Blogging in Christ — Issue 27

Write the Vision, Make It Plain

Every course ends with a next step. This one ends with a watchtower.

The prophet did not begin by writing. He began by standing. "I will stand at my watch and set myself on the ramparts, and will look out to see what he will say to me, and what I will answer concerning my complaint." (Habakkuk 2:1) First the watching, then the writing. The herald does not invent the message on the ramparts. He waits until the Lord speaks, and answers his own complaint with what he hears. A writer who reverses the order has nothing to announce but himself.

Then the command came, in two parts that must not be separated. "Yahweh answered me, 'Write the vision, and make it plain on tablets, that he who runs may read it.'" (Habakkuk 2:2) Write it, and make it plain. A vision kept only in the prophet's head serves no runner, and a vision written in a tangle serves no runner either. Plainness is not a concession to the age's short attention. It is the form the command takes: the tablet must be legible to a man in motion. He reads as he runs. Say the thing truly. Write it plainly. Let the reader run with it.

Mark what the command does not promise: not that the runner will arrive at once, or that the vision will be fulfilled while the ink is wet. "For the vision is yet for the appointed time, and it hurries toward the end, and won't prove false. Though it takes time, wait for it, because it will surely come. It won't delay." (Habakkuk 2:3) The appointed time is not the writer's. It hurries toward its end — not stalled, not idle — and yet it takes time. The work is urgent because the end is certain, and patient because the time is appointed. A herald who demands immediate fruit has confused his own calendar with God's. A herald who stops writing because the fruit is slow has confused patience with surrender. Wait for it: the hardest word in the whole charge.

This is why the division of labor makes perseverance possible. The writer plants and waters. God gives the increase. "I planted. Apollos watered. But God gave the increase. So then neither he who plants is anything, nor he who waters, but God who gives the increase." (1 Corinthians 3:6-7) If the increase belonged to the writer, every quiet season would be an indictment, every unread piece a failure. The writer would either inflate his numbers to hide the silence, or quit to escape it. But if the increase belongs to God, the quiet season indicts no one, and small faithfulness is not wasted. The writer's business is the tablet: written, plain, true. The increase is God's, on God's time.

Therefore the command to the weary writer is not to write louder or more cleverly, or to find a new device that will finally make the work take hold. The command is endurance. "For you need endurance so that, having done the will of God, you may receive the promise." (Hebrews 10:36) Endurance is not mere continuance out of habit or stubbornness. It is continuance with the will of God as its object. The tablet is written plain because that is the will of God for the herald. The waiting is endured because the appointed time is God's. Write, and wait.

The same letter warns against the opposite motion, and every tired writer feels its pull. "Therefore don't throw away your boldness, which has a great reward." (Hebrews 10:35) Boldness is thrown away quietly: when a writer softens a hard text so it offends no one, or trims a plain sentence into a vague one so it can mean anything, or stops writing the vision and starts writing what the age already agrees with. Each softening feels like wisdom. Each one is a surrender. Do not throw it away. The charge has not changed because the season is quiet.

Weariness, then, is not evidence that the work has failed. It is evidence that the work is real. "Therefore we don't faint, but though our outward person is decaying, yet our inward person is renewed day by day. For our light affliction, which is for the moment, works for us more and more exceedingly an eternal weight of glory." (2 Corinthians 4:16-17) The outward person decays, and Scripture does not pretend otherwise. Yet the inward person is renewed day by day — not by the writer's reserves, which run dry, but by the same Word he announces. The herald is fed by the message he carries, and the text renews him in the writing. The affliction is light not because it feels light, but because glory outweighs it.

And the race has a direction. "Therefore let's also, seeing we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, lay aside every weight and the sin which so easily entangles us, and let's run with perseverance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the author and perfecter of faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising its shame, and has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God." (Hebrews 12:1-2) The runner of Habakkuk's tablet becomes the runner of this race, run looking to Jesus. The writer lays aside weights, and among them are the very measures this series set aside: the count of readers, the size of a list, the noise of approval. The writer's endurance ends where the Lord's ended, at the right hand of the throne, because the race has one finish and one Judge.

The Word the herald carries will do its own work in its own time. As the rain waters the earth and gives seed to the sower, "so is my word that goes out of my mouth: it will not return to me void, but it will accomplish that which I please, and it will prosper in the thing I sent it to do." (Isaiah 55:11) The writer does not control which field it waters or when the bud breaks. He controls the tablet: that the Word is written, written plainly, written faithfully. "The prophet who has a dream, let him tell a dream; and he who has my word, let him speak my word faithfully. What is the straw to the wheat?" says Yahweh. (Jeremiah 23:28) The straw is the writer's own invention. The wheat is the Word.

The temptation of a long series is to believe that one more issue will settle the matter. It will not. The work is finished by the Lord's appointed time, not by the writer's output. The series ends, therefore, not with a technique for endless production, but with the one practice: stand at the watch, write the vision plain, wait for its time, and do not throw away boldness in the waiting.

The writer's subject was never an audience, a market, or a brand. It was always a Person, the same at the end as at the beginning. "Beginning from Moses and from all the prophets, he explained to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself." (Luke 24:27) And the righteous live by faith — "Behold, his soul is puffed up. It is not upright in him, but the righteous will live by his faith." (Habakkuk 2:4) — the same faith the writer announces, or his announcements are straw.

So the last word is the first charge, repeated because it is the only one that endures. "Therefore, my beloved brothers, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the Lord's work, because you know that your labor is not in vain in the Lord." (1 Corinthians 15:58) The labor is not in vain in the Lord — not because the writer can see its fruit, but because the Lord does not lose what is done in Him. The apostle finished his course with the same confidence: "I have fought the good fight. I have finished the course. I have kept the faith." (2 Timothy 4:7) He did not claim the increase. He claimed the course, kept. That is the herald's finish, and it is enough.

Write the vision. Make it plain. Wait for its appointed time. The tablet stands, the runner reads, and God gives the increase.