Common to Man, and Nobody Told Him

Half past six and the light is going in that particular way it goes in early spring, and Hal is sweeping.

It is a good workshop. Not a large one. It is at the back of the property and he built the bench himself in 1994 and it will outlast him. He is sixty-one and he is out here most evenings and it is where he is happiest.

He has been a believer since he was thirty-one and it has held through some things that had no business being survivable.

And there is one thing he has carried for the whole thirty years.

It is not the pull itself. He would tell you, if you got him talking, that everybody has something, and he means it, and he is not naive about anybody.

It is a conviction about his own, and it goes like this: theirs is a milder thing. Whatever it is that other men are describing when they nod at each other about struggle, that is not this. This is different. This is the one nobody mentions, because nobody has it, or because anybody who has it has the sense not to say so.

Thirty years.

And here is what Hal has just noticed, sweeping shavings into a pile with the light going, and it has genuinely never occurred to him before.

He has never once tested it.

Not with a person. Obviously not with a person; the whole nature of the conviction is that you do not say it, and every year of not saying it has thickened the belief.

But also not with a book. Not with a passage. Not with God. He has prayed about the pull ten thousand times and he has never once said to God: I think mine is different from everybody's, and he has never once gone looking to see whether Scripture says anything about that specific idea.

Thirty years of holding a conclusion he has never exposed to anything.

He stands there with the broom.

You have that conviction. Yours has different edges. But you know you hold it, and you know you have never said it out loud, and you have probably never checked it against anything either.

The first clause denies it

There is a verse most people know the back half of, and it is the front half that has your name on it tonight.

There hath no temptation taken you but such as is common to man: but God is faithful, who will not suffer you to be tempted above that ye are able; but will with the temptation also make a way to escape, that ye may be able to bear it.1 Corinthians 10:13

There hath no temptation taken you but such as is common to man.

That is the first thing Paul says. Before faithfulness, before the escape, before any of it. He opens by naming the exact conviction you have been holding for thirty years and denying it in nine words.

The phrase behind common to man means human-sized. Of the ordinary human kind. The sort that belongs to people.

He is not saying yours is small. He is saying it is human, and that whatever it is, it is not a category of one, and there is not a person alive who is standing outside the ordinary run of what people carry.

You are inside the ordinary run of what people carry, and Scripture says so in the first clause. That is the written word and not my guess about your evening, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes the opening of a verse everybody misquotes and lays it on a workshop floor at half past six.

Thirty years, and the sentence has been sitting there the whole time in a chapter you have read.

God is faithful is the subject of the sentence

Now the part that has to be handled carefully, because this verse has been misused on people like you for a long time.

But God is faithful.

That is the subject. Everything that follows in the sentence hangs off those four words, not off you. Who will not suffer you to be tempted above that ye are able is a statement about what God does. Will with the temptation also make a way to escape is a statement about what God provides.

The verse is not a compliment about your capacity and it is not a warning that you had better cope. It is a claim about God's character with two consequences attached.

And look at the timing of the escape. He will, with the temptation, also make a way.

With. Not afterwards, if you hold out long enough. Not as a reward for a decent run. The way out is provided alongside the thing, at the same time, as part of the same arrangement, and it is described as something God makes rather than something you locate.

This is yours, and the way out is made with it and never earned after it, and it is already settled. First Corinthians 10 says with the temptation in exactly those words, and the same Spirit who kept Paul through everything in that letter is the one making it a present fact in a man with a broom in his hands.

Let me guard this, because I have watched this verse used as a stick.

It has been read to people as: you are able, therefore if you did not manage it, that is on you. That reading puts the whole weight on the person and it takes the subject of the sentence out. The subject is God is faithful. Remove that and you have a different verse and a cruel one.

And I am not ranking. Nothing here says yours is smaller than anybody's or larger. Common to man does not mean mild; it means human. Some human things are enormous.

And I am not telling you that a stronger pull means anything at all about your standing. There is no verse anywhere that measures a person's belonging by the size of what they are up against.