He Closed the Book in the Middle of the Sentence and Sat Down

He has been handed halves his whole life and never once seen a seam.

That is what makes this difficult. A half does not look like a half. It looks like a sentence. It is grammatical, it is complete on its own terms, and there is nothing about it that announces that something has been taken off the end of it.

So he has a Bible in his head made of fragments, every one of which is a real quotation, and he has no idea which of them are whole and which are pieces, and no way to find out except by opening it.

And he has not opened it, because he assumed that what he had was what there was.

There is a Sabbath in Nazareth where Jesus reads out loud from a scroll and stops in the middle of a sentence, and where He stops is the whole message.

What He read

Here it is, in the King James Version:

And there was delivered unto him the book of the prophet Esaias. And when he had opened the book, he found the place where it was written, The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised, To preach the acceptable year of the Lord. (Luke 4:17-19)

To preach the acceptable year of the Lord.

And then:

And he closed the book, and he gave it again to the minister, and sat down. And the eyes of all them that were in the synagogue were fastened on him. (Luke 4:20)

And he closed the book.

Now go to Isaiah 61 and read the sentence He was in the middle of:

To proclaim the acceptable year of the LORD, and the day of vengeance of our God. (Isaiah 61:2)

He stopped at the comma.

Everybody in that room knew the second half. They had heard that passage all their lives, and He read up to the comma and closed the scroll and sat down, and the silence in the room is described in the next line: every eye fastened on Him.

You are able to notice where something stops and you were never going to see it without the whole. Luke 4:20 records the closing of the book mid-sentence, and it is the Holy Spirit rather than a scholar's note who makes a stopping point speak to an ordinary reader.

Why the stopping was the message

And then He says one sentence.

And he began to say unto them, This day is this scripture fulfilled in your ears. (Luke 4:21)

This day is this scripture fulfilled.

The half He read is the half that was being fulfilled that day. The other half was not, and He said so by stopping rather than by explaining.

That is an enormous thing to communicate without a word of commentary, and it works because everybody in the room had the whole passage.

Which is the reverse of the situation this article is about. In Nazareth, the omission carried the meaning because the hearers knew what was left out. A man who does not know what was left out cannot receive anything from an omission; he simply receives a smaller thing and does not know it is smaller.

So the difference between a stopping that teaches and a stopping that misleads is entirely in whether the hearer has the whole.

You have a whole available and you were never meant to work from what somebody left you. Luke 4:21 has the meaning carried by an omission that everybody could see, and it is His Spirit who makes reading the whole the thing that lets a man receive what a part is doing.

Why every part of it is given

And the reason all of it is available.

All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness. (2 Timothy 3:16)

All scripture. Not the useful parts. Not the parts that get read out. All of it, and the word profitable is attached to the whole.

And Paul, describing his own practice with a church he had spent three years with:

For I have not shunned to declare unto you all the counsel of God. (Acts 20:27)

All the counsel of God. He says it as a defense of his own record, which means he expected to be measured on whether he had held anything back.

That is a striking standard for a teacher and it says something about what a hearer is owed. Nobody in that room was supposed to end up with a Bible made of the parts that suited a particular emphasis.

You are owed the whole counsel and you were never meant to hold a selection. Acts 20:27 has a man defend himself by saying he shunned nothing, and 2 Timothy 3:16 attaches profitable to all of it, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes the parts nobody reads out something a man can go and get.

What a man finds when he goes looking

And it is worth saying what actually happens, because a man expects the worst.

Most of the time the missing half does not overturn what he was told. Most of the time it qualifies it, or gives the situation it was written into, or adds a clause that makes it warmer rather than harder.

Occasionally it does overturn it, and that is worth knowing about too.

And the ordinary experience is that a passage becomes larger rather than smaller, because a fragment is always thinner than the thing it came out of, and the thinness is what a man has been living with without knowing what to call it.

That is worth expecting. Not exposure. Enlargement.

You are likely to find more rather than less and you were never going to lose by reading the whole. 2 Timothy 3:16 calls all of it profitable, and it is His Spirit who makes a fuller passage a gift rather than a correction.