Open My Eyes, He Said, and He Had Been Reading for Years

The archive has high windows and no blinds, which is a preservation problem that has been noted in three separate reports and never acted on, and which means that at about four in the afternoon the whole room fills with light and dust and looks like something out of a painting.

Boxes. Long tables. Cotton gloves in a drawer that nobody uses properly. A cart with a wheel that goes.

He is good at this. He can date a hand at a glance. He knows which fonds are catalogued badly and he knows why. He has a mind that holds things in order and he has been given a room that rewards it.

He reads the Bible every morning at six. Thirty five minutes. He is currently in Jeremiah and he was in Isaiah before that and he will be in Lamentations after, and he takes notes, and he could tell you the structure of any of them.

And he has felt nothing about any of it for a long time.

He does not doubt a word. That is what makes it strange. He believes it entirely, the way he believes that the second box on that shelf is 1834 to 1847. It is simply that it goes in as information and it does not go anywhere else, and he has begun to suspect that this is what he is now, permanently: a man who knows the text.

Friend, put the pencil down and come and stand in the light. Because there is a man in the Psalms who knew that text better than either of us, and I want you to hear what he asked for.

The longest psalm about the word contains a request for eyes

Psalm 119 is one hundred and seventy six verses about the law of God. It is an acrostic. It is the most sustained piece of devotion to Scripture anywhere in the book and the man who wrote it clearly lived in that text.

Eighteen verses in, he asks for this.

Open thou mine eyes, that I may behold wondrous things out of thy law.Psalm 119:18

Stop on the strangeness of that.

He is not asking for a new text. He is not asking for a better copy or a missing scroll. He has the law. He knows the law. He is one hundred and seventy six verses deep in loving the law.

And he asks to be shown what is in it.

Which means seeing and knowing are two different operations, and he understood that, and he did not consider his own knowledge of the text to be a substitute for the second one.

You have a request available to you that a man who knew the text better than anybody thought was worth making, and knowing has never once been the same operation as seeing. That is not a slight on your reading; Psalm 119:18 puts the asking in the mouth of the psalm's own author eighteen verses into his masterpiece, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes an acrostic about the law and lays it in an archive room at four in the afternoon. The gap you have noticed is real and it is named in the text itself.

Now the second half, and this is the one I want to say carefully to a precise man.

You have concluded that this is what you are now. Permanently. A man who knows things.

But notice the grammar of that verse. Open thou mine eyes. Second person imperative, addressed to God. He does not say I will apply myself more carefully. He does not resolve to read with more attention. He asks Somebody else to do something to his eyes.

Which means the opening was never in his job description, and it is not in yours, and the thing you have been quietly failing at was never assigned to you.

You have been holding yourself responsible for something the psalm hands to God, and the verb in it is a request rather than a resolution. Psalm 119:18 puts the opening entirely on His side of the sentence, and it is the Holy Spirit who does the showing, at six in the morning, over a text a man already has by heart.

What wondrous things means, and why it is not new information

One more thing, because it changes the six o'clock.

The word is wondrous, and it does not mean previously unknown. The psalm is not asking to be shown verses he has not read. He is asking to see the ones he has read as what they are.

That is a different request from the one people usually make of Scripture. Most of us go looking for something new when the old has gone flat. He goes looking for the same thing, seen properly.

And that is a much more hopeful ask, because it does not require anything to be added. Jeremiah does not need to become more interesting. Something has to be opened at your end, and the asking for that is the whole of the action.

You are not short of material, and the request in that verse asks for sight over ground you have already covered. The written word says wondrous things out of thy law, which is the law he already had, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes an old page arrive as a new thing without a single word of it changing.

And here is the last piece, because you have a mouth and it does more than read aloud in your head.

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 the quality of your morning reading. 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.