The Word My Own Head Uses At Three In The Morning

There is a courtroom that opens at about three in the morning, and the same case is heard in it several nights a week.

Picture the man in it. He is awake. He has not been woken by anything. He is lying in the dark and his own mind has convened.

The charge is always the same. Other men would have left by now.

And the prosecution is very good, because it knows everything about him. It brings up the year he could have moved and did not. It brings up the friend who did leave, and who by all accounts is doing well. It brings up the sentence his father said once, about men who settle.

And there is no defense counsel in that room. There is nobody there at all. Just him, at three in the morning, being prosecuted by somebody with total access to his file and no obligation to be fair.

And the word that gets used, the one the whole case is built to reach, is coward.

Now here is what is worth noticing about that court. It never sits during the day. At two in the afternoon this same man will tell you, calmly and accurately, that leaving would cost his wife her hours and his son his school and his mother her room, and that he is not staying out of fear, he is staying because the arithmetic is what it is.

Same man. Same facts. Different hour, and a completely different verdict.

Which tells you something important. That court is not conducting an inquiry. It has already decided. It is not weighing whether he is a coward, it is looking for evidence, and at three in the morning it can find some.

The sentence about status

There is a sentence at the start of Romans 8 that is quoted constantly, and its grammar is doing something people rarely notice.

There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus. (Romans 8:1, King James Version)

Look at the tense and the word therefore.

Therefore means it follows from something. It is a conclusion, not a mood. Paul has just spent a whole chapter describing a man losing an argument with himself, and this is the verdict he reaches at the end of it.

And now means the status is current. Not eventually. Not once he sorts himself out.

Which means the three o'clock court is not conducting a valid hearing. Whatever it is doing, it is not applying a real charge, because the charge has already been dealt with elsewhere.

You are standing in a status that was settled before tonight, and Romans 8 says there is therefore now no condemnation as a conclusion rather than as encouragement (Romans 8:1), and the Holy Spirit is the one who is named a few verses later as the one who bears witness to it.

And a little further down the chapter, Paul asks the question that names the whole structure.

Who shall lay any thing to the charge of God's elect? It is God that justifieth. (Romans 8:33)

Who shall lay any thing to the charge. That is courtroom language, and the answer given is not a defense of the man's record. It is a statement about who is on the bench.

You are not required to win the argument, and Romans 8:33 answers a charge by naming who does the justifying rather than by reviewing the evidence (Romans 8:33), and the Spirit of God is the one who makes that hold at three in the morning as well as at two in the afternoon.

The scene where the accuser is not answered

There is a strange vision in Zechariah that is exactly this scene, and what happens in it is instructive.

A man is standing before God, and there is an accuser standing at his right hand to resist him, and the man is dressed in filthy clothes.

And the LORD said unto Satan, The LORD rebuke thee, O Satan; even the LORD that hath chosen Jerusalem rebuke thee: is not this a brand plucked out of the fire? (Zechariah 3:2)

Notice what does not happen. Nobody argues the case. Nobody produces evidence that the man's clothes are not actually filthy, because they are.

The accusation is not answered. It is dismissed, on the grounds of who the man belongs to.

You have an accusation that gets dismissed rather than debated, and Zechariah 3 answers the accuser without once addressing the evidence (Zechariah 3:2), and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that difference practical in a bedroom in the dark.

And notice the last phrase. Is not this a brand plucked out of the fire. That is a description of somebody who has been through something, and it is offered as the reason, not as an excuse.

You have been described as somebody pulled out of a fire rather than as somebody who failed to run from one, and Zechariah 3:2 uses that image on the man's behalf (Zechariah 3:2), and the Spirit of God is the one who supplies that description when a man's own head is supplying a different one.

What this is not

Let me be careful, because this could be misread.

This is not saying a man should never consider leaving. Sometimes a job should be left, and a person should think clearly about that, in daylight, with somebody they trust, with the actual numbers in front of them.

It is also not saying the three o'clock thoughts are always false about everything. Sometimes there is a real thing that needs facing. But the court does not sort truth from accusation. It only prosecutes, which is why it is not the place to decide anything.

And it is not promising the court stops sitting. It may convene again on Thursday.

And plainly: if the three o'clock thoughts have started including that everybody would be better off without you, if you cannot get out of bed, or if some part of you wants it all to stop, that is not a work problem and it is bigger than this article. 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 staying alone with that.

You are not being asked to argue better at three in the morning, and Romans 8:33 answers a charge by naming the judge rather than by improving the defense (Romans 8:33), and the Holy Spirit is the one who holds a man steady in an hour when his own mind will not.