Riseth Up Again

She knows the number and the number is six.

Not six of anything you would put in a sentence to a stranger. Six times she has turned about the same thing, meant it, held it for a stretch, and then found herself back. Six is not a guess. She has kept count the way people keep count of things that matter to them, and each one has a date attached, and she could give you the dates.

And her position now, at the end of the sixth, is that the count has become the thing. She is no longer thinking about the matter itself. She is thinking about being a person who has done this six times.

Here is the reasoning underneath, and it is worth saying out loud because it operates in the dark otherwise. Once is a mistake. Twice is unfortunate. Six is a pattern, and a pattern is not an event, it is a description of a person. And you can repent of an event. She is not sure what you do about a description.

So she has not made the seventh turn. Not because she does not want to, and not because the pull is not there. Because a seventh turn would be a seventh entry, and at some point the number stops being a record of what she has done and starts reading as her name.

That is you at six.

You've got a count. And the count crossed a line somewhere between three and five, and after that it stopped being a list of occasions and became evidence about the kind of person you are. And now the getting up is what you cannot face, because getting up is what puts another number on the list.

The proverb counts to seven and calls him just

Here is the verse, and I want to take it slowly because the arithmetic in it is doing something nobody expects.

For a just man falleth seven times, and riseth up again: but the wicked shall fall into mischief.Proverbs 24:16

A just man falleth seven times. Read that again with your count in your hand.

The verse does not say a just man occasionally stumbles. It gives a number, and the number is high, and the number is attached to the word just. Seven, in that literature, is the number of completeness: it is not seven exactly, it is as many times as there are. And the man being described while all this falling goes on is called just the whole way through.

You are described in that verse rather than excluded by it, and the count you have been reading as disqualification is inside the definition, and I am not softening a proverb: Proverbs 24:16 puts seven falls and the word just in the same clause, in writing, and it is the Holy Spirit rather than my saying so who can get that into a woman at number six.

Now watch where the contrast actually falls, because this is the part people get wrong. You would expect the second half to say: but the wicked man falls too many times. It does not. The contrast is not between falling more and falling less. The just man and the wicked man are not separated by the number of falls in that sentence.

They are separated by the rising.

The just man is the one who gets up. That is the whole distinction the proverb draws. Not a cleaner record. A pattern of rising, which by definition requires a pattern of falling to be visible at all.

You have been counting the wrong column, and the column that defines a just man in that verse is the one you keep refusing to add to, which is written into the structure of the proverb rather than into my encouragement, with the Spirit of God able to reach a place where six dates have hardened into a name.

Let me put this the way I would teach it, because doctrine you cannot dance to does not move anybody. Righteousness in that proverb is not a thin record. It is a habit of getting up. And a habit of getting up is not built by people who fall once; it is built by people who fall enough times to have got good at rising, and that is a strange and glorious thing to say out loud but the verse says it first.

This seventh rising is the very thing the proverb calls you by, because Scripture puts the identity on the rising rather than the record, and the Holy Spirit is the one carrying that onto a street corner in the late afternoon.