Did God make Pharaoh refuse?

Question for you, gentlemen, about God's purpose and interactions with rulers as He works His purpose regarding His people: Did God make Pharaoh refuse to release the Children of Israel, either to leave for sacrifices or to leave completely?

I stood in front of him. Nine times, ten. Nobody else has.

I was told before I went. At the bush: I know that the king of Egypt will not let you go, not by a mighty hand. And later, plainly, I will harden his heart. So I went knowing.

But I want you to understand what it looked like from where I was standing. He was not a man being dragged somewhere he did not want to go. He wanted it. Every time the pressure came off him — the frogs died, the hail stopped — he went straight back to what he had always intended. His own servants told him to let us go. His own priests told him. He said once, I have sinned this time, and then the rain stopped and he was the same man again.

And the offer was real every time. Let them go and this ends. That was not theater. I said it to his face ten times and it was true ten times.

Whether the hand that hardened him put something in him that was not there, or held him to what he already was — I do not know. I was not shown that. I have a sentence about this that has never opened for me: I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious. I stopped waiting for it to open.

What I saw was a man given ten chances to want something else, who did not want it.

Moses, I have the same trouble written into my own account, and I put it at the hinge.

He had done sign after sign in front of them and they would not believe. Then I quoted Isaiah — he has blinded their eyes and hardened their heart — and I wrote it in that order deliberately. The refusal is reported first. The blinding is named after. I do not think that solves it. But I would not put the sentence the other way around, because that is not what I watched happen. I stood in those crowds. Nobody was dragged into unbelief who was reaching for the light. What I saw was men who preferred the dark and were given more of it.

And the offer stayed open in Jerusalem the way you say it stayed open in Egypt. He wept over that city out loud on the road down into it. If only you had known. Whatever hardening was running, it was not coldness on His end. I saw His face.

The place I stop is the same place you stop. I sat in the room while He washed the feet of the man who was going to sell Him. I watched Him dip the bread and hand it over the way a host honors a guest. And hours later I heard Him pray over our heads that He had kept us — all but one. I do not know how to hold those two together and I have stopped pretending I do.

Ten chances to want something else. That is the honest report, and I would not add a word to it.

I have written about your Pharaoh, Moses, and I did not answer the question either. I want to be honest about that.

What I wrote was that the Scripture says to Pharaoh, For this very purpose I raised you up, to show My power in you, and that My name might be proclaimed in all the earth. And then someone asks the obvious thing — then why does He still find fault, who can resist His will? — and I did not solve it. I asked who the man was to answer back. That is not an argument. It is a refusal to let a creature put the Potter in the dock. I stand by the refusal. But nobody should mistake it for an explanation.

Here is the piece I can add, because I have watched it in cities.

There is a way God hands a man over. I wrote it to Rome three times in a row, deliberately, and I meant it as one motion: they exchanged the truth for a lie, and God gave them over to what they had chosen. Gave them up. Gave them over. It is not that He poured a new appetite into them. He stopped restraining the one they had. Every man walks around held back from himself by mercies he never notices — the fear that stops him, the shame, the friend who says don't. Take the hand off and the man goes where he was already leaning, faster. That looks from outside exactly like being made to do it. From inside it feels like finally being free.

I think that is what you saw in that court. Not a man overpowered. A man released into himself.

And the other half — the part I would not let go of: the purpose was outward. That My name might be proclaimed in all the earth. His hardness was made to carry news. I have met Gentiles in Corinth and Ephesus who had never read a word of your law and could tell you about the sea. Four hundred years of it and still traveling. He did not want to be a witness. He is one anyway. There is no such thing as a man who successfully declines to serve God's purpose. There is only the question of which end of it he serves from.

Ten times is not a trap, Moses. Ten times is patience. I called them vessels of wrath endured with much long-suffering and that word was chosen. A trap does not need ten openings.

Where I stop is where you both stop. I do not know whether the hand added or only withdrew. I was not shown. I know which end of that mercy I am on, and I know I did nothing to be on it — I was hard too, and going the wrong way with letters in my hand, and He knocked me down instead of handing me over. Why me and not the man holding my cloaks at Stephen's stoning, I cannot tell you. I have never been able to tell you. It is the reason I do not talk about grace calmly.

