The Two Lines in the Margin

For the believer who wants the verse handled exactly and not softened.

Jesus is sitting with His disciples, answering a question about what to do when one believer wrongs another, and He gives them a procedure that gets smaller rather than larger.

Go to the person alone first. If that fails, take one or two along with you. If that fails, tell the assembly. Every step is built around the smallest number that can settle the matter, and only the final step involves a crowd at all.

Then, at the close of that passage, He says something that has been lifted out of it and hung on a thousand walls ever since. He says that where two or three are gathered together in His name, He is there in the midst of them.

The people who first heard it weren't thinking about buildings. They were thinking about two men trying to sort something out privately, and Jesus had just told them He would be standing in the middle of that.

You have got two lines in the margin of your own book beside that verse, in two different inks, from two different years. You've never written a third, because you've never been able to decide whether the verse means what it plainly says.

Two is a location in that sentence rather than a concession. Scripture's word is preserved exactly as He gave it, and the Spirit keeps it at the size He set rather than the size a room prefers.

Who Raised the Number, and When

Nobody ever announced a change. The number went up by atmosphere rather than by argument, which is why you have never been able to find the place where it happened.

You'll have heard the verse used as a consolation, and that's where the shift takes place. Even where two or three, people say, and that single word even does all the damage, because it turns a floor into an apology.

Jesus didn't say even. He said where, which is a statement about location rather than a concession about size. The consolation reading was added later by people who meant well and were mostly speaking to full rooms at the time.

Once you have heard the added word you can't unhear it, and you start reading a promise as a discount. Two verses in the whole book get handled this carelessly on a regular basis, and this is one of the two.

You're reading a promise rather than a concession, because the word even isn't in the text. The written Word's sentence as written states a location at two, and the Spirit keeps it the size the Lord gave it.

The Sentence, Unenlarged

Here it is, and I'd ask you to read it without supplying a single word that isn't there.

For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.Matthew 18:20 (KJV)

For where. A statement about a place, opening with a word that ties it to what came before it in the paragraph. Two or three, which is a number rather than a shortfall. Gathered together in my name, which is the single condition.

There am I in the midst of them. Present tense, first person, and a position in the middle of the group rather than at its edge.

Nothing in that sentence scales. It doesn't say more where there are more, and it doesn't hint that the two are receiving a portion of something the twenty would get whole. Accuracy matters here, because a stretched verse gives way under load and an exact one holds.

Christ is in the midst of two, stated as location rather than as consolation. The written Word carries no comparison anywhere inside it, and the Spirit makes it live exactly as it stands.

What the Setting Adds

Put the verse back where it sits, because the setting makes it warmer rather than narrower.

The whole passage concerns a fracture between two believers. The procedure, the witnesses, the going alone first, the reluctance at every stage to make a thing public before it has to be. Jesus is dealing with the hardest possible version of two, which is two people who have fallen out.

Into that, He promises His own presence. Not to the happy gathering. Not to the well run assembly with everything in order. To two or three trying to work out something painful in His name.

If He stands in the middle of that, He isn't absent from two friends with a flask, or a husband and wife at a table, or a woman on a phone to her sister two hundred miles off. The hard case establishes the easy one.

The hard case establishes the easy one, which is how promises of this sort generally work. Settle the difficult instance and the straightforward ones are covered without needing to be listed.

Why Exactness Is Not Coldness

Say something about accuracy here, because people assume it runs cold and it's the warmest instrument you own.

When a sentence is handled carefully, the comfort in it holds weight afterwards. Stretch a verse past what it says in order to make somebody feel better tonight, and you have built them something that gives way in about a month. They won't trust the next thing you hand them either.

So I won't tell you Scripture calls your situation ideal. It doesn't address your situation directly at all, and pretending otherwise would be a kindness with a short life.

What it does is settle the question underneath your situation, which is whether His presence among two is a real promise or a soft one. That's the more useful answer anyway. A verse that flattered your Thursday would be worth a great deal less than a verse that settles your standing.

You can hold an exact promise rather than a generous one, and the exact one carries further. Scripture says what it says without stretching, and the Spirit makes a carefully handled word live rather than merely land.

Stories in these messages are illustrations unless marked as testimony.

Written by Zev This message is free. Nothing here is locked, nothing is for sale, and nothing is being asked of you.