There Were Three Of Us There

Close your eyes and go back to it and see where God is standing.

For most people He is at the front. In the robes, or behind the man in the robes, presiding. Official, benevolent, and entirely on the ceremony side of the arrangement rather than inside it.

That picture has been quietly running your whole marriage since, and you have never once examined it.

Because if God was the official, then He conducted a thing between two people and then the two people went home and got on with it. He was present at the making and absent from the keeping.

Which would explain a great deal about how the last few years have felt.

I am not going to promise you that a different picture fixes anything. It does not fix anything. What it does is change who is in the house, and that turns out to matter more than I can easily explain.

Surely the LORD is in this place

There is a moment in Genesis with a man asleep on the ground in the middle of nowhere, and what he says when he wakes is the whole of this article.

Surely the LORD is in this place; and I knew it not (Genesis 28:16, King James Version)

He is not in a temple. There is no altar, no priest, no ceremony. He is on a road, with a stone under his head, running away from a family situation of his own making.

And the sentence is not: the LORD came here. It is: the LORD is in this place, and I did not know.

The presence was not established by the dream. The presence was already the case, and what the dream did was inform him.

You are standing in a house where He already is, and Genesis 28 has never once made a person's awareness the thing that puts Him there. Genesis 28:16 has the man discover a presence rather than summon one, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that a discovery in a kitchen instead of a doctrine on a page.

Now put that against the picture at the front of the church. That picture has God at the ceremony because a ceremony is where you would expect Him. Jacob's sentence is about the last place anybody would look.

You have been assuming a location rather than checking one, and the word has never once put God only where a person expected Him. The passage puts the presence in an unremarkable place with nobody aware of it, and the Spirit of God is the one who informs somebody of what has been true for years.

A party rather than an official

Let me make the distinction as plainly as I can, because it is the whole hinge.

An official conducts a thing between other people. His involvement ends when the paperwork does. He goes home.

A party is inside the arrangement. A party has something at stake in it. A party is one of the ones the promise was made between.

When you said your vows, you said them to him and you said them to God. God received a promise that day. That makes Him a party, and a party does not go home afterward.

You are inside an arrangement with three names on it, and there has never once been a version of this where He left after the ceremony. Genesis 28:16 has the presence continuing in a place where nobody had noticed it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who moves God from the front of a church into a hallway.

You were promising to somebody who has stayed, and no verse has ever once described the receiving of a vow as the end of His involvement. It is written that the LORD is in this place and a man did not know it, and the Spirit of God is the one who tells a person what has been true in their house all along.

I am not going to follow that with a promise about what He does with the marriage. Presence is what is being claimed here, and presence is not a small thing, and it is not the same as an outcome.

One sentence, in your own house

Here is the assignment and it follows straight from Jacob.

Say one sentence of prayer out loud about the marriage, in the room where the two of you actually live.

You are speaking to somebody who was in that place before you noticed, and Genesis 28 has never once made a person's awareness the thing that put Him there. Genesis 28:16 has a man discover a presence rather than summon one, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is standing in a front room on a Thursday.

Not in church. Not in the car. In the room. Because the whole point of Genesis 28 is a man discovering that an ordinary place was not empty.

Something like: this house has had You in it and I did not know, and this marriage is Yours.

Out loud. When he is not there. This is not something to ask him to be part of.

You are speaking to somebody who is already in the room, and it has never once been necessary to bring Him with you. Genesis 28:16 has the presence precede the awareness entirely, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is standing in a front room while a man says one sentence out loud.