The Arithmetic Has One Answer

There is a piece of paper in a drawer in a great many houses, and it is usually the back of something.

Picture the man who wrote it. He has done this about nine times over four years. He gets the numbers out after everybody has gone to bed, and he writes them down properly, because the version in his head is always vaguer and more hopeful than the version on paper.

Wage, after everything. Mortgage. The car that has to keep going. His wife's hours, which are what they are because of her back. The heating. The boy's thing on Wednesdays. The amount that would have to come out if he went somewhere else at the rate that other place pays.

And every single time, the answer comes out the same.

It does not work. Not next year either. Not with the sums he can see.

And then he puts the paper back in the drawer, and he goes to bed, and he lies there feeling, of all things, guilty.

That is the part worth stopping at. He has just done a piece of careful, sober, responsible work on behalf of the people he loves, and the feeling it produces in him is shame.

And the reason is that he has been told, over years, by well meaning people, that a man of faith would not be sitting at a table with a calculator. That there is something small about the arithmetic. That if he trusted God he would step out.

So the most responsible thing he does all month has been quietly reclassified in his own head as evidence against him.

Jesus told people to sit down and count

There is a passage where Jesus talks about counting the cost, and it is not a metaphor about commitment in general. It is a builder and a budget.

For which of you, intending to build a tower, sitteth not down first, and counteth the cost, whether he have sufficient to finish it? (Luke 14:28, King James Version)

Sitteth not down first, and counteth the cost. The verbs are sit and count. It is a man at a table with numbers.

And notice that Jesus is not describing this as a lack of faith. He is using it as the obvious, sensible thing that any reasonable person does, and He is holding it up as a model.

The whole force of the illustration depends on His hearers agreeing that of course you count first. Of course you do.

You are doing the thing Jesus described as obvious, and Luke 14 uses a man sitting down with the numbers as the model rather than as the warning (Luke 14:28), and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that land on somebody who has been quietly ashamed of a calculator.

And the reason He gives for counting is even more pointed.

Lest haply, after he hath laid the foundation, and is not able to finish it, all that behold it begin to mock him. (Luke 14:29)

The failure mode He names is a half built thing and a family exposed. He is not worried about somebody being too cautious. He is worried about people being harmed by a start that could not be finished.

You have been protecting people rather than lacking courage, and Luke 14:29 names the harm of an unfinished start as the reason for counting (Luke 14:29), and the Spirit of God is the one who removes the shame from a man doing sums at midnight.

Know the state of your flocks

There is a line in Proverbs that says the same thing about a working life, and it is an instruction rather than a permission.

Be thou diligent to know the state of thy flocks, and look well to thy herds. (Proverbs 27:23)

Be diligent to know the state. That is a command to have accurate knowledge of what you actually have.

It is aimed at a herdsman, whose flocks were his income, his savings and his security all at once. In modern terms it is an instruction to know your actual financial position rather than a hopeful version of it.

You are obeying an instruction rather than betraying a trust, and Proverbs 27 tells a person to be diligent to know the state of what they have (Proverbs 27:23), and it is the Holy Spirit who takes an old herding proverb and applies it to a man with an envelope and a pen.

And notice that the verse assumes the knowing will be work. Diligent. It expects somebody to sit down and find out properly rather than to guess.

You have been diligent in the exact way the proverb asks for, and Proverbs 27:23 makes the knowing an assignment rather than a concession (Proverbs 27:23), and the Spirit of God is the one who is present at a table at midnight while a man finds out the truth.

What this is not

Let me be plain, because this could be taken too far in either direction.

This is not saying God never asks anybody to move without a full picture. Sometimes He does, and there are people whose story is exactly that, and this article is not writing them out of the Bible.

It is also not saying the numbers are the whole of reality. They are not. Things change, situations open, people help, and no envelope has ever contained the future.

What it is saying is narrower and firmer: the counting is not the sin. A man who sits down with paper on behalf of his household is doing what Jesus described as the ordinary sensible thing, and calling that unbelief is a misuse of the word.

And plainly: if the numbers have got to the point where they will not work at all, if you cannot get out of bed, or if some part of you has begun wanting it all to stop, that is bigger than an envelope. Call or text the 988 crisis line, and say the true version out loud to a doctor or a counselor or a pastor you trust. There is no faith in doing that alone.

You are not being handed a rule about staying, and Luke 14 is about counting rather than about deciding either way (Luke 14:28), and the Holy Spirit is the one who guides the actual decision, which no article and no proverb can make for anybody.