Witness in the Word · Module 6 — The Report from the Wall
Class 25 – Therefore Be Ye Ready
Source: Watchman, What of the Night?, Chapter Fifteen
Watch therefore: for ye know not what hour your Lord doth come... Therefore be ye also ready: for in such an hour as ye think not the Son of man cometh.
— Matthew 24:42, 44
Watch ye therefore: for ye know not when the master of the house cometh... And what I say unto you I say unto all, Watch.
— Mark 13:35, 37
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The last chapter took the clock out of your hands. This one tells you what to do with the hands that are now free.
We ended by seeing that the Lord Himself, in His final conversation before He ascended, took the timing question off the table and put a task in its place. But we have not yet asked the obvious question that follows: if a man does not know the hour, what is he supposed to do? It seems, at first, like a disadvantage. The date-setter at least had something to aim at, a target to prepare for. The man who has surrendered the date seems to be left standing in the dark with nothing to organize his readiness around.
The Lord's answer to that turns the whole thing inside out. The not-knowing is not a disadvantage that makes readiness harder. It is the very thing that makes real readiness necessary — and it produces a better readiness than any date could have produced. That is the argument of this chapter, and it comes straight from the mouth of the Lord, laid out as plainly as a chain of reasoning can be laid.
And at the end of it He says one thing that changes who this whole book is written to. He says the command to watch was never meant for the watchman alone.
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The Not-Knowing Is the Reason
Read the first link in the chain, and notice the little word that joins the two halves, because everything hangs on it.
Watch therefore: for ye know not what hour your Lord doth come.
For. Because. He does not say watch, even though you do not know the hour, as if the not-knowing were an obstacle to be overcome. He says watch, because you do not know the hour. The not-knowing is given as the reason for the watching. It is the engine, not the brake. The very thing a man might complain about — that God did not tell him when — is precisely the thing the Lord points to as the ground of the command. You do not know the hour; therefore watch.
This is the payoff of everything the last chapter argued, and now you can see why the closed clock was a mercy and not a deprivation. If you had known the hour, you would not have needed to watch — you could have slept until the date drew near and roused yourself only then. The not-knowing is what makes the watching necessary at all. Take away the date, and watching becomes the only sane thing a man can do. Give him the date, and watching becomes pointless until the last moment. God took away the date on purpose, and the purpose was to make you watch.
So the man who surrendered the clock in the last chapter is not left with empty hands and nothing to aim at. He is left with the one command that fills a whole life: watch. Not watch for a date. Just watch — stay awake, stay turned toward Him, stay ready — because He comes at an hour you were not given, which means the only hour you can be ready in is every hour.
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The Householder Who Knew Too Little
The Lord then gives a small, sharp picture to prove the point, and it is worth walking slowly because it grants the date-setter his one true premise and then buries him with it.
If the goodman of the house had known in what watch the thief would come, he would have watched, and would not have suffered his house to be broken up.
The goodman of the house is simply the master of it, the man responsible for keeping it. And the Lord concedes something to him: if he had known when the thief was coming, he would have watched that night, and his house would have been safe. That is true. Knowledge of the hour would have let him prepare for that hour. The date-setter's instinct is not entirely foolish — there is a real sense in which knowing the time would let a man get ready for the time.
But now feel the trap close. The householder does not know the hour. No one has told him which night, which watch, the thief will come. So what is the householder to do? He has exactly two options. He can watch on no particular night, gamble that the thief will not come tonight, and sleep — and be broken up on the night he guessed wrong. Or he can watch every night, because any night might be the night, and thereby never be caught.
Do you see what the not-knowing has done? It has made occasional watching useless and continual watching necessary. A man who knew the hour would watch once, on the right night, and sleep soundly the rest. A man who does not know the hour has only one safe course: to watch always. The very thing that looked like his disadvantage — his ignorance of the time — is what forces him into the only readiness that is actually secure, which is standing readiness, readiness as a settled condition of the house rather than a special effort made on a marked night.
This is why I keep saying that readiness is a condition and not an act. You cannot get ready for a thing whose hour you do not know. You can only be ready — all the time, as a matter of how you keep the house — or be caught. There is no third option, and the not-knowing is what removed the third option, and its removal was a mercy, because the third option was the one that got men killed.
