A Right Way, Asked For Plainly

He is the kind of man who reads the footnotes, and the footnotes are what stopped him.

Somebody at work, who he likes, mentioned that their church was doing this and asked, in a friendly and completely unloaded way, whether he had ever done it. And he said he had not, and then he went home and did what he does, which is find out.

And what he found was a phrase. It kept turning up in the older translations and in the material built on them, and it is this: afflict your soul.

He sat with that for a long time. Because he knows what afflict means in English. It means to inflict suffering on. And a religion that asks a man to inflict suffering on himself in order to be nearer to God is a religion he has spent his adult life carefully not joining, and he had thought this one did not do that, and now here is a phrase in the actual text.

He has not asked anybody about it. He would have to explain too much context to get to the question.

If a word stopped you before you started, come and sit down. We will do the word first, plainly, and nobody is going to be embarrassed by the asking.

Here is the sentence the phrase comes from

Let us look at the place where it sits most plainly, because context does most of the work here and nobody ever supplies it.

A man is about to take a large group of families on a long and genuinely dangerous journey. He has said out loud to a foreign king that his God is able, which was brave and which he now has to live inside. So he stops the whole company at a river before they set out.

Then I proclaimed a fast there, at the river of Ahava, that we might afflict ourselves before our God, to seek of him a right way for us, and for our little ones, and for all our substance.Ezra 8:21

Now the phrase. In the Hebrew it is an idiom, and the idiom means to humble yourself, to bring yourself low, to take the high position you have been standing in and step down out of it. The old English word afflict has drifted a very long way from that in four hundred years. It has picked up the meaning of inflicting damage, and the Hebrew never carried that.

You can see it in the sentence itself if you read the second half. Why are they doing it? To seek of him a right way. Not to earn one. Not to hurt themselves into deserving one. To ask, from a low position, for a road.

That is the whole of it. A man with responsibility for a lot of children stepped down out of his own competence and asked God for a road.

You are not being asked to damage yourself, and you never were, in any translation. Ezra 8:21 is where that sits, in a sentence whose own second half explains the first, and the same Spirit who carried that record down to us is the one who takes a genuinely frightening word off a careful man.

What this site will never say, said now rather than later

Since the word came up, let me put the whole thing beyond doubt, because you deserve it in plain English before you decide anything.

Hunger is not purifying. Emptiness is not holiness. Nothing about being depleted brings anybody nearer to God, and no amount of going without makes a person more spiritual than the person next to them. If you have ever encountered a version of this that admired somebody for how long or how hard, that version is wrong and it is dangerous and I want no part of it.

And control over your own body is not a spiritual achievement. That has to be said out loud on a page like this, because for some people who will read it, not eating is already a compulsion that is hurting them, and religious language is one of the strongest triggers there is for exactly that.

You are not closer to God on an empty stomach, and you were never further from Him on a full one. It is written into Romans 14:17, where the kingdom of God is explicitly not a matter of eating and drinking, and the Holy Spirit is named in that very verse as what it actually is a matter of.

Some people must not go without food at all. If you live with diabetes, if you are pregnant or nursing, if you take medication, if you have ever had a hard relationship with food or with eating, if you are underweight, unwell, frail or elderly, or if you are not sure, speak to your doctor first and let their answer be the answer. There is no length on this page, no kind of fast, no plan and no schedule, and there will not be one. And telling a doctor, a wife, a parent or whoever cooks is always right and it is never a failure of privacy.

If today is heavier than a page can carry, call somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, or a crisis line, and the emergency services if you or anybody near you is in danger tonight.

What is actually happening by that river

So with the word cleared, look at the scene, because it is one of the most human in the book.

He has a crowd of families and no armed escort, because he had already told the king that God would look after them and now he is not going to ask for soldiers. That is a man who has talked himself into a corner with his own faith, and he knows it, and everybody with him knows it.

So he stops. He gathers them at a river. And they get low together and they ask for a road.

Notice what is not there. No length is recorded. No method is recorded. No claim afterward that the asking produced the safe arrival. He asked, and later he wrote that God let Himself be appealed to, which is a sentence about what God is like and not a report on a mechanism that worked.

You are permitted to ask plainly for a road and then simply wait, and you were never expected to work out the machinery. That sentence belongs to Proverbs 3:6, where the acknowledging is ours and the directing of the path is entirely His, and His Spirit does not require you to understand how before you are allowed to ask.