Stand Up, I Myself Also Am a Man Is What He Said on the Floor

When he reads the Bible he hears it in a particular voice, and the voice is not God's.

It is a man he has known since he was fourteen. It is not a bad voice. It is warm and it is careful and it has been right about a great many things, and he owes that man more than he could easily say.

But it is his voice. Every sentence of Scripture arrives in his cadence, with his emphasis, and with the little pause he puts before the important part. And when the man is not sure about something, that uncertainty is in there too, and when the man dislikes a passage, the dislike comes with it.

He has never once read a verse in a voice that was not somebody's.

He did not choose this. Nobody set out to install a voice in him. It is what happens when everything a man has of God has come to him through one channel for thirty years, and it means that in practice, at the level where things actually operate, there is a person standing between him and God, and neither of them ever agreed to that.

There is a moment in Acts where a man falls at another man's feet and gets pulled up off the floor in one sentence.

What Cornelius did and what Peter did

Here it is, in the King James Version:

And as Peter was coming in, Cornelius met him, and fell down at his feet, and worshipped him. But Peter took him up, saying, Stand up; I myself also am a man. (Acts 10:25-26)

Fell down at his feet, and worshipped him.

Cornelius is not a foolish man. Luke describes him a few verses earlier as devout, generous, and a man of prayer. He is not somebody who bows to anybody.

He does it because he has been told, by an angel, to send for Peter, and the message arrived with enormous weight, and when the man arrives the weight goes onto the man.

That is the mechanism, and it is worth noticing that it starts with something genuine. The angel was real. The instruction was real. Peter was in fact the man to send for. Nothing in the chain was false, and the bowing still happened.

But Peter took him up.

Physically. He does not say a word first. The first thing recorded is that he picked him up off the floor, and the sentence comes second.

You are not foolish for how this happened and you were never bowing to something false. Acts 10:25 has a devout and praying man do it in response to a real message, and it is the Holy Spirit rather than a sharper eye who shows a man what he has quietly put where it does not belong.

What he says, which is one clause

Stand up; I myself also am a man.

Four words in the second half and they do all the work. Not: I am unworthy, which would have been modest and would have left the frame intact. Not: worship God instead, which would have been correct and would have been a correction.

I myself also am a man. He puts himself in the same category as the man on the floor. The word also is the whole sentence.

That is not humility as a performance. It is a factual statement about what class of thing he is, made by somebody who had every reason to enjoy the alternative and did not.

And it is worth saying plainly on this site: the man whose voice you hear when you read would almost certainly say the same thing if you told him. Most of them would be appalled. The arrangement is rarely built by the man at the top of it.

You have somebody who would say that same sentence and you were never dealing with a man who wanted this. Acts 10:26 has Peter say I myself also am a man to somebody at his feet, and it is His Spirit who makes a man in that position able to say it rather than enjoy it.

The one in the middle, named

And the sentence that says what the arrangement actually is, in a letter to a young pastor.

For there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus. (1 Timothy 2:5)

One mediator. The number is the point of the verse.

That is not an argument against teachers, and the letter it sits in is full of instructions to a teacher about how to teach. It is a statement about the specific role of standing between, and it says the position is occupied.

Which means the seat the voice in his head has been sitting in was never vacant. It has an occupant, named, in the same sentence, and the occupant is described as the man Christ Jesus, which is a deliberate phrase: the mediator is Himself a man, so the mediating is not done by somebody who cannot understand the ones being mediated for.

You have one mediator and the seat was never empty. 1 Timothy 2:5 names one God and one mediator, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes an occupied seat something a man knows rather than a thing he agrees with.

What direct access actually looks like

And two verses about what is available, because this is not an argument for a man to be alone.

Let us therefore come boldly unto the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy, and find grace to help in time of need. (Hebrews 4:16)

Come boldly. Speaking freely, without managing it. And the invitation goes to us, which is everybody the letter is addressed to and not a subset with training.

And the promise Jeremiah gives about the arrangement that was coming:

And they shall teach no more every man his neighbour, and every man his brother, saying, Know the LORD: for they shall all know me, from the least of them unto the greatest of them, saith the LORD. (Jeremiah 31:34)

From the least of them unto the greatest. Which is a range with nobody outside it.

That verse is quoted in Hebrews as a description of the arrangement believers are actually under, and it does not abolish teaching, because the New Testament keeps commanding teaching. What it abolishes is the situation where a man's only knowledge of God is somebody else's report.

You have direct access and you were never on a relay. Hebrews 4:16 says come boldly and Jeremiah 31:34 says they shall all know Him from the least to the greatest, and it is His Spirit who makes that a lived arrangement rather than a doctrine.