Near, Not Waiting At The End

The meal had been going for two hours when the last man came through the gate, and Hakim watched what happened next with more attention than he intended.

There were about thirty people in that courtyard. It was one of those evenings that assembles itself: somebody puts a table out, somebody else brings a dish, and by nine o'clock there are children under the table and a lot of very loud opinions about football at the far end.

The last man was called Sabir and he had come off a fifteen hour day and he knew he was late and he had that particular apologetic hunch of a person walking into something that has already got going without them.

Hakim, who was there because his cousin had dragged him, had a fairly settled expectation about what would happen. Somebody would call out. He would get waved to a seat at the near end. Somebody would say something nice about him having made it. And then the evening would go on being the evening, and Sabir would eat quickly and catch up.

That is not what happened.

What happened is that the host, a man called Yunus who is about seventy and who moves slowly, got up from the middle of a conversation, walked down the length of the courtyard, and sat down next to Sabir at the end of the table where he had put himself.

And stayed there. For the rest of the evening. In the worst seat, at the end, away from the good conversation, with a man who had nothing left to say and was mostly just eating.

Hakim said afterwards that he could not stop thinking about it, and that it took him about two weeks to work out why.

It was because he had spent about eleven years quietly picturing God the way he had expected that room to work. Up at the good end. Available, entirely available, and available at the far side of a distance he was too tired to cross.

And what he had watched instead was a host who left the good end and went and sat at the bottom.

You may carry the same picture. Not that God is unwilling, which you would probably deny believing, but that He is somewhere ahead, at the good end, and that getting to Him is a distance and you have not got the distance in you today. And nobody has ever pointed out where Scripture actually puts Him.

The Verse Gives A Position, Not An Invitation

There is a line in Psalm 34 that is often read as comfort and is actually geography.

"The LORD is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart; and saveth such as be of a contrite spirit."Psalm 34:18

Nigh unto. Near to.

That is a positional statement. It is not saying He is willing to be near, or available to be approached, or open to a request from that direction. It says where He is.

And it names the location by describing the people He is near, which is the ones whose hearts are broken and whose spirit is at the bottom. That is the end of the table He is sitting at.

You are not at the wrong end of anything. Psalm 34 states a position rather than issuing an invitation, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that and puts it into a courtyard at nine at night beside a man who came in fifteen hours late.

And notice what that does to the distance. If the nearness is stated as a fact about where He is, then the crossing was never yours to do. A man too tired to walk up the courtyard does not have to walk up the courtyard, because the host has already come down it.

You have been sat next to rather than waited for. That is what the written word says about God's position in relation to people at the bottom, and it is the Spirit of God who turns that from a comforting line into an actual seating plan.

Willing Is Not The Same As Near

Now the distinction that matters, because most people who read this will already believe the first half of it.

Almost nobody thinks God is unwilling. That is not the modern problem. If you asked, most people would say of course He is willing, of course He is available, of course the door is open.

Willing is a statement about His attitude. Near is a statement about His position. And a person can believe entirely in the first and still be exhausted by the second, because a willing God at the far end of a courtyard still requires a walk.

Psalm 34 is not talking about attitude. It is talking about location. And the location it gives is the bottom end of the table.

You have not been left to cross anything. It is written that He is not far from every one of us, which is stated as a plain fact about proximity, and His Spirit is the one who has been sitting beside you through the eleven years you spent picturing Him somewhere else.

And say the guard, because this is exactly where a warm thing becomes a task. Nothing on this page asks anything of you. No approach, no effort, no words, no proportion of anything, and nothing routed to any person or work anywhere at all. If you never get up from that end of the table, you are exactly as much His sitting right there, that is the written shape of it, and the Holy Spirit is the one keeping this off the ground where efforts grow.