He Binds It Before He Opens It

The table has been scrubbed so many times over so many years that the grain stands up and the whole top has gone pale, and if you put a hot pan on it now it does not even mark.

Evening. Two of them and the good coffee pot and a cake tin between them with about a third of a cake left, which will be gone.

Her cousin is talking and she is listening properly, and the light through the window over the sink has gone the color it goes at this time of year.

And she is happy. That is not a lie. There is a real happiness at this table tonight, and she has it.

What she also has, and has had for some years now, is a kind of general muffling. It came on after a hard stretch on this place, and she could tell you the year but not the day. She stopped feeling things quite so much, all round, good and bad, and it made that period survivable, and she has been in it ever since.

Lately something has started coming through. A song on the radio. The smell of the yard after rain. She has cried twice, briefly, at nothing.

And instead of being glad about that she has gone tight, because she believes, without ever having thought it out, that if the muffling lifts she will be standing in the middle of the worst of it again with nothing between her and it.

Sit down, honey, and pour yourself another one. Because there is a short verse in a psalm and the order of the two halves is everything.

The binding up and the healing are the same sentence

Psalm 147 is a psalm about God doing large things, counting stars and naming them, and right in the middle of that it says this.

He healeth the broken in heart, and bindeth up their wounds.Psalm 147:3

Two clauses joined by and, and I want you to notice how they sit.

He healeth the broken in heart. That is the deep work.

And bindeth up their wounds. That is the bandage.

Binding up is not surgery. It is what you do to a wound to protect it while it mends. It goes over. It keeps the air and the dirt off. It is a covering, applied by somebody who intends the thing underneath to get better and knows it will not do that if it is left open in a field.

Which means the two things you have been holding as opposites, the covering and the healing, are described in one breath as the same activity performed by the same Person.

You are being healed by Somebody whose method includes binding up, and the bandage in that verse is on His side of the sentence rather than yours. That is not a way of excusing the muffling; Psalm 147:3 puts the healing and the binding together with an and, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a psalm about stars and lays it on a scrubbed kitchen table in the evening. What has been covering you is not the opposite of what heals you.

Now the second half, and it is the fear itself, which deserves to be answered plainly rather than soothed.

You believe that if the muffling lifts you will be standing in it again with nothing between you and it. That belief has a mechanism in it: that the covering is the only protection you have, and that it is yours, and that when it goes there is nothing behind it.

But the psalm has Him binding up. If the covering that came over you in that year was a rough field dressing that you applied yourself in an emergency, then what is on offer is not the removal of it and nothing else. It is the replacement of it with something better applied by better hands.

You are not being asked to stand exposed, and the covering being changed is not the same as the covering being taken away. Psalm 32:7 says Thou art my hiding place, thou shalt preserve me from trouble, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a Person the shelter, which is a thing a rough dressing could never be.

He does not open a wound in a field

One more thing, and it is practical for a woman at a scrubbed table.

Notice what is not in the verse. There is no examining. There is no requirement that the person describe how it happened. The whole action in that sentence is toward the wound and it is protective.

That is worth having, because you have been imagining a process that involves you being made to go back and look at that stretch in detail.

Whatever else God does with you, He is not described anywhere as a surgeon who opens somebody up on a hillside for the education of the patient. The word that keeps coming up is binds.

You are dealt with by Somebody who binds before He does anything else, and He has never once opened a person up in a field. Hosea 6:1 says He hath torn, and He will heal us; He hath smitten, and He will bind us up, and it is the Holy Spirit who keeps that order, which puts the binding at the end of the sentence and not at the beginning.

And here is the last piece, because you have a mouth and it works even when the rest of you is muffled.

Jesus said in Matthew 17:20 that faith the size of a mustard seed, spoken to a mountain, is enough to move it. The smallest seed there is. Not how much you can feel at this table. That a person opens their mouth and says what God has said. You have that standing because you are in Christ and Christ is in you, and speaking is the appointed way this works. We flip the switch. He sends the current.