Not Because We Were Many

The church basement smells of cumin and burned coffee, which is a combination Nabil did not expect and has decided he likes.

Six folding tables have been pushed into one long one, with a paper cloth taped down at the corners because of the fan. Somebody has brought rice in a roasting pan the size of a car door. Somebody else has brought a tray of dates and a small jar of honey, and a nine year old has appointed himself guardian of both and is taking it seriously.

Nabil counts. Nineteen.

He counts again on the way back from the coffee urn, because he would like to be wrong. Nineteen, and that is counting the two women from the church who organized it and the man who came down early to open up.

Nineteen. In a city of four hundred thousand people.

He is nine weeks in. He came tonight because the flyer taped in the laundromat said welcome dinner and because he has not eaten at a table with more than two other people since the airport. He has his good shoes on. He has practiced the sentence he is going to say if anybody asks him what he did before.

And now he is standing at the end of a paper tablecloth doing arithmetic, and the arithmetic is doing something to him.

Somewhere in this city, he thinks, there is a real thing happening. A hall. Three hundred people. Music. And here is a roasting pan and a fan and nineteen.

The boy pushes the tray of dates into his hands. Hold this, he says, I have to get more forks, and he is gone before Nabil can answer.

So Nabil stands there holding a tray of dates for a stranger's child, and the man who opened up says a blessing over the food, and every person in the room says amen at the same second.

Nineteen voices. It sounds like more than it should.

He counts again anyway. Nineteen. Twenty, with the boy coming back at a run with the forks.

You have done that arithmetic. Maybe not in a basement, but you have stood in a room and counted it and felt the total settle on you like a verdict, and the verdict was always the same one: this is small, so I must be small, and the important thing is elsewhere.

You are inside a choosing that was never once decided by a total. Scripture says out loud that God did not set His love on a people because they were more in number, and it is the Holy Spirit who has put you in the middle of that same company. The number in the room is not the audit and it never has been.

The number was never the reason

Let me put the plain thing where you can see it, because it is the whole message and it takes one verse to say.

The bride in Scripture is the church, a whole company of people, and everything said about her is said about a company. Not about one person's private standing with Christ, and not about a romance. Chosen is covenant vocabulary, the vocabulary God uses over nations and households, and when He explains what He based it on, He goes out of His way to rule out the thing you have been measuring.

The LORD did not set his love upon you, nor choose you, because ye were more in number than any people; for ye were the fewest of all people.Deuteronomy 7:7

Read it slowly. Every you in it is plural. He is talking to a whole people about themselves as a people, and He tells them the size of the room was not the reason, and then He tells them what the size of the room actually was: the fewest of all. Not modest. Not promising. The smallest thing going.

He did not say it in spite of their number. He said it about their number, out loud, in the document.

You are inside a company God chose while it was the smallest thing on the map, and the smallness was never held against it. That is written, plainly, in the sentence you just read, and His Spirit is the one who carries an old covenant word into a basement with a fan in it. There was no audition, because an audition would have required a number, and the number was never asked for.

Nobody in that basement was auditioning

Here is what I want to say to the arithmetic, because I think it runs in you more often than you would admit to anybody.

You have been treating the count as a report card. Nineteen means marginal. Three hundred means real. So a small room becomes evidence, and being in a small room becomes evidence about you, and you leave with a total in your pocket that you did not sign up to carry.

But the choosing was never of individuals held up one at a time and measured. That is the picture that does the damage, and it is not the picture Scripture gives. God set His love on a people. The company was chosen, and everyone inside the company is inside the choosing, and your inclusion is a fact about that company rather than a verdict about your promise.

You were counted in as part of a people, and no reason for it was ever required from you. The word says He chose them because He loved them and because He keeps His oath, and it is the Holy Spirit who joined you to that same people without consulting your figures.

And notice what that does to the pressure. If the reason was your quality, then somebody with more of it has a stronger claim, and the room becomes a ranking. If the reason was His love and His oath, then a man holding a tray of dates for somebody else's child has exactly the standing of anyone else in the room.

You have a place in this that is not competing with anybody, right now, as you read. Scripture puts the whole weight on His covenant rather than on the roll call, and the same Spirit who wrote that is with you while your arithmetic goes quiet.