The Sentence Has No If In It

The class met on Thursday evenings in a room above a print shop, four students in September and three by the fall, which the teacher said was normal and nothing to be sad about.

They were learning to read an old language, slowly, a line at a time, and the teacher had one rule she repeated until it annoyed them. Translate what is there. Not what it means. Not what it obviously must mean. What is there.

In the third month she gave each of them the same short letter to work on. A grandmother in a village, writing to a grandson in the city. Four sentences long, in a hand that leaned hard to the right.

Petru worked at his for twenty minutes with his thumb under the line. He was the slowest in the room and the most careful, which the teacher had privately decided were the same thing.

When she asked him to read it out, he read: "I am well. The apricots did badly this year. I will come at Easter, if the roads are good. Kiss the children for me."

The teacher took her glasses off her hair and put them on. "Read the third sentence again."

He read it again.

"Where is the if?"

Petru looked down. The line had four words in it. He counted them twice, and then a third time with his thumb, and there was no if in any of them. He had put it in himself, somewhere between the page and his mouth, and he had not felt himself do it.

The other two laughed, and he laughed too, because it was funny, and because a room where three people are learning something badly is a warm room.

Then he went quiet. The teacher did not rescue him and did not hurry him. She waited with her hands flat on the table until he looked up.

"You did not misread it," she said. "You translated it. You have done that sentence before."

And he had. Every promise made to him as a boy had a hinge somewhere in the back of it. Come Saturday, if I finish. We will see, if you behave. His hand supplied the condition where the grandmother had not written one, because a sentence with an if in it cannot cut you as deeply when the thing does not happen. It was not carelessness. It was a coat he had been putting on since he was nine.

And you do that. Not with an old letter from a village. With the sentences of God, the ones where He says what He will be, and somewhere between the page and your mouth a small word arrives that He did not write.

Two grammars, and both of them honest

Start where the teacher started, because everything else here depends on it. Translate what is there.

That rule cuts in both directions, and this is the part most people are never told. Scripture does contain conditions. Leviticus 26 opens a long passage with one in its third verse: if you walk in my statutes and observe my commandments and do them. That is an if, it is on the line, it is not a printing error, and nobody honest goes around it. A man who tells you the word of God has no condition anywhere in it has done the exact opposite of what Petru did, and both of them have finished up holding a sentence God did not write.

And then, further down that same chapter, God says something with no hinge in it at all, and you are allowed to read that one just as flatly as you read the first. Leviticus 26:12 runs two clauses and there is no condition inside either of them, and the Holy Spirit who breathed the third verse breathed the twelfth with exactly the same care.

And I will walk among you and will be your God, and you shall be my people.Leviticus 26:12

Look at what He commits Himself to there. Not to a result in somebody's week. To Himself. I will walk. I will be your God. Two verbs that belong to Him, describing what He is going to be toward people, with nothing in the line making either verb wait on anybody.

You have that sentence standing over you as a commitment in the first person, and not as a general sense that God means well, which is the thing you already had and the thing that has not held you up. His Spirit does not read Leviticus 26:12 to anybody with an asterisk floating over it, because there is no asterisk on the line to read.

The same sentence again, with the walking supplied

That formula is worth following through the Bible, because it keeps coming back: I will be their God, and they shall be my people. It surfaces in Genesis, in Leviticus, in Jeremiah, in Ezekiel, in the letter to the Hebrews. And in Ezekiel it arrives with the machinery shown.

And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules.Ezekiel 36:26 and 27

Count the verbs and notice, again, whose they are. A new heart given. A new spirit put in. The stone taken out. His Spirit placed inside. And then the walking, which He also takes on Himself.

You were written into a sentence where God assumes responsibility for the very obedience most people assume is the hinge. That is Ezekiel 36:27 in His own mouth, not my encouragement to you, and the Spirit He names in it is the Spirit at work in a believer now.

So here is the line down the middle of the page, and it goes here in the teaching rather than at the end as a soft note. God's I will sentences are His oath, and that half is settled. Your response is real, it is genuinely asked for, and it is not the thing holding His half up. Both of those are true in the same breath, and dropping either one of them produces a lie that somebody will build a life on.

Your answer matters. You are asked for something and it is not decoration: to walk with Him, to keep His word, to answer Him when He speaks, to love the people He put near you. Ezekiel 36:27 does not delete one word of that. It tells you whose strength does the walking, and the Spirit who supplies it is not standing at the end of the corridor with a clipboard.

What I will not do is tell you what God is about to do about your circumstances. That is not on the line anywhere and I do not have it. What is on the line is what He said He would be, in verbs He owns, and that is a great deal more solid than a forecast.