is a real and good thing, and it makes a passage brighter the way a clean window makes a room brighter. But a window is not the light, and God did not put the door of His provision behind a grammar. If He had, He would be a God who feeds scholars first, and I have read too much of Him to let that stand on my table.

Paul was writing to a church being told exactly what you are being told. That there was a deeper level. A fuller knowledge. Something beyond the plain thing they had received. And he wrote this about Christ.

In whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.Colossians 2:3

Read where the treasure is. In whom. Not in a text, not in a tradition, not in a level. In a Person. And read that word hid properly, because it is doing the opposite of what you fear. It is not hidden from you the way a key is hidden from a child. It is stored in Him the way money is stored in a bank you hold the account at. All of it. Every treasure of wisdom and every treasure of knowledge, kept in one place, and the one place is the One you already have.

You are not holding the watered down version, and nothing about God has been withheld from you in translation. That is not a comfort I put together for a woman at a kitchen table. It is written into Colossians 2, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a line written to people being sold a deeper level and lands it on a red book at nine at night.

You have the Teacher Himself living in you, and He has never once required a language before He would speak. Scripture says the anointing you have received abides in you and teaches you, and His Spirit is the one who makes a written promise into an actual voice in an actual kitchen.

Now let me say the harder thing, because I would not be teaching you if I only comforted you.

The rope tied to your hunger is fear, and the fear has a shape. It says: everything good in my life came late and second hand. School was second hand. The house is somebody else's. Even my Bible, it turns out, is the version they hand out. And so you have been trying to buy your way to the original, one letter at a time, at nine at night, after a shift. That is not vanity. That is a woman who has been given the copy so many times that she assumes God does the same.

You are not being handed the copy, and there is no original you are being kept from. Scripture says that of His fulness we have all received, and grace for grace, and the word all is not a rounding down, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a word like fulness and settles it in the chest where the fear was living.

And now the part about your mouth, because this does not move by being agreed with. Jesus said a mustard seed of faith, spoken to a mountain, does what quiet study never does. So speak it out. You have the standing to tell an old fear at your own table what it is not, because you are in Christ and Christ is in you, and Scripture calls that your position and not your qualification, and the Holy Spirit carries a spoken word a great deal further than your kitchen window.