Through the Waters, and the Preposition Is the Whole Promise

I asked a class once to write down, from memory, a verse about God and deep water, and eleven of them wrote a promise that is not in the Bible.

They did not do it carelessly. Every one of them had the verse mostly right. What they had changed, without knowing they had changed it, was one small word.

They wrote versions of: He will keep you out of the deep water.

One of them wrote it and then looked at it for a moment and added a question mark, which I thought was the most honest thing on any of the pages.

The verse says something else, and the something else is one preposition, and I have come to think that word is the reason a great many people believe God has broken a promise He never made.

I want to say at the start that this is not an article about reading carefully. Nobody in that room was careless. Every one of them had heard that verse spoken over somebody in a hospital room or at a graveside, and they had all heard it the way it was meant, as comfort, and comfort compresses toward whatever the hearer is hoping for.

What it costs is enormous, and the cost is paid years later, by somebody standing in water up to their chest wondering what they did to lose a protection that was never in the sentence.

What it actually says

Here is the verse, and it is worth reading slowly by anybody in the middle of something.

When thou passest through the waters, I will be with thee; and through the rivers, they shall not overflow thee: when thou walkest through the fire, thou shalt not be burned; neither shall the flame kindle upon thee. (Isaiah 43:2, King James Version)

Through. Three times.

Not around. Not instead of. Not away from. The verse assumes the water and it assumes the fire, and every clause in it is about what happens to a person inside those things rather than about whether they will be in them.

And notice the first promise attached. I will be with thee. That is the first thing offered, before anything about the water not overflowing, and it is a promise about company rather than about circumstance.

You have a promise about company inside something rather than exemption from it, and the word in that verse is through (Isaiah 43:2). The same Spirit is the one who makes an accompanied fire something different from an unaccompanied one.

Why the misremembering happens

I want to be fair to the eleven people in my class, because they were not being sloppy.

The misremembering happens because the promise a person wants is the one they hear. That is not a fault in anybody's reading, it is how memory works under pressure, and everybody does it about the things that matter most to them.

And there is a second reason, and it is about the way this verse gets used. It gets read at funerals and in hospital rooms as reassurance, and reassurance tends to get compressed toward the outcome people are hoping for, and the preposition goes first.

And the cost of the compression is enormous, because a person who thinks they were promised exemption and finds themselves in deep water has to conclude either that God broke a promise or that they did something to forfeit it.

You are not holding a broken promise, and the one in that verse was never about staying dry (Isaiah 43:2), and it is the Spirit who corrects a misremembering without ever making a person feel foolish for having held it.

And the twenty-third psalm does exactly the same thing, and everybody misquotes that one too.

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me. (Psalm 23:4)

Through the valley. Not around it. And the reason given for not fearing is not that the valley is short. It is thou art with me.

What the accompanied version actually looks like

There is one account where somebody watching from outside can see the accompanying, and it is worth having because it is so concrete.

Three men are in a furnace, and a king who put them there is looking in, and he counts.

Lo, I see four men loose, walking in the midst of the fire, and they have no hurt; and the form of the fourth is like the Son of God. (Daniel 3:25)

Four. He put in three.

And notice where the fourth one is. In the midst of the fire. Not outside it beckoning, not opening a door from the far side. Inside, walking about with them.

That is the shape of what Isaiah is promising, and it is not a lesser thing than being kept out. It is a different thing, and anybody who has ever been in something with somebody beside them and then in something on their own knows exactly how different.

You have been given the harder promise and the better one, and Daniel 3 shows what it looks like from outside (Daniel 3:25), and the Spirit is the one who makes an accompanied fire something a person can actually survive.

You are not in this alone, and the account has somebody counting from outside and getting a number he did not expect (Daniel 3:25). The Spirit is the one who is that presence in a fire nobody was spared.

And I want to say the honest thing, because this passage gets used to close conversations. Not everybody comes out. Hebrews eleven lists people who were delivered and then, in the same passage, lists people who were not, and it praises both lists in the same breath and does not distinguish between them by outcome.

And this belongs here plainly, because this category reaches people in real danger. Where the water is over somebody's head right now, that is not for an article to hold. Tell a person today: a doctor, a counselor, a pastor you trust, somebody who can sit with you, or call the 988 crisis line, in the United States. Going is strength.