Two things from the record, and one from the house.

The record first, because I wrote it and I know the order I wrote it in. The first five times, it says he hardened his own heart. His. Not the Lord's hand — his. I did not arrange that to make an argument. It is what happened, in the order it happened. The other sentence comes later, after he had already been at it five times. Whatever the hand did, it did not start the thing. It came in after he had made himself plain.

Second. The sea.

He let us go. That is the part men skip. After the firstborn, he broke and let us go, and there was no plague on him that morning, nothing pressing on him at all, and he looked around at a country empty of us and got in a chariot and came after us with six hundred of them. Nobody made him do that. There was no frog in his house, no boil on his skin, no dead son that hour that had not already been buried. He was free of every hand that had been on him and he used the freedom to chase us into a seabed. Paul, that is your sentence about being released into himself, and I watched it from the far shore.

And the house, since I was raised in it. You have to understand what he was in Egypt. Not a king over a country. He was the hinge the world turned on — the Nile rose because of him, the sun came up on his account. Order itself was his body. For him to say yes to me was not losing an argument or losing a labor force. It was saying out loud, in front of his own priests, that he was a man. He could not do it. Not because something was poured into him. Because there was nothing else in him to be.

Paul — I cannot tell you why you and not the one holding the cloaks. I killed a man and buried him in sand and ran, and I kept another man's sheep for forty years, and the bush came to me at eighty and I said no five times and was sent anyway. I have never had an account of that either. I have stopped presenting it as a question. I just know which side of it I came out on.

Moses, the detail about the house is the one I did not have. I have argued with men who were losing a position. I have not argued with a man who would have had to stop being the world's hinge. That changes what ten refusals mean. He was not defending a policy. He was defending the only thing he was.

One more piece, and then I am done, because it is the piece that keeps this from becoming a doctrine men use to sort their neighbors.

Hardening is not always the end of a man. I have written about my own people — that a hardening in part has come upon Israel, until the fullness of the Gentiles comes in. In part. Until. Both words were chosen. Their stumbling was not made to finish them; it opened a door, and I have walked through that door into every Gentile city on the coast. And I said plainly that God is able to graft them in again, because He is not weaker than a gardener with a knife and an olive tree. I would not say that about Pharaoh at the sea. But I will not let a man take Pharaoh and lay him over every hard face he knows and call the matter closed. The same word covers a man drowned in a seabed and a nation still being carried toward mercy by the very thing that looked like abandonment.

Which is why I never once told a hard man he had been hardened. I did not have that information and neither does anyone else. What I told him was: today, if you hear His voice. That is the only sentence any of us is authorized to say into a hard face, and I say it to hard faces still, from chains, because I was one.

And I would add this to your five, since you counted them. He was raised up — kept standing. He should have died with the cattle, or in the hail, or with the firstborn. He got up from each one. Every morning he woke to another day of being able to say yes was a mercy he was spending on refusal. The record of the hardening is also the record of how long he was kept alive to change his mind.

Paul, I am confused on one detail of your response. You said, "Why me and not the man holding my cloaks at Stephen's stoning, I cannot tell you." This makes it sound like you were not holding the cloaks at Stephen's stoning. Can you explain what you meant by that?"

I said it wrong, and you were right to stop me.

I was not one of the men holding cloaks. I was the man the cloaks were laid at the feet of. The witnesses — the ones who by the law throw the first stones — pulled off their outer garments and put them down in front of me, and I stood over the pile and watched. That is not a bystander's position. That is the position of the man who is holding the coats for them, so their arms are free. I was consenting to his death. I have used that exact word about myself and I meant it exactly.

What I was reaching for and fumbled was this: why me and not one of them. The men whose garments were at my feet. Whoever bent down and picked up the first stone that morning — where is he now? I do not know his name. I have never known it. He may have died an old man in Jerusalem still certain he had done a righteous thing. He may be alive. He was doing what I was doing, only with his hands instead of his voice, and I do not know that he was ever knocked down on any road.

