I Only Ever Heard an Accusation

There are verses you skip.

Not deliberately. You are a man who reads his Bible and has done for years. But there is a small set of texts about bodies and appetites and what a man does with himself, and when you come to one of them your reading changes speed slightly, and you go through it the way a man walks past a dog he does not trust.

You have never once heard any of those verses as good news. Not once, in decades. Every one of them arrives with an edge on it, and the edge is always pointed at you.

And that has done something over the years that is worth naming. It has quietly divided the book. Most of it is for you. Some of it is about you, in the way a report is about somebody.

Let me put the plain thing first. You have not been careless with this. You have kept reading, which is more than most men do with a book that has been landing on them, and you have gone at the thing itself for years and gotten up after every attempt. Somebody who did not care would skip the verses and not notice.

So this page will not explain the difficult verses to you. That is not the problem. The problem is not the content, it is the voice you have been reading them in.

I want to take the most famous one about a body and read it out loud in a different voice.

The voice you supply

Here is what happens when a man reads a text, and it is worth knowing because it is mechanical.

Words on a page have no tone. Tone is supplied by the reader, always, without exception, and out of whatever material the reader has. If the material available is decades of being assessed, then that is the voice the verse gets read in, and the verse sounds exactly like the voice, and the reader concludes that he has heard what the verse says.

He has not. He has heard his own material with the verse's words in it.

You have been supplying the tone rather than receiving it, and no verse on the page has ever once carried the voice you heard it in. Psalm 139:14 says I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made, and the Holy Spirit is the one who supplies a tone that a man's own history cannot.

And notice the consequence, because it is serious. A book read in a hostile voice becomes a hostile book. And so a man who loves God ends up in a strange arrangement where his devotional life is mostly a place he goes to be corrected, and nobody around him knows.

You have been reading a kind book in a hard voice, and no scripture has ever once been written to accuse the person holding it. The written word says fearfully and wonderfully made, spoken as praise rather than as assessment, and the Spirit of God is the one who changes what a page sounds like.

Fearfully and wonderfully made

Read the verse, and read what it is doing grammatically.

I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made: marvellous are thy works; and that my soul knoweth right well. (Psalm 139:14, King James Version)

It is praise. The whole sentence is directed upward. It is not a man describing himself and it is not God describing a man. It is a man telling God something about God, and the subject he uses to do it is his own construction.

Which means that verse is not an assessment of you at all. It is a compliment paid to God, using you as the evidence.

You are the evidence in a sentence of praise, and no verse in that psalm has ever once been a report on your condition. Psalm 139 points the whole line at God, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a man read a sentence about himself without becoming its defendant.

And read the last clause, which is where men like you get caught. And that my soul knoweth right well. He says he knows it well. Not that he feels it. Knowing and feeling are different, and the psalm asks for the first one.

You are able to know something you do not feel, and the psalm has never once asked anybody to feel it first. The Spirit of God is the one who makes knowledge hold when feeling does not, and the written word says my soul knoweth right well, said by a man about a fact and not about a mood.

Read it in the other voice

Now the part I came to say, and it is a practical instruction rather than an idea.

Read that verse out loud in a kind voice. Not silently. Out loud, in the voice you would use to read something to a child who was frightened. Slowly, warmly, without the edge.

It will feel like a trick the first time. It is not a trick. It is the correct voice, and the voice you have been using is the imported one.

You have been given permission to read it the way it was written, and no page in that book has ever once been written in the voice you brought to it. The written word is praise from beginning to end in that verse, and the Holy Spirit is the one who confirms which of the two voices belongs there.

And here is why the reading out loud matters rather than being sentimental. Your ears are not connected to your history the way your inner voice is. A sentence heard in the room is harder to bend than a sentence read in your head, and that is the whole reason it works.

You have a way of hearing it that your own history cannot reach, and no imported voice has ever once survived being read out loud kindly. The Spirit of God is the one who makes a room able to carry a sentence a man could not carry silently, and Psalm 139:14 is the written word underneath it, where the whole line is praise and the man says he knows it well.