He Was Inside the Thick Dark

He is not avoiding God and he would like that established, because two people have implied otherwise and neither of them was listening properly.

He is waiting for conditions.

He is a careful man. He surveys buildings for a living and he has spent twenty-six years declining to give an opinion on things he cannot see, and there is a principle in him about not entering a space you cannot assess.

So when it went dark, about three years ago, he did the thing that has served him well in every other part of his life. He stopped. He held his position. He decided, quite reasonably, that he would wait for it to clear and then go in.

He still goes to church. He still reads. He would tell you, accurately, that he has not moved backward one inch.

But he has not drawn near either. There is a thing he used to do, which was to actually address God, at length, about real things, and he has not done that since it went dark, because you do not walk into a room you cannot see the floor of.

Three years is a long time to stand at the edge of something waiting for the weather.

And underneath his patience, which is genuine, there is a quieter thing he has never inspected: he has assumed that the clearing has to come first, and that God is somewhere on the other side of it.

Where the text puts God

There is a verse in Exodus that puts God in a location, and the location is the whole point.

And the people stood afar off, and Moses drew near unto the thick darkness where God was.Exodus 20:21

Read the last four words on their own. Where God was.

Not on the far side of the darkness. Not waiting for it to clear. Inside it. The thick dark is given as the address, plainly, without embarrassment, as the place He was to be found.

And notice what the two parties do with that. The people stand off, which is exactly what a sensible person does when they cannot see. Moses goes in.

He does not go in because the visibility improved. It did not improve. He goes into the thick dark as it is, because that is where God is, and the not being able to see is a feature of the location rather than a reason to postpone.

You have been waiting for a clearing on the assumption that God is on the other side of it, and Scripture puts Him inside. That is not me making a metaphor out of a historical detail; Exodus 20:21 names the thick darkness as where God was, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that and stands it beside a careful man who has held his position for three years.

What the principle is good for and where it fails

Now, I do not want to take your carefulness away from you, because it is a real virtue and it has protected people.

The principle is sound: do not enter a space you cannot assess. In a building, that principle keeps a man alive. And you have applied it faithfully for twenty-six years and it has never once let you down.

But it is a principle about hazards, and it works because a dark space might contain something that will hurt you. It rests entirely on the assumption that the unknown is dangerous.

What Exodus does is take that assumption and remove it from this one particular darkness, by telling you what is in it. There is no hazard in that dark. There is a Person in it, and He is the reason to go in rather than the reason to stay out.

You have been running a hazard protocol on the one dark place Scripture has already told you the contents of. The written word names the thick darkness as where God was and does not warn anybody off it, and the Holy Spirit is not waiting on the far side of a fog for a man to arrive in better conditions.

And let me say the plain thing about the three years. Not drawing near is not a sin here and I am not accusing you of one. You have been careful, not cold, and the two look similar from outside and are entirely different, and the people who implied otherwise had not understood the difference.

You were never at a distance, and there has never been a door that had to open before you could speak. Scripture has a man walking into the dark to meet God rather than waiting at the edge for light, and the Holy Spirit has been in the fog with a man who has been standing still since it came down.