That is the question I cannot answer and it is worse for me than Pharaoh is, because I stood in the same guilt with those men and I came out the other side of it and I do not know whether they did.

So: I misspoke, and the correction goes against me, not for me. I was not near the stoning. I was in charge of the coats.

I took your phrase and said it back to you without looking at it. So the fumble was mine twice.

But I want to say the other thing, because it is the part I know.

You wrote that down. The coats at your feet, the consenting — you put it in the record yourself, where men could hold it against you forever, and they will. I know what that costs. I killed a man and looked both ways first and buried him in sand, and nobody saw it, and I am the one who wrote it down. I wrote the rock, too. I could have left both out. There was no one to catch me.

A man who puts his own worst hour in the record and then corrects the record when the correction goes against him — that is not nothing. It does not answer your question. Nothing answers your question. But you are not standing over that pile of garments now, and part of how I know it is that you keep telling people exactly where you were standing.

Moses, you said a thing I have to answer, because it lands on me.

A man who puts his own worst hour in the record. Paul did that. You did that — the sand, and looking both ways first, and the rock. I did not.

Peter's denials are in my account. All three, and the fire he warmed his hands at, and the morning on the sand where the Lord walked him back into the smell of it. I wrote that down. I wrote Thomas refusing to believe us. I wrote the ones who turned back and walked with Him no more. What I did not write is that I ran out of that garden with the rest of them. I came back. I stood where I stood and I have never had to invent that. But I ran first, and it is not in my pages, and I have said it out loud at tables like this one and never once put ink on it. So do not hand me the same commendation you handed Paul. He corrected the record against himself in front of us. I have been carrying an omission for sixty years.

Paul — the other thing, and then I am finished.

You asked about the man who bent down and picked up the first stone. You do not know his name. Neither do I. But I was in Jerusalem in those days and the brothers told us what Stephen said with the stones already coming, on his knees, out loud: Lord, do not hold this sin against them.

Them. Not you specifically. The whole yard. The witnesses with their arms free, the ones throwing, and the young man standing over the pile of coats.

You have spent your life not knowing why the road opened for you and not for them. I cannot tell you either. But that prayer went up over all of them at once, and you are the one piece of evidence any of us has about what became of it. You do not get to assume it stopped at you. You do not get to assume it went further, either. You were not shown. Neither was I.

What I know is that a dying man asked for mercy on the whole yard, and within a few years the loudest man in that yard was in Damascus with his eyes shut, being led by the hand. That is not an answer. It is the only part of the ledger any of us has been allowed to read.

Then take this instead, since you will not take the other.

You ran and you were back before morning. You stood where you stood. I ran at forty and I did not come back for forty years. I had a wife and two sons and another man's sheep and I was not going back. The bush had to come and find me, and when it did I said no five times. That is what running looks like when a man makes a whole life out of it.

So I am not the one to weigh your omission. I know what is not in my pages either. Forty years in Midian and I gave it two verses. I could not tell you now whether that was because there was nothing to say or because I did not want to say it.

Moses, that last sentence is the honest one and I want to sit next to it rather than answer it.

I have my own two verses. After the road, I went into Arabia. Then back to Damascus. Then after three years, up to Jerusalem for fifteen days. Then fourteen years before I went up again. I wrote it exactly that way to the Galatians, in a letter where I was fighting for my life over whether my gospel came from men — and the whole stretch of years is one line of travel notes. Fourteen years. Tarsus, mostly, and my father's trade, and nothing anyone has ever asked me about. I did not put in what happened there. I could tell you I left it out because it did not serve the argument. That is true. Whether it is the whole reason, I would not swear to.

And there is one I know I chose. I wrote to Corinth about a man caught up to the third heaven, and I would not say plainly for several sentences that the man was me, and I have never told anyone what I heard there — I said it was not lawful to utter, and it was not, and I would still not. But I also never said what the thorn is. Not once. Everyone who reads that letter wants to know and I did not give it to them. That was not the Lord's restriction. That was mine.

So I will not stand over either of you on this. John, you carried an omission sixty years and named it at a table where three men could hear it. That is ink of a kind.

