The Entrance of Thy Words Giveth Light, and It Says to Whom

He left school at sixteen and has been apologizing for it ever since without ever saying a word about it.

It does not come up. Nobody asks. What it does is set a ceiling that he applies to himself in every room, and the room where he applies it hardest is the one with a Bible in it.

He can build a house. He can read a job from a set of plans and find the mistake in them. He has an actual working knowledge of about four trades and has kept a business running through two bad stretches, and none of that counts, because the ceiling is not about competence. It is about a particular kind of smart, and he has decided he does not have it.

So he listens. He is good at listening. And he has never once opened the book expecting to get anything out of it that a man like him could get, and that expectation has held for thirty years and has never been tested.

There is one line in the longest chapter in the Bible that says exactly who the reading works for.

The line, and who it names

Here it is, in the King James Version:

The entrance of thy words giveth light; it giveth understanding unto the simple. (Psalm 119:130)

The entrance of thy words giveth light.

Entrance is a going in. It is not the study of the words, or the mastery of them, or the analysis of them. It is them getting in, which is what happens when a man reads a chapter out loud in a room by himself.

And the effect named is light, which is not information. Light is what makes it possible to see what is already there.

It giveth understanding unto the simple.

The simple. In the poetry of these books that is not an insult and it is not a compliment either. It means the untrained. The one who has not been formed by study. The ordinary person with no equipment.

And that is the group named as the ones it gives understanding to. Not despite being simple. The verse says the giving is aimed there.

You are the person that line names and you were never outside the group it was written about. Psalm 119:130 says the entrance of His words gives understanding unto the simple, and it is the Holy Spirit rather than an education you did not get who does the giving that verse describes.

The prayer in the same psalm

And because a man in this position will assume there is a catch, the same psalm gives him the prayer to pray about it.

Open thou mine eyes, that I may behold wondrous things out of thy law. (Psalm 119:18)

Open thou mine eyes.

That is a request, and it is made by somebody who is already reading. It is not a request for a teacher and it is not a request for a better mind. It is a request that the seeing be done to him.

Which means the psalm itself does not assume the reader arrives capable. It assumes he arrives asking, and it puts the words in his mouth.

And the picture the psalm gives for what the book does:

Thy word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path. (Psalm 119:105)

A lamp unto my feet. Not a floodlight over the whole county. A lamp at the feet lights the next step and the one after it, which is exactly as much as a man walking at night actually needs.

That is a modest promise and it is a real one, and it does not require a man to understand everything before he gets any use out of it.

You have a lamp for the next step and you were never promised the whole road at once. Psalm 119:105 says it is a lamp unto the feet and Psalm 119:18 hands a man the prayer for his own eyes, and it is His Spirit who does the opening that prayer asks for.

What Jesus said about who gets it

And then the sentence in the Gospels that says the same thing and is startling every time.

At that time Jesus answered and said, I thank thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes. (Matthew 11:25)

Hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes.

That is not an attack on learning and it has been misused that way. Plenty of learned people in Scripture receive plenty. It is a statement about what the qualification is not.

Whatever the entrance requirement is, it is not the thing the man who left school at sixteen has been assuming he lacks. It cannot be, because the sentence puts the wise and prudent on the side of the ones it was hidden from.

And Paul says the same thing about how God chooses:

But God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty. (1 Corinthians 1:27)

You have a qualification that is not the one you thought you lacked and you were never disqualified by it. Matthew 11:25 says the things were revealed unto babes and 1 Corinthians 1:27 says God chose the foolish things, and it is the Holy Spirit who is named throughout these letters as the one who teaches rather than a faculty a man is born with.

What understanding actually looks like

It is worth being plain about this, because a man who has never expected anything is also unsure what he would be looking for.

Understanding in these passages is not the ability to explain a chapter to somebody else. It is not mastery of the background. It is not being able to answer a question at a table.

It is closer to what happens when a man reads a sentence out loud and something in his own week lines up with it and he sees the two together.

That is the light in Psalm 119:130. It is not new information. It is the same room with the lamp on.

And it does not require anybody to be smart. It requires the words to go in, which is the plain meaning of entrance, and going in is a thing a man does with his own mouth in his own kitchen.

You are able to receive it in the plainest possible sense and you were never going to get it by being cleverer. Psalm 119:130 makes the entrance the cause and the light the effect, and it is His Spirit who makes a sentence read out loud line up with a man's actual week.