The Man Who Studied The Rest He Never Took

He can tell you what the word means in three languages.

He can tell you how it was argued over across a dozen centuries, who took which side, and where the good arguments are on each. He has four books on it, and one of them has his own notes running down every margin in two colors, which is a system he devised and is quietly rather proud of.

He has taught on it. Twice.

A friend asked him, at the end of a long evening, what he does on his day.

He gave a genuinely beautiful answer. It was accurate, it was warm, it was not showing off, and every sentence of it was about what the day means.

His friend waited until he had finished and then said, no. I did not ask what it means. I asked what you do.

And he had nothing.

He sat there with a cup in his hand and went back through the last four years looking for one hour, and found conferences and chapters and a lecture and a very good Saturday in the spring when he had read for eleven hours straight about the subject of resting.

He could not find the hour.

Here is the thing he has not said to anybody, and it has been sitting under his ribs since that evening.

He thinks he made it a subject on purpose.

Not consciously. He would never have chosen that. But a man who studies a commandment is doing something with it, and it is not nothing, and it looks from the outside exactly like obedience, and it can go on for a very long time without ever once requiring him to stop.

Study is the one form of engagement with the stopping that involves no stopping at all.

If you know a great deal about something you have never actually done, pull up a chair. Put the book on the floor, face down, it will keep.

The reason underneath the command

There is a version of the commandment that gives a reason most people never notice, because they know the other version better.

And remember that thou wast a servant in the land of Egypt, and that the Lord thy God brought thee out thence through a mighty hand and by a stretched out arm: therefore the Lord thy God commanded thee to keep the sabbath day.Deuteronomy 5:15

Therefore. That word is carrying the whole verse.

The reason for the stopping is not the nature of time, or a principle about rhythm, or a truth about human limits, all of which are real and all of which a man could read about for a decade.

The reason is a memory. You were a servant. You are not one now. Stop, because stopping is what a person who is not a slave gets to do. A slave does not have an hour. That is the definition of the condition. The hour is the evidence of the deliverance, and it was commanded so the evidence would be produced regularly and could not quietly lapse.

You are being commanded to produce the evidence of your own freedom, and the commandment was built on a memory rather than on a principle. Deuteronomy 5:15 puts a mighty hand and a stretched out arm underneath the whole instruction, and the Holy Spirit kept the reason as an act of God rather than as an argument about human need, which means the hour is not a technique to be understood before it is used.

The study was not the disobedience

Let us be careful here, because a man with your habits will take this and make a whip out of it, and that is not what it is.

The reading was not wasted. The books were not a sin. A person who loves the word of God enough to run notes down a margin in two colors is not a person to be lectured about seriousness.

You have four years of genuine love for the word behind you and no accusation standing anywhere near it. Psalm 1:2 says his delight is in the law of the Lord and in his law doth he meditate day and night, and it is written as praise rather than as a warning, and it is the Spirit of God who is the one teaching in every one of those hours, so nothing in that shelf is being taken off you or held against you.

What is being said is smaller and more practical. Knowing is not doing, and in this one case the commandment names the doing specifically, and no amount of the first ever produces the second.

What the friend actually heard

Now the evening, because that is what has been sitting under the ribs and it deserves to be looked at squarely rather than avoided by reading about it.

Your friend did not ask that question to catch you. He asked it because he wanted to know how to do it, and he asked the person in his life most likely to know.

You were being asked as a man who is trusted, and being trusted is not the same as being tested. Proverbs 27:17 says iron sharpeneth iron, so a man sharpeneth the countenance of his friend, and it is written of the ordinary work friends do on each other rather than of an interrogation, and it is the same Spirit who puts a question in somebody's mouth at the end of a long evening, which means what happened at that table was a gift arriving in an inconvenient shape.