I Can Teach It And I Do Not Live In It

Iosif had taught the Wednesday class for nine years. An hour at seven, in a small room off the main hallway of a community center, with the door left open because the room got warm and the hallway was where people stood afterwards with their coats over their arms.

He was good. Not showy, and never dull. He could take the letter to the Hebrews and set it out so that a person who had never opened it followed every step, and he could explain what once for all meant from three directions without once making anybody feel slow.

He arrived at a quarter past six to put out the chairs. He made the tea in the urn and washed the cups himself afterwards, standing at the little sink with his sleeves pushed up. He carried the box of books down to the car at the end and lifted it into the trunk on his own, and he had done that for nine years, in every kind of weather.

One Wednesday a young man called Vlad hung back while the others filed out. Nineteen, sitting on the edge of a table, swinging one foot.

"Can I ask you something, and it is going to sound rude, and I do not mean it rude."

"Ask it."

"You said tonight that it is finished. That nothing has to be added. That the word means once and it does not mean once so far." He was picking at the edge of the table. "So why do you always look like a man who has got something left to do?"

Iosif laughed.

And the laugh went on slightly too long, the way a laugh does when it is buying a man a few seconds.

Vlad, who was nineteen and therefore merciless and completely without malice, said, "I am not having a go. My dad says you have never once let anyone else carry that box."

"It is a heavy box."

"There are four of us here every week."

Iosif stood in the doorway with the warm hallway behind him and could not think of a single sentence, which had not happened to him in nine years of Wednesdays.

He drove home and did not put the radio on.

He had been able to explain the finished work since he was twenty six. He could hold his own with anybody on it. He had simply never slept a single night inside it.

And you can explain it too. That is not the trouble. You can set out what Christ did, accurately, from more than one angle, to somebody who has never heard it. And you have not stopped working for one week to secure a place that was handed to you complete.

What the word once actually does

Let me put the sentence in front of you before we talk about anything else, because on this subject people remember the argument and forget the line.

he entered once for all into the holy places, not by means of the blood of goats and calves but by means of his own blood, thus securing an eternal redemption.Hebrews 9:12

Two words there do all the work, and neither of them is decorative.

Once for all is one word in the original and it does not mean once so far, and it does not mean once a year, and it does not mean once and then again if things slip. It means once, finally, and never repeated. It is a door that closes behind a thing.

And securing is the second word, and it is the harder one to receive. Not offered. Not made possible. Secured, in the past tense, by somebody who is not you.

You have an eternal redemption under your feet as a matter already closed, closed by somebody else, closed before you were born, and I am not saying that warmly to comfort you: Hebrews 9:12 says it in the flattest legal language the letter owns, and the Holy Spirit is the One who takes flat legal language and makes it feel like the floor of a house.

Here is what He put His own name to, in the first person, so you are not living on my summary of Him.

I, I am he who blots out your transgressions for my own sake, and I will not remember your sins.Isaiah 43:25

Read who He says He is doing it for. For my own sake. Not because a case was made to Him. Not because somebody carried a box down to a car for nine years in the rain.

Which half is finished, and which half is your answer

So here is the line down the middle, and it goes here in the middle of the teaching, not tacked on at the end where nobody would trust it.

The securing is His and it is finished. The remembering of your sins no more is His and it is settled. Your response is real, it is genuinely asked for, and it is not the thing that keeps your place. Both of those are true at once, and this article will not drop either one to make the other feel bigger.

Because relief is not permission, and this is exactly where a person is told the wrong thing next. Nobody is telling you the chairs do not matter. Somebody has to put the chairs out. The tea is a kindness and the box is heavy and the class needed a man to come at a quarter past six for nine years, and God is not indifferent to any of it.

What is being retired is the reason. You were never setting out chairs to hold a place, and the moment that reason goes, the chairs are still there, and they are lighter, and they are yours to enjoy. Isaiah 43:25 has God blotting out for His own sake, and the Spirit who lives in you is not a supervisor keeping an eye on your hours.

I am not going to hand you a total. There is no running figure anywhere in this, no balance being carried forward from your twenties, nothing outstanding against you at all, and any picture in your head that has a column in it belongs to a document God did not write. Take the column out and the work stays. That is the strange and wonderful thing about it.

You are living inside a finished work whether or not you have ever slept in it, and Hebrews 9:12 does not become more true when a man believes it convincingly. The Holy Spirit is the One who moves a person from explaining a house to living in it, and He is doing that while you read.