The Same Forty Pages

There is a book in your house that you have read forty pages of about eleven times and the other three hundred pages once.

You know exactly which forty. Pages forty one to eighty, roughly, and the spine has gone soft in that one place so the book falls open there on its own. That is the section, and you go back to it about every two months, and you read it slowly, and then you put the book down.

And that has begun to feel like a problem. Not because anybody said anything. Because reading forty pages of a book over and over while the rest of it sits there unvisited sounds, when you say it out loud, like something has gone slightly wrong.

Two things are not coming here, and you have met them both.

Nobody is handing you a list. Not a title, not an author, not a genre, and no shelf of what anybody ought to have read by now. Being handed one has never once opened a book.

And nobody is saying one word about your phone. You know about the phone. Everybody knows. Being told again by a stranger returns nothing at all.

What I want to look at is the going back, because Scripture has somebody sent back into the same water seven times and told to do exactly that.

He dipped himself seven times

There is a scene in 2 Kings 5 where a man is given an instruction that offends him because of how repetitive it is.

Then went he down, and dipped himself seven times in Jordan, according to the saying of the man of God: and his flesh came again like unto the flesh of a little child, and he was clean. (2 Kings 5:14, King James Version)

Read the shape of what he was told to do.

Seven times. In the same river. The same act, repeated, with no variation and no progression, and nothing in the instruction suggests that the seventh dip was somewhere different from the first.

And notice what he objected to earlier in the chapter. He wanted a different river, a more impressive one, and he wanted something to happen rather than something to be repeated. The repetition was the part he found insulting.

You are doing something Scripture prescribed rather than tolerated, and eleven returns to the same forty pages have never once been a fault. 2 Kings 5:14 has the same act done seven times in the same water as the actual instruction, and the Holy Spirit is the one saying that over a spine gone soft in one place.

There is one more detail in it and it is the interesting one.

Nothing happened on dips one through six that the text records. The result is reported at the end, after the seventh, and the six before it are simply listed as having happened. They were not failures and they were not warm ups. They were part of the thing.

You have returns that count without producing anything yet, and eleven readings of one section have never once needed to show a result. It is written according to the saying of the man of God, the six dips before the last are recorded without comment as part of the whole, and the Spirit of God is saying that plainly here.

The rule about reading straight through

Here is the mechanism, and it is a convention rather than a fact.

A book is a physical object with a front and a back, and the object suggests a direction, and somewhere the direction became a rule.

That is the whole source of the discomfort. Nothing about reading requires the pages to be taken in order or once. The order is a property of the binding. It exists so that pages do not fall out, and it happens to also carry the sequence of a story, and those two facts got fused into a requirement that nobody ever stated.

And once the requirement exists, going back to pages forty one to eighty eleven times reads as circling rather than as reading, and circling sounds like a problem.

You are obeying a property of a binding, and reading the same section repeatedly has never once been circling. 2 Kings 5:14 has the man do the same thing seven times in the same place as the instruction itself, and the Holy Spirit is present with a man who has been going back every two months for two years.

And there is a second layer, and it is the one that makes the whole thing make sense.

Those forty pages do something that a first reading cannot do. Everything in them is already known. So the activity is not following, it is dwelling: noticing how the thing is put together, catching what got missed, sitting inside a passage rather than traveling through it.

That is a completely different activity from reading a book once, and it has no name in ordinary conversation, which is exactly why it sounds like a fault when described out loud.

You have an activity with no common name, and dwelling in a passage has never once been a lesser thing than passing through it. The written word makes the repetition the instruction and records the middle attempts without judgment, and His Spirit is the one who takes a convention off a man.

Ten pages of the one you already know

So here is the assignment, and it is the same section on purpose.

Read ten pages of a book you already know.

Pages forty one to fifty, or wherever the spine falls open. That section. For the twelfth time.

Not the rest of the book to be fair to it. Not the next forty pages as a compromise. The same ten, again, on purpose, because they are the ones you want.

You are doing what Scripture prescribed rather than tolerated, and eleven returns to one section have never once been circling. The Holy Spirit is the one in that corner with you, and 2 Kings 5:14 makes seven dips in the same water the instruction itself.

Here is why the same ones.

Reading on tonight would concede the rule. It would accept that the eleven returns were a holding pattern to be broken out of, and they were not. They were eleven complete visits to a place worth visiting, and there is a twelfth available.

And ten pages rather than the forty, because ten is the unit on this site and because a known passage read slowly does not need the full stretch to do what it does.

You are able to open the same section for the twelfth time, and a twelfth visit has never once been worth less than a first. 2 Kings 5:14 says then went he down, and dipped himself seven times in Jordan, and the Holy Ghost is the one present with a man reading pages forty one to fifty again in a lamp lit corner.

And leave the rest of the book alone. Nobody is asking you to get to it, tonight or ever, and the three hundred unvisited pages are not a debt.

You have a section that is yours to return to, and three hundred pages read once have never once been a claim on you. It is written and his flesh came again like unto the flesh of a little child, the result comes after seven identical acts in the same water, and the Spirit of God is saying it in that corner tonight.