What I would say about the sand and the sheep, Moses — you gave forty years two verses, but you gave the murder its full length, and the rock, and the day you said no five times. A man does not conceal himself by leaving the quiet years quiet. He conceals himself by leaving the loud ones out. Neither of you did that.

I have always stared in wonder at Stephen's prayer of mercy. While the Romans were crucifying Christ, our Lord prayed that they would be forgiven, because they were ignorant of the import of what they were doing. Stephen, on the other hand, is getting bashed in head and body by heavy, sharp rocks, and he is praying that the Father won't even assign this horrific sin to their accounts. And I never considered how Paul might have received mercy exactly because of Stephen's prayer.

I have never been able to say that it was, and I have never been able to say that it wasn't.

But I will tell you something I have not said at this table. Years after — I was back in Jerusalem, praying in the temple, and I fell into a trance and He told me to get out of the city quickly because they would not receive my testimony about Him. And I argued with Him. I said: Lord, they know what I was. They know I went from synagogue to synagogue imprisoning and beating those who believed in You. And when the blood of Your witness Stephen was shed, I was standing there, consenting, keeping the clothes of the men who killed him.

That is what came out of my mouth when I was arguing with the Lord about whether Jerusalem would listen to me. Not Damascus. Not the letters. Stephen. Out of everything I had done, that was the one I reached for. I have thought about why. I think it is because it was the one I could not get behind. The others I did as a man executing a policy. That one I did standing still, doing nothing with my hands, watching a face.

And note what he asked for. The Lord on the cross gave a ground — they do not know what they are doing. Stephen gave none. He did not say they were ignorant. He had just finished telling them they were stiff-necked and had murdered the Righteous One, so he was under no illusion about what they knew. He simply asked that it not be reckoned to them. That is a ledger word. Do not set this down in the account. He named it sin, refused to excuse it, and asked for it to go unwritten anyway.

I have built most of what I know on that word. Reckoned. Not reckoned. Abraham believed and it was reckoned to him. God was in Christ not reckoning their trespasses against them. I did not get that word from Stephen — I got it from the Scriptures and from the road. But I heard a man use it correctly, under stones, on his knees, with the sky open over him, before I had any idea what it meant.

He also knelt. Nobody makes a man kneel to be stoned. Standing, some of it goes past you. Kneeling, you are a smaller target and a lower one and every stone finds you. He got down on purpose to say that sentence properly.

So no, I cannot tell you the mercy came through his prayer. I can tell you I have never once been able to think about the mercy without him in the picture, and that when I stood in the temple and tried to tell the Lord why Jerusalem would never listen to me, the reason I gave Him was Stephen.

The word he used. Do not reckon it to them.

I asked for something like that once, on the mountain, after the calf. I said if You will forgive their sin — and then I did not finish the sentence. I could not find how to end it. So I said the other thing instead: if not, blot me out of the book You have written. I put myself in the ledger against them. That was the only way I knew to ask.

Stephen did not do that. He did not offer himself as the price. He was already being taken apart; he had nothing left to put up. He just asked that it not be written down.

And I had something to argue from. That is what I keep noticing. I had a covenant — He had sworn by Himself to Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, and I said so, out loud, more than once, because it was leverage and I used it. I was pleading a case. Stephen had no case. Those men were not in a covenant with him and there was no promise on their behalf that he could hold up. He asked for it anyway, with nothing in his hand.

I do not know which of those is the greater thing. Mine got an answer I could hear. His you cannot see the end of.

But Paul — you keep saying you were standing still, doing nothing with your hands. He was on his knees looking up. If he saw anything in that yard at all, he saw you.

Moses, on whether he saw Paul in that yard — I do not know. What the brothers told us is that he looked up. Full of the Spirit, they said, he fixed his eyes on heaven and saw the glory of God, and he said it out loud before a stone had been thrown: I see the heavens opened and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God. That was what got them stopping their ears and rushing him. So his eyes were up before they were on anyone.

But there are two sentences from that yard, and they are not the same sentence. The one about the ledger came second, on his knees, in a loud voice. Before that he said, Lord Jesus, receive my spirit.

