Carried on the Heart, Name by Name

He has spent nineteen years in systems and it has done something to his picture of God.

Not a cynic. He would be quick to tell you he is not a cynic and he would be right. He works in operations, he likes it, and he is very good at the thing he does, which is essentially to make sure that large numbers of people are correctly handled by processes that cannot possibly know them.

That is his whole professional life: making it so that a person who is only ever a record gets treated properly anyway.

And somewhere in the middle of that, without noticing, he built the same architecture in his head about God.

He believes God knows about him. Fully, accurately, comprehensively. Every fact. Nothing missing.

He does not believe God knows him.

He would struggle to explain the difference if you pushed him, and then he would say something like: it is the difference between a file that is complete and somebody who would recognize your walk from behind at a distance.

He is a good man with a correct doctrine and a cold picture, and the picture goes with him into every prayer he prays, and it is why he has never once been able to say anything to God that he would not be prepared to put in writing.

Twelve names on a chest, and where they were carried

And Aaron shall bear the names of the children of Israel in the breastplate of judgment upon his heart, when he goeth in unto the holy place, for a memorial before the LORD continually (Exodus 28:29).

Look at where the names are and what is being done with them.

Not on a list. Not in a record kept in a side room. On a breastplate, worn on the body, over the heart, and carried by a man walking into the holiest place there was.

And it says upon his heart, which is not decoration. The chapter is describing an actual object with actual stones with actual names cut into them, and the placement is specified: over the heart, and carried in.

You are carried and not filed. That is the picture the word chooses to describe how a people are brought before God, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes an ancient piece of priestly clothing into something a man can feel in his chest, because Scripture says He makes intercession for us with groanings, which is not the behavior of a system.

Knowing about and knowing

Now let me sharpen the distinction you could not explain, because it is the whole article and you were nearly there.

A system knows about. It holds facts, and it can hold every fact, and it can be entirely accurate, and it can process you correctly on a Tuesday without any of that involving anything you would call being known.

A person knows. Knowing is relational. It involves regard, and history, and the specific way one person holds another in mind, and it is not made out of facts at all, which is why a friend who has forgotten your birthday still knows you and a database that has it never did.

You have spent nineteen years making sure the first kind treats people well. That is honorable work. It also means the only model of comprehensive attention you have handled every day is the impersonal kind.

You are known and not merely known about. The word says the Lord knows them that are His (2 Timothy 2:19), and the verb there is relational, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that a warm thing rather than a data claim, because He is called the Spirit of adoption and adoption is entirely a matter of regard.

Continually

There is one more word in the verse and it is doing more than it looks.

For a memorial before the LORD continually.

Continually. Not when the priest remembered to bring the list. Not when somebody's case came up. The names went in every single time, because they were attached to the man rather than to the occasion, and there was no version of him walking in there without them.

Which means, in the picture the chapter is drawing, there was never a moment when those names were not in the room.

You are in the room continually and not when your case comes up. Scripture says He ever lives to make intercession for them (Hebrews 7:25), and ever is the same idea carried into the New Testament, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a continual thing into a felt one, which a man cannot do for himself out of doctrine.

And I will be honest, because you would put a red line through anything else. Knowing this does not change how you feel in a prayer tomorrow morning and nineteen years of an architecture does not come down in an evening. What is settled is where the names are carried, and a man who knows that prays with something in his chest that was not there before.