Sixscore Thousand Persons

She started doing it about a year ago, on the bus, on the top deck, and she has kept it up better than she keeps up most things.

Praying for the city. Not for anything specific at first. Just the whole of it, out of the window, the tower blocks and the ring road and the hospital and the twelve thousand people she can see roofs for.

And lately it has started to feel absurd.

Not wrong. Absurd. A twenty-three year old on the top deck of a bus, saying words about a place with six hundred thousand people in it, on the way to a shift. She said it out loud to a friend last week and heard how it sounded: I think I'm praying at the sea.

What has crept in is not doubt about God. It is arithmetic. That a city is simply too large a unit for anything she does to register against, and that she has been doing something very small at something very big for a year and cannot point to one thing.

That is your bus. That is your window. And I want to answer that, because the Bible ends an entire book on the question of how God counts a city.

How He counts one

Jonah is furious that God spared Nineveh, and God asks him a question, and the book stops there. The last verse is the answer to everything.

And should not I spare Nineveh, that great city, wherein are more than sixscore thousand persons that cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand; and also much cattle?Jonah 4:11

Watch what He does with the number.

He does not say a great city. He says that great city, wherein are more than sixscore thousand persons, and then He describes them, individually, by a characteristic: they cannot tell their right hand from their left. That is a description of small children, or of people who genuinely do not know.

He has looked at a hundred and twenty thousand people and noticed something true about each of them. And then the cattle, which is almost funny, and is not: He has counted the animals too.

You are praying to Somebody who counts one at a time. Not to a God who receives cities as lumps. The written word takes an enormous number and breaks it into described people, and the Holy Spirit is the One who makes that live in a woman on the top deck of a bus.

Now let me say something about the year, because you have begun to write it off.

You have prayed for your city, most days, for a year, at twenty-three, out of a window, with nobody watching and nothing to show. That is not a small thing that failed. That is a rare thing done faithfully.

You have not wasted a year. The written word never makes visible results the test of whether prayer was received. The Holy Spirit has been on that bus every morning and has not missed one of them.

And now the arithmetic itself, which is where the trouble actually is.

You have been dividing yourself by six hundred thousand. Anybody divided by six hundred thousand comes out at nothing. But God is not doing that sum at all: He is looking at the city person by person, which is precisely how He described it to Jonah, so the number never functioned the way you have been assuming.

You are not too small for something this size. Sixscore thousand persons, and He knew a specific thing about all of them. The Holy Spirit has been carrying your prayers into a city that God counts one soul at a time.