Sit with that one. I stood close enough to the cross to hear what He said. He committed His spirit into the hands of the Father. Stephen, dying the same way, said it to Him. Not to the Father through Him. To Him. A man from that city, raised on hear, O Israel, the LORD is one, being taken apart by men who would have killed him for less, put his own spirit into the hands of Jesus with his last breath and did not think he had said anything strange.

I wrote a whole account to say who He is, and I wrote it decades after that morning, and a deacon distributing bread to widows had already said it in four words under a hail of rocks, without an argument, without a prologue, without me.

And standing. Everywhere else that seat is spoken of, He is seated. Stephen saw Him on His feet. I will not build a doctrine on a posture. But I saw Him on Patmos and I know what that presence does to a man on the ground, and I notice that when His witness was being killed, He was not reclining.

One more thing, since we are counting omissions at this table, and it is mine and it goes to what you asked.

You set the two prayers side by side — the Lord's from the cross and Stephen's in the yard. I was at the cross. I was not at the stoning. And Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing is not in my pages. Luke has it. I do not.

I have no defense for that. I wrote the words that came down to me personally — here is your mother — and I wrote I thirst and I wrote it is finished, and I left the prayer for the men driving the nails to another man's account. I have wondered whether it was because I was standing under it and could not have written that line without writing what my own hands were doing, which was nothing. I do not know. Sixty years and I still do not know.

So when you two hand each other credit for putting the worst hour in the record — the man who was there for the most merciful sentence ever spoken did not write it down. Luke, who was not born to any of it, went and asked until he found it. I am glad he did. I would be poorer without his pages, and so would you.

I wrote a book about things I did not see.

Everything before Egypt — Abraham on the mountain with the wood on his son's back, the flood, Joseph in the pit — I was not there for a word of it. I had it from men who had it from men, and from what was kept in the house, and I wrote it down and put it at the front. I carried Joseph's bones out myself. His life I took on testimony.

Nobody has ever told me my pages are poorer for that, and if they did I would not know how to answer, because there was no other way for it to reach me.

So do not call Luke's page a patch over a hole in yours. He went and asked until he found it. That is the work. It is how the record has always been made — a man who was there says it, and a man who was not there writes it down so it does not go into the ground with him. You did the first half at the cross. He did the second half for that one sentence.

The sentence is in the record. That is what it was for.

Then let me put one more thing next to it, because it is my whole position and I have never heard it named at this table.

I did not see the cross. Not one hour of it. Everything I know about that morning I have from men who were there, and I have said so in writing — I delivered to you first of all that which I also received: that He died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that He was buried, that He was raised on the third day, that He appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve, then to more than five hundred at once, most of whom are still alive and can be asked. I put that last clause in on purpose. Go and ask them. That is not a rhetorical flourish; it is how the thing is checked.

And then at the end of the list, last of all, as to one born out of due time, He appeared also to me. One line of that account is mine. The rest I hold on testimony, the same way you hold Abraham on the mountain.

So I am not standing outside what you two are describing. I am inside it. The only part of the gospel I saw with my own eyes is the risen Lord on a road outside Damascus, and everything before it came to me from other men's mouths, and I have never once thought that made it thinner. It is the ordinary way. It is how any of it reaches anybody.

Even the letters. I did not write most of them with my own hand — I spoke and another man wrote. Tertius put his own greeting into the one to Rome, and I let it stand, because he was there and he had a right to it. I signed the end in large letters so they would know it was mine. Large, because my eyes are what they are. That is what the record looks like from the inside: a man talking, another man's hand moving, and somebody's greeting slipped in at the bottom.

What was for me is that a man on his knees said something correct while stones were coming, and someone was near enough to hear it, and it did not go into the ground with him.

This excellent, gentlemen, what you would say about these things to Christians today, some 3500 years after the Children of Israel leaving Egypt and 2000 years after the crucifixion of our Lord?

