Faithful To What Exactly

They topped out on Larkin at the golden hour, four of them, packs off, boots up on the warm rock, and the whole valley lying out below in that light that makes even the scree look kind.

The argument had been going since the second switchback and it was the friendly kind, the kind you keep alive on purpose because it makes the miles shorter. Marcy said the Creek Line bridge was in. Bo said Dell had been saying the bridge was in since spring and that Dell says a great many things.

"He's reliable," Marcy said.

"Everybody's reliable," Bo said. "Reliable at what."

"He's just reliable, Bo. He's a reliable man."

And Tam, who had not said anything for a mile and a half, took a long drink and then lifted her chin toward the gap between the two stands of pine, way down there where the creek runs.

"There," she said.

They all looked. And there it was: new decking across the water, pale and raw and catching the low sun, so plain you could count the boards from a thousand feet up.

Nobody said anything for a second. Then Marcy laughed out loud and Bo swore softly and reached over and shook Tam's boot, and that was the end of the argument, and it did not end because anybody won it. It ended because somebody pointed at a thing you could see, at a named place, and once you have seen the bridge there is nothing left to be reliable about in the abstract.

And that is the argument you have been losing for twenty years, only nobody up on your ridge has ever pointed at anything.

You were raised on the word faithful. It was on the wall of the room where you learned to sit still. People said it at funerals and they said it in the parking lot and they said it to you the week the phone call came, and every one of them meant it kindly. God is faithful. He is so faithful. He has always been faithful.

And you nodded. And somewhere underneath the nodding a small honest question has been standing with its hand up for two decades, never once called on, because it sounds ungrateful and it is not.

Faithful to what, exactly.

Point at it. I want to see the boards.

The word needs an object

Let me say the honest thing first, because it has been carried alone a long time and probably called doubt.

Faithful is not a mood. It is a relational word and it will not stand up by itself. A man is not simply faithful; he is faithful to a wife, to a post, to a promise he made out loud in front of people who remember. Strip the object away and the word turns into a compliment, and a compliment is what gets handed out at every graveside, which is where it first reached your ears at nine years old.

So we are not going to praise God's character here in the abstract. We are going to read the boards. Here is a place He said what He would do, in the first person, and you will notice He does not deal in adjectives at all.

Fear not, for I am with you; be not dismayed, for I am your God; I will strengthen you, I will help you, I will uphold you with my righteous right hand.Isaiah 41:10

Count them. I am with you. I am your God. I will strengthen you. I will help you. I will uphold you with my righteous right hand. Five sentences, five verbs, one speaker, and not a single one of them is an atmosphere.

You have five named commitments standing under your feet tonight and not a general good feeling about heaven. I am not being poetic with you. Those are the words as written in Isaiah 41:10 with God as the subject of every verb, and the Holy Spirit is the One taking a sentence you have heard read at funerals and setting it down where you actually live.

What He is faithful to is a list of His own verbs

Here is the turn this whole site is built on, and it belongs in the middle of the teaching and not tucked at the bottom as a disclaimer.

The half that holds this up is God's oath, and that half is settled. It was settled before you had the question. The half that is yours is your response, and it is real, and it is asked of you, and it is not the half carrying the weight. Both of those sentences are true at the same time and neither one softens the other.

Look at where the ask sits in that verse. Fear not. Be not dismayed. That is your column, and it is two imperatives, and they are addressed to a person who is plainly afraid, which is why they had to be said at all. Nobody tells a calm man to stop being dismayed.

And now look at where the weight sits. Strengthen, help, uphold. Every one of those is God's own verb with God as the one doing it, and not one of them is handed to you to perform. You are being asked to stop bracing. You are not being asked to hold anything up. That distinction is the entire document, and the Spirit is the One who makes a written distinction like that go from understood to inhabited.

I am not going to tell you what He is about to do

And this is where I have to be careful with you, because the temptation is to warm this up by predicting something.

I will not do it. I do not know what your week holds and I am not permitted to guess on God's behalf. What I can do is read you what He bound Himself to and stop where the sentence stops, which is what a term is: a fixed thing you can go back and check, not a forecast.

So I hand you His words and I hand you nothing of my own.

It is the LORD who goes before you. He will be with you; he will not leave you or forsake you. Do not fear or be dismayed.Deuteronomy 31:8

That was said to a man taking over from Moses with the whole weight of a nation about to land on him, and God did not tell him how the campaign would go. He told him who would be there. That is the shape of every commitment God makes about Himself: presence and person, named, before any outcome is discussed.

You were given a named Companion and not a predicted result, and that is the better half of the two. It is written plainly in Deuteronomy 31:8, and His Spirit is the One who takes a promise made to a frightened man three thousand years ago and makes it land in a kitchen at eleven at night.