The Word He Used Is About Limping, Not About Standing Still

He is one person at Sunday dinner and a different person on Wednesday afternoon.

Not a worse person. A different vocabulary, a different range of things that can be said, a different set of assumptions about what everybody around him already knows.

He has been doing this since he was about seven and he is extremely good at it. It is not deceit; both versions are him, and everybody who has grown up between two worlds develops the same skill, and most of them never think about it because they have never known anything else.

What he has noticed, at twenty-six, is that he is not fully present in either place. In one, he is a slightly reduced version who leaves things out. In the other, he is a slightly foreign version who explains things.

And there is no third place where all of him is.

Elijah puts a question to a nation about exactly this, and the verb he uses is not the one people assume.

The word is about walking unevenly

Here is the question.

And Elijah came unto all the people, and said, How long halt ye between two opinions? if the LORD be God, follow him: but if Baal, then follow him. And the people answered him not a word. (1 Kings 18:21, King James Version)

How long halt ye.

The word behind halt is not about stopping. It is about limping, about walking unevenly, and it is the same word used a few verses later to describe the prophets of Baal leaping around their altar.

So the picture is not somebody standing still at a junction unable to decide. It is somebody moving, continuously, with their weight going onto one foot and then the other, never fully on either.

That is a much more accurate description of what happens between two worlds. Nobody in this condition is paralyzed. They are extremely busy and they are getting a great deal done, and the unevenness is in how the weight is carried rather than in whether anybody is moving.

You are described exactly, and the word is about weight rather than about paralysis. 1 Kings 18:21 uses a limping verb rather than a stopping one, and it is the Spirit who searches all things, 1 Corinthians 2:10, in a knowing that reaches how a person actually walks.

And the people said nothing

The last clause of the verse is the one that makes this recognizable.

And the people answered him not a word.

Not: they argued. Not: they were divided. Silence, from a whole nation, in response to a direct question about which of two things they were doing.

And the silence is not confusion. They knew the answer. What they could not do was say it, because saying it would have ended the arrangement, and the arrangement was working, and both halves of it were useful.

That is the exact silence at a Sunday table. Nobody is confused about anything. There is simply no way to say the true sentence without something ending, so nothing gets said, and the limping continues.

You are able to be in a silence that is not confusion. 1 Kings 18:21 records a nation with no answer to a question they knew the answer to, and it is by the Spirit, Romans 8:26, who helps our infirmities when a person cannot get something out.

What the choice actually was

It is worth being precise about what was on offer, because it was not what people assume.

These people were not choosing between two religions in the sense of abandoning one entirely. They had been doing both. Baal was for the weather and the crops, which was the practical department, and the LORD was for the national identity and the history and the festivals.

Nobody in that field had stopped believing in the God of their fathers. They had added something for the parts of life where He seemed not to be handling the details.

That is a great deal more recognizable than the version usually preached. The choice is not between faith and abandonment; it is about which one is load-bearing in the departments where a person actually lives.

You are being asked which one is load-bearing rather than which one you believe. 1 Kings 18:21 addresses people who held both rather than people who had left, and it is by the Spirit, Romans 8:14, that a person is led rather than allocating parts of a life.

What James says the cost is

The New Testament describes this condition with a compound word, and it is not an insult.

A double minded man is unstable in all his ways. (James 1:8)

Double minded. Literally two-souled. And unstable in all his ways, which is the cost, and the word all is doing the work.

That is worth noting by a person who assumes the arrangement is contained. The claim in James is that the instability does not stay in the compartment where the two-mindedness lives; it shows up everywhere, including in the parts that appear to be going well.

And unstable is a walking word again, the same picture as the limp, which is presumably not an accident.

I would say the honest thing: nobody I know from this background has ever fully resolved the two worlds, and the ones who claim to have done it usually amputated something. That is not what is being offered here.

You are described by a walking word rather than by a verdict on your sincerity. James 1:8 says unstable in all his ways, which is a description rather than an accusation, and it is by the Spirit, Ephesians 3:16, that a person is strengthened in the inner man.

What the third place actually is

If there is no third place where all of a person is, that is worth answering directly, because Scripture offers one and it is not a room.

For our conversation is in heaven; from whence also we look for the Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ. (Philippians 3:20)

Our conversation is in heaven. The word is a civic one: our citizenship, our commonwealth.

That is not a promise that the two worlds merge. Nothing merges, and Paul does not suggest it will. What is offered is a citizenship held somewhere neither of them controls, which is a place a whole person can be from without either country losing anything.

And it does not resolve the in-betweenness, which is the reader's actual life and will be for the rest of it. What it does is stop the in-betweenness from being the deepest fact about them.

You have a citizenship in a place neither of your two worlds administers. Philippians 3:20 puts it in heaven and uses a civic word, and it is the Holy Spirit of promise, Ephesians 1:14, who is called the earnest of that inheritance.

What ended it in the chapter

The chapter does end, and the ending is worth knowing because it is not an argument.

And when all the people saw it, they fell on their faces: and they said, The LORD, he is God; the LORD, he is God. (1 Kings 18:39)

They say it twice.

And notice what produced it. Not the question in verse 21; that got silence. What ended the limping was something happening that they saw, and then a sentence said out loud, twice, by everybody.

Nobody argued anybody out of anything. The question was asked, went unanswered for most of a chapter, and was eventually answered out loud by people who had known the answer the entire time.

You are able to say out loud a thing you have known the whole time. 1 Kings 18:39 has them saying it twice after a chapter of silence, and it is by the Spirit, 1 Corinthians 12:3, that anybody says Jesus is Lord at all.