A Compliment About His Personality

The step was mended before Miss Ada noticed it was broken.

That was Dennis. Every Thursday, a little after five, his van pulled up at her gate and he came through with a bag of yams and green bananas on one arm and new timber under the other, and by the time the sun went orange behind the mango tree the step was solid and the porch light had a fresh bulb in it.

Miss Ada thanked him the way you thank a man who owes you nothing. Brightly. A little too much. She pressed sweet bread on him, and afterwards she told the whole road what a good young man he was. So thoughtful. So kind.

Which is a compliment. And a compliment, listened to properly, is a small worry wearing good clothes: a man who is kind can stop being kind. So every Wednesday night, without once admitting it to herself, Miss Ada wondered whether tomorrow would be the week the van did not come.

Then her cousin came down off the hill for a funeral and sat on the porch afterwards with a cup of mint tea.

You know why that boy comes here, don't you.

He is kind, Miss Ada said.

Her cousin set the cup down on the rail. In this yard, she said. Forty years ago. Your father and his father stood right where that clothesline is now. There was a young goat, and it was divided, and what was in it went out into that ground, and the two of them walked the path between the halves and said words over the top of it. Words about children not yet born. They traded names over it and walked out of this yard belonging to each other.

Miss Ada looked at the clothesline for a long time.

He is not being nice to you, her cousin said. He is keeping something. It was cut before you could walk.

And that is the difference nobody ever sat down and explained to you.

You say God is faithful, and you mean every syllable of it, and you say it in exactly the voice you would use about a neighbor who owes you nothing and turns up anyway. It is a lovely thing to say about a person. It is a compliment about His personality.

And every Wednesday night of your life, in the part of you that does not say things out loud, you have wondered quietly whether this is the week He does not come.

What happened in the yard

Long before Miss Ada's father, a man stood in a field at the end of an ordinary afternoon and was told to bring animals and divide them. He laid the halves out in two rows with a path of bare ground running down the middle. That was not a ceremony he invented. It was how two parties made a thing binding: you cut, you laid the pieces out, you walked the path between them, and the walk said what nobody had to write down. May it be done to me as it was done to these, if I do not keep my word. The path was the signature.

So the man waited to walk it. The sun went down. And what happened instead is the strangest sentence in the chapter: a deep sleep fell on him, and while he lay in the grass unable to lift his own head, a smoking furnace and a burning lamp moved down that path alone.

And it came to pass, that, when the sun went down, and it was dark, behold a smoking furnace, and a burning lamp that passed between those pieces.Genesis 15:17

Abram never walked. God walked, and He took both halves of the oath, His own side and the man's side, and swore them while the only other party slept through the whole of it.

So hear this where you are sitting. You are standing inside an oath that was sworn over a sleeping man, and you were inside it long before you could define one word of it. That is not me warming you up with a nice idea: Genesis 15:17 has the fire moving down that path by itself while the man who was promised everything lies flat in the grass, and the Holy Spirit is not showing you that as history this evening. He is setting it under your feet as ground.

A compliment can be taken back. An oath cannot.

A compliment describes somebody. An oath binds them. When you call a man kind you are describing weather: real, pleasant, free to change by Thursday. When a man swears an oath in blood, he has removed his own option to change, and what he does for you afterwards is no longer a mood. It is a debt he has entered.

And that is what has been sitting under your Wednesday nights, unread. You have not been hoping a kind God stays in a good mood; you are standing on an oath God swore against Himself, and Scripture reaches for the coldest legal language it owns to say so, two unchangeable things in which it is impossible for God to lie, precisely so that nobody would go on reading His faithfulness as a personality trait. And it is His Spirit, right now, moving that from a thing you know to a thing you are standing on.

As for thee also, by the blood of thy covenant I have sent forth thy prisoners out of the pit wherein is no water.Zechariah 9:11

Look at the grammar, because it gives away everything. The prisoner does not come up out of the dry pit because somebody reviewed his case and felt sorry. He comes up by the blood of thy covenant. And notice whose covenant the prophet calls it. Thy covenant. The man at the bottom owns it, could not have explained it, and it was his anyway.

So put your own name in that line, because it is doing its work whether or not you can define the word. You are the one it is talking about, and it is already yours: Zechariah 9:11 calls the covenant thine while the man it belongs to sits in the dark with no idea what is being said over his head, and the Spirit who breathed that sentence through a prophet is saying it over the room you are in.

Why there is blood in it at all

Let me be gentle here, because that word frightens people and it was never put there to.

Blood in a covenant is not violence, and it was never something God enjoyed. It is language, and it is the strongest way the ancient world had of saying one thing: this cannot be undone. A signature can be denied. A promise softens until it means whatever is convenient. Blood was what you reached for when the words had to be permanent.

And when God came to make the oath about you personally, He did not send an animal down the path. He walked it Himself, in a body, up a hill outside a city, and He walked it alone exactly as the fire did.

So nothing about your standing is under review this evening. You are held inside a finished oath, and its wording was never left to how well you happen to be doing this month: His word says it is impossible for God to lie, and the Holy Spirit is not asking you to feel that. He is asking you to stand where it puts you.