Far Off Was A Distance, Not A Verdict

Everybody stands, and he is always half a second late.

He stands when the shoulders in front of him move, which is a system, and it works. He follows about a third of what is said. Not the third you would expect, either: he loses the beginning of a sentence, catches the middle of it, and by the time the whole thing has assembled itself in his head the room has already gone on two sentences without him. Once, a man three rows over said something funny and he worked out what it was roughly thirty seconds after the laugh, and laughed then, alone, quietly, into his coat.

At the door afterward somebody kind says something quick and warm and puts a hand on his arm, and he says yes, and smiles, and has no idea at all what he has just agreed to.

Then he gets home, and he prays, and it pours out of him. Fluent, exact, unembarrassed. Words he learned before he could tie his shoes. Whole sentences that arrive already formed, in the language his mother used to call him in from the yard. Two different men, apparently, and the fluent one only exists in his own kitchen.

And on the walk home you have decided something about yourself that you have never once said out loud. Not that you are unwelcome, because everybody has been kind and you would say so. What you have decided is that you are the one this room is being patient with, and that eleven years of it have not changed that by one inch.

Far off is a position, not a character reference

There is a phrase in Ephesians that has been read as an insult for a very long time, and it is not one.

Paul is writing to people who had come in from a long way outside. They had no covenant history. Their grandparents had prayed to other things. When he describes what their situation used to be he does not soften it: without Christ, foreigners to the commonwealth, strangers to the covenants of promise, no hope, no God in the world. And then he sums the whole condition up in two words that he did not invent, because the prophets had used them for centuries.

But now in Christ Jesus ye who sometimes were far off are made nigh by the blood of Christ.Ephesians 2:13

Far off. It is a distance word. That is all it ever was. It measures where a man is standing, and it says nothing whatever about what kind of man is standing there. Isaiah used it long before Paul did, and when he did, God said peace to the far off and peace to the near in one breath, and named the far off first.

So when you sit in that room with a third of the sentences and put yourself at a distance, you are using a word that Scripture also uses, and Scripture uses it about a location. You have been reading it as a verdict. It was a set of coordinates.

You are inside the people of God at a distance you have been misreading, and the misreading has cost you eleven years of your own life. Ephesians 2:13 uses far off as a position and never once as an assessment, and the Holy Spirit is the one who moved you from the one to the other while you were busy standing half a second late.

Now look at what the verse says closed it, because the instrument is named. Made nigh by the blood of Christ. Not by fluency. Not by the years. Not by getting the idioms, catching the jokes on time, losing the accent, or reaching the point where you no longer have to watch the shoulders in front of you. By blood, and by nothing standing next to blood.

You were made near by an instrument that has nothing to do with vocabulary, and there is no second requirement waiting behind it. Ephesians 2:13 puts made nigh in the passive voice, which means the one doing the making is not you, and His Spirit is what carries that into a room where you are only catching a third.

The room adjusts, and it always has

Now I want to put something beside that, because there is a picture people carry of the people of God as a room with one language in it, and the newcomer as the one who has to close the gap.

Consider how this people actually started. On the day the Spirit was given, there was a crowd in Jerusalem from every direction under heaven, and the first thing God did with the message was to make it arrive in each man's own language. Every man heard it in the tongue he was born in, Acts 2:6 says so plainly, and the list of nations that follows takes several lines to get through. Nobody was told to come back when their Aramaic improved. The languages were not an obstacle that God worked around. They were the medium He chose.

That is the founding day of the very people you are sitting inside of. Whatever a given room does on a given Thursday, the pattern at the source was that the message went to where the hearer already was.

So I am not going to tell you to work on it. Your language is not a hurdle, your accent is not a stage you are passing through, and your generation is not something to be got past. If you learn more of the room's words, good, and if you never do, nothing about your standing shifts by a hair. The room adjusts in this article. You do not.

You have a full share among God's people that no fluency ever added to and no gap in it has ever subtracted from. Acts 2:6 says every man heard in his own tongue, and it was the Holy Spirit who did that, and He has not changed His method since.

Right now, as you read this, you are at home in a room you follow a third of, because being at home in it was never a function of following it. Scripture set that down at Ephesians 2:13, and the same Spirit keeps it true whether or not the sentence you are hearing has finished assembling.