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In Such an Hour As Ye Think Not
Now the sharpest sentence in the passage, and it drives the final nail into the coffin of date-setting from a direction the last chapter did not come at.
Therefore be ye also ready: for in such an hour as ye think not the Son of man cometh.
Read that with care: in such an hour as ye think not. He comes in the hour you do not expect. Not merely in an hour you happen not to know — in the very hour you have judged unlikely. This is a razor, and it cuts the date-setter coming and going. For suppose a man studies the signs and concludes the coming is likely in a certain season. By this word of the Lord, that conclusion has just made that season less likely, not more — because the Lord comes in the hour men think not, and the man has now marked that hour as one he thinks. The moment you expect an hour, you have disqualified it. The coming is timed, by the Lord's own statement, to the hour of least expectation.
And this clasps hands with the very center of this book. What is the hour a man least expects? It is the ordinary one. It is the hour that feels least like a moment of destiny — the ordinary breakfast, the ordinary business day, the quiet evening when nothing is happening and nothing seems about to. Such an hour as ye think not is exactly the hour Noah's world was eating and drinking in, exactly the hour Sodom was buying and building in. The coming is aimed at the unremarkable moment, the one your instincts file under surely not now. Which means the hours you feel safest are the very hours the word tells you to be readiest in. Your sense that "it could not be today, today is so ordinary" is not evidence of safety. It is the exact feeling the men of Noah's day had on the last dry morning.
So readiness cannot be saved for the dramatic hours, the ones that feel significant. It must be kept most carefully in the ordinary ones, because those are the ones He said He comes in — the hours you think not.
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He May Come in Any Watch
Mark records the same teaching and adds a detail that seals it, and I want you to see it because it forecloses the last hiding place.
Watch ye therefore: for ye know not when the master of the house cometh, at even, or at midnight, or at the cockcrowing, or in the morning.
The night, in that world, was divided into four watches — evening, midnight, the cockcrowing, and morning. The Lord names all four. And the point of naming all four is to leave no watch uncovered. The master may come in the evening, or at midnight, or in the small dark hours before dawn, or in the morning — any of them. There is no watch a servant can point to and say, not this one; he never comes at this hour; I may sleep through this watch safely. Every watch is a watch he might come in, so every watch is a watch to stay awake in.
This closes a door a tired man is always looking for. We are forever trying to find the watch we can sleep through — the season of life, the stretch of years, the ordinary decade when surely we may let our guard down, because surely He will not come then. The four watches say there is no such season. He may come at even. He may come at midnight. He may come at the cockcrowing. He may come in the morning. Name any hour of the long night of this age, and it is an hour He might come in — and therefore an hour to be found awake in.
And the thing to be avoided is stated with total simplicity: lest coming suddenly he find you sleeping. Not lest he find you imperfect. Not lest he find your work unfinished, your house not spotless, your account not settled to the last farthing. Lest he find you sleeping — unwatching, eyes closed, anesthetized, taken under by the ordinariness of the hour. That is the one thing the servant must not be found doing. To be found awake — turned toward the door, watching for the master — that is the whole of what is asked. Which brings us to what "ready" actually means, and here is where the door of this hard chapter swings open.
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What "Ready" Means, and What It Does Not
I have to be careful here, because a man can hear all this about watching and readiness and conclude that he is being asked for a perfection he knows he cannot deliver, and give up before he starts. So let me say plainly what the Lord asks for, and what He does not.
He does not ask to be found finished. He does not ask to be found sinless, flawless, having completed some tally of good works that would let a man stand on his own record. No man could meet that standard, and if that were what "ready" meant, this chapter would be a sentence of despair and not a command anyone could obey. The householder is not asked to be more than a householder. The servant is not asked to have become a different and better creature by the time the master comes. He is asked one thing: not to be found asleep.
To be ready, then, is not to have achieved something. It is to be facing the right direction. It is to be awake and turned toward Him when He comes — watching for the master rather than absorbed in the sleep of the age, oriented toward His coming rather than lost in peace and safety. A servant may be tired, may be imperfect, may have a hundred things about him still unfinished — and still be found watching, still be found with his face toward the door, and that is what the master asked for. Readiness is a direction, not a destination. It is which way you are facing, not how far you have traveled.
