Proverbs 24:15-16

Read it slowly, because it is not what we expect wisdom to say. The righteous falls. Not once, in a weak moment, but seven times — the number that means as often as it takes. Proverbs does not describe the righteous as the one who keeps his footing. It describes him as the one who keeps getting up. The verse is addressed to someone crouched outside that house, waiting for the fall, sure that the fall will be the end. That is the ambusher’s mistake, and it is often ours when the ambusher is our own conscience: we treat the seventh stumble as the verdict. The proverb calls it a middle. What separates the two men in this verse is not the ground — both go down — but what the ground turns out to be. For one it is a floor; he lands, and stands. For the other it is the whole story; when calamity comes there is nothing under him at all. Notice how little credit the righteous is given for the rising. The Hebrew says simply that he rises, the same plain word used of a man getting up off the ground. No technique, no lesson learned, no promise not to fall again. Just up. Wisdom will not tell us why some are made of that, or spare us the eighth fall. It only insists that the falling is not the shame we thought, and that a life of getting up is what righteousness looks like from the outside.

Julian heard from the Lord exactly what the proverb refuses to promise: not that we will be spared the fall, but that the fall will not be the last word. The righteous of Proverbs rises seven times because someone is holding him up, and we know now who that is — the one who went all the way down, into the ground itself, and got up on the third day. Our rising is borrowed from his. That is why it does not depend on the count.