A Man Arguing With Himself

Duane's truck died eleven miles up a fire road with about forty minutes of light left in the sky.

No signal. That is the part people who have not been up there do not understand. You can be eleven miles from a paved road and be as alone as you have ever been in your life, and the quiet up there is not peaceful quiet, it is the other kind.

I was in the passenger seat. I had my eyes shut, not asleep, and Duane did not know it, and he got out and put the hood up and stood there for a while, and then he did something I have thought about ever since.

He talked to himself. Out loud. The whole time.

"Right." Bang, as the prop rod went in. "Right. Okay. Come on now."

Then, after a while, "This is fine. This is fine. Somebody comes up here Thursdays."

Then, quieter, "Is it Thursday."

Then, and this is the bit, "Duane. Listen. You have got the bags, you have got water, and you have got a coat in the back, so the worst of it is you sit here till daylight and you are cold and you are bored. That is the worst of it. So quit."

And then he actually said, out loud, to himself, in a fire road with nobody in it, "You have been out of worse than this."

Then he shut the hood and got back in and had a drink of coffee and said, in an entirely normal voice, "Well, this is a fine thing."

Now, I am telling you that for one reason.

That is Psalm 42.

Word for word, in shape and in method and nearly in content. And you have read Psalm 42, and I would bet you have never once heard it in that voice, because somewhere along the line you were handed it as an inscription instead of a man.

That is a man talking, not a plaque

Here it is, and I want you to read it in Duane's voice and not in the voice you were taught to read it in.

Why are you in despair, O my soul? And why have you become disturbed within me? Hope in God, for I shall again praise Him for the help of His presence.Psalm 42:5

That is not a serene man. That is a man on a bad night talking to himself out loud, asking himself what exactly is going on, and then telling himself what to do about it.

He asks the question twice, which is what people do when they are not getting an answer. He calls himself by name, in effect, addressing his own soul the way Duane addressed Duane. And then he gives himself an instruction, hope in God, which is not a feeling arriving, it is a man deciding.

And he does it three times in two psalms, because it does not take the first time.

So hear this, and let it change how you read from tonight on. You are holding a book written in the actual voice of actual people, and the thing you have been reading as marble is a man in a truck with the hood up. That is written, and it is the Spirit of God who inspired it in exactly that register on purpose, which tells you something about what He considers holy language.

Now let me name what happened to you, because it was done kindly and it has cost you.

Somebody put the Psalms in a special voice for you.

Maybe it was a certain kind of reading aloud, slow, with the vowels done a particular way. Maybe it was the fact that you only ever hear them at funerals. Maybe it was a version whose English was four hundred years old and which is beautiful, genuinely beautiful, and which you were never told was once the plainest speech going.

And so you have read them the way you would read the words carved over a doorway: true, weighty, admirable, and not addressed to you.

They were written by men with dust on them. David is complaining about how long God is taking. Asaph nearly walks away from the whole thing and says so. One of them tells God plainly that his only remaining friend is the darkness, and God put that sentence in the book and did not tidy it.

You are allowed to read them like that. And more than allowed, because the Word says all Scripture is God breathed and profitable, which includes the ones that were shouted, and the Holy Spirit who breathed them is the one who makes them live in you rather than sit in you.

Let me guard the old language before somebody takes this the wrong way.

The old translations are not the enemy and neither is anybody who loves them. Some of the finest praying people I have ever known pray in language four centuries old and they mean every syllable of it, and it is not costume to them, it is home. If that is your home, stay in it.

I am only saying that if the words have gone from being a man's voice to being furniture, then something has been lost that can be got back in about ninety seconds, tonight, out loud, in your own truck voice.

There was a man five hundred years ago who translated the Psalms into the ordinary German of a market town, and people complained that he had made David sound like a peasant. He said David was closer to a peasant than to a professor, and that the Psalms are the heart of a man laid out in words, and that if a plowman could not hear his own voice in them then somebody had put a wall up that God had not put there.