And that is a thing any man can do, in any hour, starting now — which is exactly why it can be commanded. The Lord does not command the impossible. He does not say be perfect by the time I come, which no man could obey. He says watch — be awake, be turned toward me — which any man can begin to do in this very hour, whatever his condition, however late he has slept. The door of readiness is not a high wall a man must scale. It is a direction he must turn to face. And a man who has been sleeping his whole life can turn and face the right way in a single moment, and be, from that moment, ready. That turning is always available. It is available to you now.
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What I Say Unto You I Say Unto All
And now the sentence that changes who this book has been talking to all along, and it is the reason this chapter sits where it does — right at the turn from watching to going.
At the end of Mark's account, the Lord says this: And what I say unto you I say unto all, Watch.
Stop and take the full weight of it. Through this whole book I have spoken of the watchman as a man set apart — one man on the wall, chosen, placed, given a particular and heavy office. And that is true, as far as it goes. But here the Lord takes the one-word command that defines the watchman — watch — and He hands it to everyone. What I say unto you I say unto all. The command to watch is not the private duty of a special class. It is laid on all. Every believer, every reader, every ordinary man and woman in the sleeping city is under the same single command that the man on the wall is under. Watch.
This dismantles the most comfortable thought a reader of this book could have, and I suspect some reader has been leaning on it for fifteen chapters now. The comfortable thought is this: watching is the watchman's job. Warning is for preachers, for prophets, for the man who wrote this book. I am one of the sleepers he is trying to wake, and once I am awake, my part is done. The Lord's own words take that away. What I say unto you I say unto all, Watch. You do not get to hear the command as though it were addressed to someone else and merely reported to you. It is addressed to you. If you have read this far and come awake, you are not merely a rescued sleeper. You are now a watchman, whether you applied for the post or not, because the command that makes a man a watchman has just been spoken directly to you.
This is the hinge on which the whole last part of the book turns. If the command to watch were given only to a few, then the awakened reader could stop at his own rescue — glad to be out of the flood, and no more required of him. But the command is given to all, which means being awakened is not the end of the reader's part. It is the beginning of it. A man who wakes in a burning house and is glad only for his own escape, and does not turn to wake the others, has not understood what waking is for. And a man who hears I say unto all, Watch, and thinks the watching stops with him, has not heard the word all.
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Ready, Read Rightly
So here is where the chapter leaves you, and it leaves you standing, not sitting.
The not-knowing is not your disadvantage; it is the reason you watch, and the maker of the only readiness that is real — a standing readiness, kept most carefully in the ordinary hours, because He comes in the hour you think not, and there is no watch of the night you may safely sleep through. And ready does not mean finished or flawless. It means awake and facing the right way — a direction any man can turn to in a single moment, starting now, whatever his condition.
Read too softly, this becomes a vague encouragement to be spiritually alert that costs a man nothing and changes nothing. Read too harshly, it becomes a demand for a perfection that drives a man to despair. Read truly, it is the gentlest possible command married to the most sweeping possible reach: just be awake, be turned toward me — and all of you, not the watchman only. The one-word command has been handed to every reader. You are watching now, whether you meant to sign on or not.
And a man who is truly awake in a sleeping house does not stay still. He turns to the others. That turning — from your own rescue to the rousing of the city — is where this book goes next, but before it does, I owe you a return to the very verse we began with, because the watchman's whole honest answer has two halves, and we have been living in the darker one. It is time to say the other.
The morning cometh, and also the night.
For Reflection
Read: Matthew 24:42–44; Luke 12:35–40
1. The chapter says not-knowing the hour is "the maker of the only readiness that is real." How does uncertainty about timing change the way you should live today?
2. A man truly awake "does not stay still... he turns to the others." Who are you turning toward, or still keeping this news to yourself?
3. What does "standing readiness, kept most carefully in the ordinary hours" look like in your actual daily schedule?
This Week: Turn to one person this week the way the chapter describes — not to alarm them, but to rouse them gently and honestly.