He Could Say Every Word of It and Feel Nothing While He Said It

He can say the whole thing.

Ask him at any hour, wake him at three in the morning, and he can give you the outline, the verses, the order it goes in, and the words the congregation says together. He learned it before he could read. It is in him the way a phone number from childhood is in him.

And he stood in a service last month with the room saying something out loud around him, and he was saying it too, correctly, in time, and there was nothing behind his eyes at all.

He is not in rebellion. That is the confusing part. He has not stopped believing anything. If you asked him whether the words are true he would say yes without a pause and he would mean it.

He is just not there when he says them. He is somewhere about a foot behind his own face, watching himself say a true thing and feeling exactly nothing, and then he goes and gets his coat, and he does not tell anybody, because what would he even call it.

The word he is afraid of is hypocrite. And I want to say, before anything else, that Isaiah has a different word for this and it is much more accurate and much kinder.

The verse describes drawing near, not pretending

Here is the sentence, and the first half of it is the half that gets missed.

Wherefore the Lord said, Forasmuch as this people draw near me with their mouth, and with their lips do honour me, but have removed their heart far from me, and their fear toward me is taught by the precept of men. (Isaiah 29:13, King James Version)

Draw near me. That is what they are doing. They are approaching. They showed up, they opened their mouths, they said true things about God out loud with their own faces.

He does not say they were faking. He says the mouth arrived and the heart did not, which is a different accusation entirely, and anybody who has ever stood in a room saying a true sentence and felt nothing knows immediately that the second one is the accurate description.

You are drawing near, and He names that first before He names anything else. Isaiah 29:13 opens with the approach rather than with the failure, and it is the Holy Spirit, Romans 8:26, who is described as helping in exactly the place where a person cannot produce what they mean.

He names the mechanism and it is not sin, it is teaching

Then the diagnosis, and it is the most useful clause in the verse.

their fear toward me is taught by the precept of men.

Taught. Not chosen. Not invented. Taught, which means somebody sat down and passed it on, in good faith, over a long period, and it went in the way things go in when a person is small.

A precept is a rule with a reason attached. And what Isaiah is describing is a whole reverence for God assembled out of rules with human reasons attached, which is a thing you can learn perfectly and perform flawlessly and never once feel, because the machinery is doing the work instead of the heart.

I need to say this next part carefully. This is not an indictment of the people who taught anybody. Every one of us learned to speak from somebody, and a child raised with no precepts at all is not more spiritual, he is only more lost. The problem is not that it was taught. The problem is that a taught reverence can go the whole distance without ever passing through the middle of a person.

You were taught, and being taught is not the same as being false. Isaiah 29:13 identifies the mechanism as teaching rather than as deceit, and it is by the Spirit, Galatians 4:6, that a taught word turns into a cry from inside a person rather than a recitation.

The next verse is a promise, not a punishment

Almost nobody reads verse 14, and verse 14 is where the whole passage turns.

Therefore, behold, I will proceed to do a marvellous work among this people, even a marvellous work and a wonder. (Isaiah 29:14)

Therefore. Because of the condition just described. Because the mouth is near and the heart is far, God announces that He is going to do something remarkable.

Not that He is going to remove them. Not that He is going to wait for them to feel more. His response to a room of people saying true words with nothing behind their eyes is to announce a work of His own.

And that is exactly the right response, because the thing that is missing is not something a person can manufacture. Nobody has ever felt their way into feeling. A man cannot decide to mean it harder. If the heart has moved, then something has to be done about the heart, and that has always been His department.

You are the reason a marvelous work was announced rather than a verdict. Isaiah 29:14 opens with therefore and moves straight to what God is going to do, and it is the Holy Spirit who is named in Titus 3:5 as the one doing the renewing.

What He promises is an organ transplant

If you want to know what the marvelous work is, Ezekiel says it in physical language and it is not subtle.

A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh. And I will put my spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes. (Ezekiel 36:26-27)

Read the verbs. I will give. I will put. I will take away. I will give. I will put. I will cause. Six of them, and every single one has God as the subject.

Nobody in that sentence is asked to work up a feeling. The stony heart is not scolded for being stone; it is removed. And the walking in the statutes, which is the part a person keeps trying to achieve by effort, is placed at the end as an effect rather than at the beginning as a condition.

That is the answer to a man standing a foot behind his own face. The problem is at the level of an organ, and the promise is at the level of an organ, and the surgeon named in the passage is God.

You have been promised a heart of flesh, and the taking away of the other one is His verb. Ezekiel 36:26 says I will take away the stony heart, and verse 27 says I will put my spirit within you, which puts the Holy Spirit inside the promise rather than beside it.

The word for what you are calling numbness

I want to give this back its right name, because the wrong name is doing damage.

A hypocrite is a man performing a devotion he does not hold. He knows there is a gap and he is using it. What is being described here is somebody who holds the devotion, cannot feel it, and is grieved about that, which is the exact opposite condition wearing the same coat.

Grief about numbness is not numbness. It is evidence of something alive in there being unhappy about the situation, and a dead man does not complain about being dead.

For ye have not received the spirit of bondage again to fear; but ye have received the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father. (Romans 8:15)

Whereby we cry. The crying is attributed to the Spirit rather than to the emotional weather of the person crying. Which means the cry counts on the days when it is loud and on the days when it is a sentence said flatly into a windshield with nothing behind it.

You are not a hypocrite, and the grief you feel about this is itself a sign of life. Romans 8:15 attributes the cry to the Spirit of adoption, and it is the same Spirit who bears witness in the next verse rather than leaving the verdict to how a person felt on Sunday.