What Is in Your Hand

Seven in the evening in the yard, everything done that is going to get done, and Roy is leaning on a fence bar with the dog lying in the dust about four feet away, looking at nothing.

He is sixty. He has been on this ground his whole life apart from two years he does not talk about much and which were, by all accounts, character forming.

And he prays. That is the thing to understand about Roy before anything else. He would not use that word about it and he would be uncomfortable if you did, but he talks to God continuously and has since he was about twenty, and the talking happens while his hands are doing something. Fixing a gate. Driving. Standing in a yard at seven leaning on a bar.

It is not devotional in a way anybody would recognize. It is closer to how two men who have known each other forty years talk in a truck: long silences, the odd remark, no ceremony at all.

Forty years of that.

And in forty years there is one subject that has never once come up.

Not avoided in a dramatic way. He does not tense when it comes near. It is more like a bad patch of ground in a field you have known since you were a boy, the one where a tractor went in once in nineteen ninety-something. You do not think about it. You do not decide anything about it. You simply drive round it, every time, forever, and after a while your hands do it without you.

Roy has been driving round that patch for forty years, in the middle of an otherwise honest and continuous conversation with God, and he has never once said the word out loud.

He shifts the bar in his hand. The dog looks up and puts her head back down.

And what arrives, standing there, is not a conviction and not a weight. It is something smaller and stranger. It is a sentence, and the sentence is: I have never once been asked about it.

And then, straight after, in the same breath, the second half of it, which is the true one: or I have been asked forty times, and I have answered a different question every time.

You have that patch. Yours is somewhere else in the field. I am not going to guess what is on it, and this article never will. But you know exactly where it is, and you know your hands go round it without you deciding.

He asks a question He knows the answer to

Moses is at a burning bush and he has spent most of the conversation explaining why not. He has raised who am I, and what shall I say, and they will not believe me, and God has answered all three.

And then God does something different. He stops answering and asks.

And the LORD said unto him, What is that in thine hand? And he said, A rod.Exodus 4:2

What is that in thine hand.

God knows what it is. That is the first thing to settle, because it changes what the question is for. There is no information being gathered at that bush. The One asking made the wood.

He is not asking in order to find out. He is asking in order to get it said.

You have been asked something, and the asking was never about the information. That is the written word and not my read on your evening, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a question asked in a desert and lays it in a yard at seven o'clock with a bar in your hands.

And notice what God does not do. He does not take it. He could have. There is nothing in that scene stopping Him, and He has just been speaking out of a bush that will not burn up, so it is not a question of capacity.

He waits for a two word answer. A rod.

That is the whole of Moses's contribution to that exchange and it is the hinge of the entire chapter. Not a decision. Not a surrender speech. A man says out loud what is already in his hand, to Somebody who already knows.

And then it came back to him

Read on, because the next bit answers the thing you are actually afraid of.

He is told to cast it on the ground, and it becomes a serpent, and Moses does what any sane man does, which is get away from it. And then: put forth thine hand, and take it by the tail. And he does. And it is a rod again, in his hand, exactly as before.

He is holding the same object. Nothing about it has changed to look at.

And from that verse on, all the way through the plagues and the sea and the rock and the years, the text keeps calling it something new. The rod of God.

You are able to put something down and take it up again, and what comes back is already His. Exodus 4 has him take it by the tail and it is written that it returned to his hand, and the same Spirit who was in that fire is the one making it a present fact in a man leaning on a gate.

That is the fear, and it is not usually the fear people assume. It is not that God is cruel with what He is given. It is quieter than that and it goes: if I say it out loud, I lose control of what happens next.

Which is true, and I am not going to pretend it is not. The rod does not stay a stick you use for sheep. It goes on to do things that terrified everybody who watched, and Moses never had his ordinary life back.

But it stayed in his hand for forty years, and it was still his, and the only difference was whose name got attached to it.

Now let me guard this the way a man ought to.

I have not guessed what is on your patch. There is no list here. Whatever you were braced for me to name, I have not named it and I will not.

And you have not lost anything by forty years of driving round it. Moses was eighty at that bush. Nobody in that chapter is described as late, and God does not open the conversation by asking him about the four decades. If you cannot say it tonight, He is not colder in the morning, and this message is not a deadline.