What They Will Read Out At The End

The porch faces west, and in August the light comes up the hollow sideways and turns the whole yard the color of poured honey. Two of the neighbor girls had walked up after supper the way they do, one of them carrying half a blackberry cobbler under a dish towel, and by dark the three of them were laughing so hard the rocker had walked itself a foot across the boards.

Then somebody mentioned a farm down the road being sold out from under a family, and Dessie went quiet.

She was eleven when they read her grandmother's will out in the front room. She remembers the smell of the coal stove and the lawyer clearing his throat and the way the clock on the mantel got loud. She remembers her aunt Nell sitting with her hands folded, smiling a little, because everybody had always said the home place would come to Nell. Then the man read out a paragraph nobody in that room had ever laid eyes on, and Nell stopped smiling, and by spring she was in a rented room in town with her mother's dishes still in a crate.

Dessie is seventy-nine years old on a porch in the hills and she has never once stopped hearing that clock.

Because somewhere along the way she quit thinking the reading was about her grandmother and started thinking it was about God. Nobody taught her that. Nobody stood up and said it. She just got the idea that at the end there is a front room and a man clearing his throat and a paragraph she was never shown, and a face going still, and the face is hers. So she has lived toward it. Fifty-some years of Sunday school and casseroles and sitting up with sick neighbors, all of it real, all of it gladly done, and the whole time one ear listening for a clause.

One of the girls saw her go somewhere else and put a hand on her arm. "You all right?"

Dessie said she was fine, and the cobbler went round again, and the laughing came back.

But you know exactly where she went, because you have been living toward a reading too. Nobody put it to you in those words either. It just sits under everything, the low steady expectation that the terms of this thing get produced and read out, and that when they are, there is a sentence in there with your name beside it.

You would like, before that, to have actually read the document.

Start with the line that says who it is for

When a paper actually matters, the first thing to hunt for is not the list of duties. It is the sentence that says who the thing was drawn up to protect. It sits near the front, where anybody could find it if somebody had once told them to look.

God's covenant has one. He is talking to a man ninety-nine years old with no children and no ground of his own, and He says it out loud, in daylight, before one thing is asked of anybody:

And I will establish my covenant between me and you and your offspring after you throughout their generations for an everlasting covenant, to be God to you and to your offspring after you.Genesis 17:7

Read that last clause slow. To be God to you. That is what the document is for. Not to audit anybody, and not to catch a woman out at the end of a long life of casseroles. The purpose of the whole covenant is that God would belong to a person, and that the belonging would run on down through the generations behind her like water down a hollow.

So here is the first thing, and it is not a kindness I am laying on top of the text. You are named on the protection line of an everlasting covenant. That is not my good opinion of you. Genesis 17:7 is written down, it was sworn over a man who had nothing yet to show for himself, and the Holy Spirit is the one carrying that written sentence up onto your porch this evening and setting it down where the clock has been sitting.

The reading already happened, and it happened in daylight

Look at how God did it, because the manner tells you as much as the words.

He did not put the terms in a drawer. He said them out loud to the man they concerned, before that man had done one thing to deserve a syllable of it, and then said them again to his son and again to his grandson, so nobody in that family could ever claim they had not been told.

That is the character in the paperwork. Whatever you have been braced for, you have never once been handed a document by God with a page held back, because a God who reads a man his terms in the open before the man has earned any of them is not a God who saves a paragraph for the end. Scripture shows Him doing the opposite until it is almost tiresome, and His Spirit is what turns that from a fact you already knew into a hand on your arm this evening.

And there is a second sentence, put down plain, for people who like to know who they are dealing with:

Know therefore that the LORD your God is God, the faithful God who keeps covenant and steadfast love with those who love him and keep his commandments, to a thousand generations.Deuteronomy 7:9

A thousand generations. Nobody writes a number like that into an agreement he is looking for a way out of.

Both halves, said plainly

There are two halves here and I am not going to pretend otherwise, because a person gets lied to gently a few times and learns to smell it coming.

One half is God's oath. That half is settled. It was settled long before you drew a first breath, it holds without any help from you, and it does not move when you move. The other half is your response. That half is real, it is genuinely asked, and it is not the half holding this thing up. Anybody who tells you nothing at all is asked has handed you half a sheet and called it good news, and most of us knew better than that by forty.

So put your weight on the half that carries it. You are standing on the settled half this evening, not on your last four Sundays and not on the fifty years behind them, because Deuteronomy 7:9 makes the keeping God's own work and the thousand generations His own figure. That is not a feeling to work up. It is ground. His Spirit sets a written sentence under a woman's feet and leaves it there, and He is doing that with this one while you read.

Here is the ask, six verses earlier, in God's own mouth:

I am God Almighty; walk before me, and be blameless.Genesis 17:1

Walk in front of My face rather than behind it. That is a term, it is not decoration, and I am not going to shrink it to make this read kinder than the document already is.

But look what kind of thing it is. It is not a price, and it never was. It is the shape of a life that has been given a God to walk in front of. Notice the order in that chapter, because the order is the whole argument: the oath comes first and the walking comes after. You are asked to walk in front of Him because you have already been handed a God to walk in front of, and the Spirit who set that order down in Genesis 17 is not about to reverse it in your particular case.

Who the document protects

Every real agreement protects somebody. Ask who, and the kind of document in your hands comes clear.

This one protects the weaker party, and it says so by what God did with the risk. He had nobody higher to swear by, so He swore by Himself, and the whole weight came down on His side of the page. Then He said this, in the first person, so there could be no argument later:

My covenant I will not violate, or alter the word that went forth from my lips.Psalm 89:34

You have a God who has taken the option of altering the terms off His own table. Psalm 89:34 is written, it is His word about His own conduct rather than a hopeful reading of His character, and the Holy Spirit is pressing it in right where the alertness lives, that low permanent listening you have carried so long you stopped calling it anything.