I Am Waiting Until I Am Certain

There is a question he has held open for ten years and he could give you the reasons in about four minutes and every one of them would be sound.

He is not evading anything. That is worth saying at the start, because the people who love him occasionally suspect it, and they are wrong, and it is the one accusation that genuinely stings.

The question is real. The considerations on each side are real. He has read the material, he has thought about it properly, he has changed his mind twice and changed it back once, and he is now in a position where he can articulate the strongest version of every position including the ones he does not hold.

What he cannot do is close it.

Because closing it would mean acting on a conclusion he cannot fully warrant, and doing that is the thing he has spent his whole adult life not doing, and which he watches other people do constantly and which he does not respect.

He is forty-eight.

And what happened three weeks ago, at a table like this one, with eight people arguing happily about something unrelated, was that he applied his own standard to somebody else for the first time.

He watched a man at that table state something with confidence, and he thought, automatically, that the man could not possibly warrant that.

And then, about four seconds later, the second thought arrived, and it has not left since: nobody at this table can warrant anything at that standard. Nobody anywhere ever has. Including him. Including about anything he has already done.

What this page is not doing

Let me be precise, because you will read this precisely and you should.

Nothing here is going to tell you what to conclude about your question. This page does not know what it is, and would not be qualified, and any page that offered would be doing something you should distrust.

And nothing here is going to tell you that ten years was evasion. It was not. You have a standard, you have held it consistently, and consistency is not cowardice.

And nothing here is going to hand you a plan or a direction or anything reaching past this week.

You are not being asked to conclude anything and you are not being accused of anything. That is not caution on my part. Scripture handles this in one clause about what human beings know, and the Holy Spirit has never once required a man to be certain before He would deal with him.

The clause about tomorrow

Here is the sentence, and it is addressed to people making perfectly reasonable business plans.

Whereas ye know not what shall be on the morrow. For what is your life? It is even a vapour, that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away.James 4:14

Ye know not what shall be on the morrow.

Notice who that is said about. Not about the foolish, or the presumptuous, or the intellectually careless. It is said about everybody, as a flat description of the human epistemic position.

And notice what James does with it. He does not tell them to stop planning. Read the next verse: for that ye ought to say, if the Lord will, we shall live, and do this, or that.

The correction is not to the doing. It is to the framing. They go on doing the thing, and the thing is now held under a clause.

You are living in a universal condition that Scripture states as a plain fact about all human beings, and the response it prescribes is not to stop acting but to hold the acting under a clause. I am not stretching that. James 4:14 states the ignorance and James 4:15 prescribes the framing rather than the cessation, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a written line like that and lands it on a man at a table with eight people arguing.

The standard is unmeetable and that is the finding

Now the thing you found three weeks ago, stated properly, because you deserve it stated properly.

Your standard of warrant is not too high in the sense of being unreasonable. It is coherent. It is the standard you would apply in a piece of formal reasoning and you would be right to.

It is that you have been applying a standard appropriate to a proposition to something that is not a proposition. A next action is not a claim. It does not assert anything. It does not have a truth value.

Which means the warrant condition you have been trying to satisfy for ten years is not just difficult to meet. It is not the kind of thing that could be met, because it is category-inappropriate to the object.

You already know this. You worked it out at that table and you have been sitting with it for three weeks.

You have been applying a standard for propositions to something that is not a proposition, and the word describes everybody's warrant about tomorrow as identically absent. That is James 4:14 as a universal statement, and the Spirit who searches all things has been with you through ten honest years and has not been withholding a warrant.

And what is actually being asked

Let me be exact about the scope, because scope is the thing you will check.

Not the question. This page is not asking you to close it, decide it, or act on either horn of it. It stays open. Nothing here touches it.

One ordinary thing in front of you this week, which does not assert your conclusion, does not commit you to a position, and requires no warrant beyond the ordinary warrant anybody has for anything.

And you may hold it under the clause. If the Lord will. That is not a hedge, it is what James actually prescribes.

You are able to do one ordinary thing this week without closing anything, and Scripture prescribes exactly that framing rather than requiring the certainty first. The word never once requires warrant before a person may do the next ordinary thing, and the Spirit who was given to guide is not standing behind a standard that no human being has ever met.