Nobody There Is Translating

The hall is four blocks from her apartment and the singing in it is Romanian. She has been going for two years. She knows the shape of the tunes better than she knows any of the words, and she has worked out on her own that the word which keeps coming back, the one that opens half the songs, is Doamne, and that it means Lord. That is most of what she has. That, and the fact that the third row leaves a chair on the aisle for her without ever having discussed it.

She holds the hymnal open at the right page. She cannot read the page. She holds it open anyway, because the paper is warm and everybody else is holding one, and because the tune is doing something that does not require the paper at all. She sings it with no words. She has thought, more than once and never out loud, that this is the most honest singing she does all week.

Afterward, in the hallway, people are kind to her in the two languages between them, and somebody presses a container of food into her hands that she did not ask for and cannot refuse. Walking home she does the arithmetic she always does. A third. She followed about a third of it. And the arithmetic always ends in the same place, which is a small, unarguable feeling of being a guest at something.

You know that arithmetic. Maybe it is a language, and maybe it is a room where the jokes are from a decade you were not there for, or a family table where the talk goes past you at speed, or a way of praying that everybody around you learned as a child and you did not. Somewhere there is a room where you catch a third and you have quietly filed yourself under visitor. And there is a page in the Bible that shows you the end of the story, and the end of the story does not have a visitors section.

Count the room at the end

John gets shown the finished thing. Not the plan, not the intention, the finished thing, the way a builder is walked through a house once the scaffolding comes down. And when he tries to describe who is standing in it, watch how many words he needs.

After this I beheld, and, lo, a great multitude, which no man could number, of all nations, and kindreds, and people, and tongues, stood before the throne, and before the Lamb, clothed with white robes, and palms in their hands.Revelation 7:9

Nations. Kindreds. People. Tongues. Four words piled up for what one word could have covered, because one word would not have carried it. And here is the part that undoes the arithmetic on the walk home: the tongues are still there. At the very end, in the finished room, in front of the throne, the languages have not been dissolved into one official version for the sake of tidiness. Heaven did not standardize anybody on the way in.

You are already counted into the room John was shown, and nothing about you had to be flattened down to fit inside it. Revelation 7:9 lists the tongues instead of resolving them, and the Spirit had you gathered in long before the count was ever read out.

Think about what that verse would look like if belonging ran through comprehension. It would say a great multitude, all fluent. It would say a multitude of one tongue, having learned it. What it actually says is that the whole variety of human speech arrived intact and stood in one place, and the standing was not graded.

You have a full share in a room you follow a third of, and the share never once ran through the vocabulary. Scripture puts the nations in front of the throne with their languages whole, and the same Spirit did the joining there, never a common dialect.

Nobody there is translating

Go back to the beginning of the church and watch which direction the effort runs. There is a crowd in Jerusalem from fifteen different places, and something happens, and the thing they cannot get over is not the noise. It is the address.

They say it themselves in Acts 2:8: how is it that we hear, every man in our own tongue, the one we were born in. Not the tongue of the room. Not the respectable tongue, the educated one, the one you would use if serious people were listening. The one they were born in. Nobody in that crowd was asked to arrive in a better language. The room moved.

You were heard in the language you think in from the very first day of this, and heaven has never asked anybody to arrive in another one. Acts 2:8 records every man hearing in his own tongue, and the Holy Spirit paid the whole cost of that crossing, in both directions, every time.

That is the pattern and it never reverses. God has always been the one who comes over. He came over into a manger and into a body and into a language spoken by carpenters in an occupied province, and He has been crossing ever since, toward people, into their own words, at His own expense. There is no counter anywhere in Scripture where the cost of translation gets billed to the one who arrived.

This is yours in the two thirds exactly as much as in the third, and the missing words were never a discount on it. It is written that they came out of every tongue, and the Spirit does not run a translation department with a waiting list on the door.