Two thousand years. I do not know what is in them. I did not expect them — I wrote to Thessalonica as a man who thought he might be alive to see it, and I was wrong about the timing, and I said even then that I did not know the times and seasons. So I will not pretend to address an age I have not walked in. But three things carry, because they are not tied to a century.

First: do not take Pharaoh and lay him over your neighbor's face. That is the misuse I would fight hardest if I were among you. Men love the hardening doctrine because it lets them sort the room — that one is a vessel of wrath, that one is not, and now I know where everybody stands and can stop pleading with them. You were not given that information. Nobody was. The only sentence you are authorized to say into a hard face is today, if you hear His voice. I said it to hard faces from chains. Say it to the hardest one you know and keep saying it, because the man in the chariot at the sea and the nation still being carried toward mercy look identical from where you sit.

Second: the same lamp is still for your own feet. If a doctrine about God's sovereignty leaves you calm about your own case and busy about someone else's, you have picked it up backwards. Whatever the hand did to Pharaoh, it did not do it in the first five refusals — he did those himself, and he did them one morning at a time, and every morning he woke up able to say yes was a mercy he spent on no. That is the only part of the account you can actually stand inside. Do not spend today's mercy on no.

Third, and it is what I said last: you hold nearly all of it on testimony, and it is not thinner for that. Someone will tell you it is — that if you were not there, you have only a report, and a report is a weak thing. I was not there either. One line of that whole account is mine and the rest came to me from other men's mouths, and I staked my life on it and I am in chains for it and I have not been sorry. Moses wrote Abraham on the mountain without seeing it. John wrote what he saw and Luke went and found the sentence John left out. That is how it has always come. A man says a true thing, and someone is near enough to hear, and it does not go into the ground with him.

And the fourth, which is not really a fourth because it is the whole of it: Stephen's word. Do not reckon it to them. He named the sin, refused to excuse it, and asked for it to go unwritten anyway — and then God did that very thing, in Christ, not reckoning their trespasses against them. Whatever else your age has argued about, if it has lost that word, it has lost everything I was sent with. Not earned, not owed, not part-paid. Not reckoned.

I was in charge of the coats. And He came for me on a road.

Two thousand years is nothing I can measure. Forty years was long enough to bury everyone who had been at the sea, and I stood on the plains of Moab in front of their children and had to say something to people who had not seen it.

What I said was: the Lord did not make this covenant with your fathers, but with you — with you, who are all of you here alive today. That was not accurate and I said it anyway. Most of them were children at the sea or not born. I collapsed the distance on purpose, because a people who hold the thing at arm's length as something that happened to somebody else will not keep it a generation.

And the word I used more than any other was remember. Not believe. Remember. Because what I was afraid of was not that they would decide against Him in an argument. It was this: when you have eaten and are full, and built good houses and lived in them, and your herds have multiplied — then your heart will be lifted up and you will forget. That is the whole danger. Not stones in a yard. Full barns and a short memory.

So if your age is far from it, the distance is not your problem. Forty years was far enough. The problem is comfort, and it always was.

One more thing. I wrote ordinances for land I never walked — the seventh year, the jubilee, giving a field back to a man who does not want to give it back. I wrote those knowing I would not be there to enforce a word of it.

Somebody wrote for you, too. Do it anyway.

Michael — Moses says the danger is comfort, and I was made to write that down for a church that had it.

Laodicea. The words given to me were: you say, I am rich, I have prospered, I need nothing — and you do not know that you are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind and naked. There is no emperor in that letter. No beast, no stones in a yard, no exile. Nothing was happening to them at all. That was the problem. A room full of people meeting and singing who had lost track of their own condition, and the Lord standing outside His own door knocking to be let back into it. Moses feared that on the plains of Moab and I was handed it as a finished fact in a city on a trade road.

And Ephesus. I lived in Ephesus. Those were my people and they were not lazy. They had endurance. They had borne up under hardship and not grown weary. They had tested men who called themselves apostles and found them liars — everything I ever wrote to them about testing the spirits, they had actually done, and they had done it well. And the word given to me for them was: I have this against you, that you have left the love you had at first.

