Watchman, How Far Gone Is the Night?

Somewhere in the dark a man is shouting up at a wall, and he asks the same question twice.

Not because he did not hear the answer. Because he has not had one yet, and he is going to keep asking until somebody up there says something.

It is one of the strangest little exchanges in the prophets, four lines long, and I have not been able to leave it alone.

The exchange

"The oracle concerning Edom. One keeps calling to me from Seir, 'Watchman, how far gone is the night? Watchman, how far gone is the night?' The watchman says, 'Morning comes but also night. If you would inquire, inquire; Come back again.'" (Isaiah 21:11-12)

A man at the bottom of a wall wants to know how much of this is left. He is not asking for a sermon. He wants a number. How many hours.

And the watchman, who is the one man with the height to see further than anybody else, gives him the most unsatisfying honest answer in Scripture.

Morning comes. And also night.

He did not lie to him

Sit on that for a second, because everything in me wants the watchman to say something better.

He could have said two hours. He could have said it is nearly over, hang on. He is up on the wall in the dark and the man below cannot see a thing, and there is no one to check his work. The comforting lie was completely available and completely undetectable.

He did not tell it.

He said morning is coming, which is true, and he said night is coming too, which is also true, and he refused to pretend the first one cancels the second. Then he told the man to come back and ask again.

That is a watchman with integrity. And it is the exact posture most Christian men have never been given permission to take.

What we say instead

A man tells you his wife has been gone eight months and he does not know if she is coming back.

And out of your mouth comes: God has a plan. It will work out. He never gives you more than you can handle, which is not in the Bible. This is going to be a testimony someday. Everything happens for a reason.

Every one of those is you saying two hours from a wall where you cannot see the horizon. God does have a plan. That is not the problem. The problem is that you just told him its schedule, and you do not know it.

We do it because the silence is unbearable and because we think a man in the dark needs a timeline. He does not need a timeline. He needs somebody up on the wall who will not lie to him, because the moment he catches you guessing, he stops believing anything else you say, including the parts that were true.

Morning comes but also night is a harder sentence and a kinder one. It says this ends. It also says it may not end tonight, and I am not going to insult you by pretending I know which.

Come back again

Here is the part I nearly missed for years, and it changes the whole exchange.

The watchman does not send him away. He tells him to come back.

Inquire, and then come and inquire again. Which means the relationship survives the unsatisfying answer. There is a man on that wall who will still be there next time, who will not be embarrassed that he had nothing better to offer, who is not going to avoid this guy in the market because the conversation was uncomfortable.

That is most of what men in a long night need. Not information. Somebody who is still there in the morning and still there the night after, who did not need the situation resolved in order to keep taking the call.

Most of us fail here, and we fail out of decency. We do not know what to say, and rather than say something thin we say nothing, and after a few weeks it is awkward, and after a few months he assumes we stopped caring. He is wrong about that and it does not matter, because the effect is the same as if he were right.

A night with no timeline

This is an oracle about a nation in the dark, not a pastoral care manual. But there is a specific kind of suffering this exchange speaks straight into, and it is not the acute kind.

It is the chronic one. The diagnosis that is managed rather than cured. The kid who is nineteen and gone and might be gone for a decade. The marriage that is not ending and is not good. The job you cannot leave. The thing in your own head that has been there since you were twenty five and shows no sign of packing up.

Acute suffering gets meals and visits. Chronic suffering gets a lot of attention for about three weeks and then people run out of things to say, because there is no new information and no arc and nothing to report. And the man in it learns to answer fine, because he can see what a real answer costs the person asking.

Be the watchman who can hold a conversation with no arc in it.

The One who was in the dark

I will not leave you at the bottom of that wall.

Because there was a night with no visible morning in it, and He was in it, and He did not get told two hours either. He asked for the cup to pass and was not given a timeline. He was given an angel and the strength to stay. On the cross He said the words of a psalm about being forsaken, out loud, in the dark, and the sky had gone black over the middle of the day.

Morning came. It came on the third day and not on the first, and the men who loved Him spent the whole Sabbath and the nights on either side of it believing it never would.

So when you tell a man that morning comes, you are not offering him a feeling. You are telling him something that happened on a specific morning outside a tomb, and it is the reason the sentence is not a platitude when you say it. It is also the reason you can be honest about the night. You do not have to oversell the dawn to a man who has been given a King who walked out of one.

Go back to the one you stopped asking

There is a man you checked on when it started, and it has gone on a long time now, and you have not called in a while because you did not know what you would say.

Call him anyway, and go in with nothing.

You are not bringing an answer. You are not bringing a verse you found. You are bringing the fact that somebody is still on the wall, and you are willing to say I do not know how much longer, and I am not going anywhere.

Then tell him to call you again. Say that part out loud. Come back and ask me again.

He will not believe you the first time. Say it a second time, the way the man at the bottom of the wall asked twice.