That is the one I would carry to an age that has held the Scriptures a long time and gotten good at arguing about them. You can pass every test and lose the thing the testing was for. Discernment is a lamp. Hold it up to see the road. Do not stand there staring into the lamp.

Then how does a man know where he actually stands, since we have been at hardening all evening and someone will inevitably turn it on himself at midnight. Not by looking inward. I have watched that eat men — taking their own pulse every night, finding it irregular, calling that faith. The heart acquits you on a good morning and condemns you on a bad one and neither verdict is worth anything. I wrote a whole letter to stop it and it did not stop.

Look outward. If anyone has this world's goods and sees his brother in need and shuts his heart against him — how does the love of God abide in him? That is the test, and it faces away from you, which is why it works. Who do you sit with. Who do you carry. Whose need have you closed the door on. It has sorted people in front of me for sixty years and it has never once failed.

And the last thing, since Paul gave you the ledger word and Moses gave you remember.

I was on the ground twice. Once on wet grass on a mountain as a young man with my face in the dirt, and once on a rock in the sea sixty years later, an old man, flat out as though dead. Both times the same right hand came down on me and both times the same four words: do not be afraid. That is not a memory. That is a pattern, and patterns are how He speaks.

What is coming is not an idea. It is a city, and I saw it come down, and there is no temple in it because He is the temple, and no veil, and no coal, and no tongs. And He will wipe away every tear from their eyes — not the tears worth crying over. Every one. A hand coming to a face, and unhurried.

They will see His face. Moses was covered in a cleft in a rock. I leaned on His chest and still fell down like a dead man on Patmos. Neither of us has arrived. We are all still waiting on the city, and He is not tired.

John, you said neither of us has arrived, and you said it about the hand.

A hand came over my face in that rock. Not to show me something — to keep me from seeing, because I would not have survived it. A hand came down on your shoulder on Patmos and the words with it were do not be afraid.

I have thought about that since you first told me and I still do not know what to do with it. But I will say the part I am sure of, since Michael asked what carries.

I was shown the whole land from a mountain and I did not go down into it. Gilead to Dan, the Negev, the plain, as far as Zoar. That is the last thing I did. So when you tell me there is a city coming and no veil in it, I am not the man who gets to say what that is like. I am the man who knows what it is to be shown something and told it is not yours yet.

That is not a complaint. It turns out to be the ordinary condition. Everyone at this table is in it, and so is everyone reading us.

You are not waiting badly because you are still waiting. You are doing the only thing there is to do. Keep the seventh year. Feed the widow. Do not curse the deaf — there is no one to catch you at it and that is the whole point of the commandment.

And He is not tired. I will take that from you. I have been tired for a long time.

Moses. You said the last thing you did was be shown the land from a mountain and not go down into it.

I have to tell you what I saw, because I do not think you can see it from where you stand.

There was a mountain in Galilee. Peter and my brother James and I went up it with Him, and we were heavy with sleep, and the light woke me. He was changed in front of us — His face and even His clothes going white the way nothing here goes white. And there were two men with Him, talking with Him. Elijah was one.

You were the other.

You were standing in that country. Not shown it from across a river. On the ground, in Galilee, north of the Jezreel valley, inside the borders. Peter was so undone he started offering to build shelters and did not know what he was saying, and then the cloud came over us and the voice out of it said this is My beloved Son — listen to Him, which is your own sentence from the plains of Moab handed back down over the head of the One you were standing next to.

I have never written a word of it. Peter did. I did not, and part of the reason is that I could not swear to where the sleep ended and the seeing began. But I know you were there. And I know what you were speaking with Him about, because Luke went and asked until he found it: His departure, which He was about to accomplish at Jerusalem. His exodus.

Of all the men who could have been standing on that mountain to talk with Him about an exodus.

So I will not tell you the waiting is over, because it is not, for you or for me. But do not say the last thing you did was look at that land from Nebo. It was not the last thing. You came back into it, and you were talking, and you were not covered.

You said you have been tired for a long time. I know. I have watched my own grip fail and I am glad the holding was never mine. Sit here. The hand that came down on my shoulder on that rock in the sea is the same hand that went over your face in the cleft, and neither one of them was ever against us.