For The Sake Of A Servant Long Gone

The dust showed on the ridge before the sun was properly up.

By the middle of the morning the whole city could see it: tents going up in lines across the high ground east of the valley, smoke from cooking fires, the small movements of a great many people who had nowhere else to be. The gates were shut. Everyone was on the wall, and nobody had anything to do but look.

So they started counting.

That is what people do on a wall. The baker was counting the two winters he had short weighted the widow at the corner, and had told himself both times that everybody was doing it that year. A man near the north tower was counting the night he had not gone back down the road for his brother, and had made good sense of it at the time, and had never once made good sense of it since. A young woman with her hands on the parapet was counting nothing at all, because she had come up from the coast the summer before and had decided, quietly and completely, that she was too new here for any of this to be about her.

Every one of them was doing the same arithmetic. If this city is spared, there will be a reason, and the reason will be somebody's record, and mine will not hold up if it is read out.

Then the king's man came along the wall with a word from the prophet, and read it into the wind, and the reason was in it.

It had nothing to do with anybody standing there.

The city would stand for God's own sake, he said, and for the sake of His servant David. A shepherd boy who had become a king and had then been a hundred years in the ground. Not one man on that wall had ever met him. The baker's short weight did not come into it. The brother on the road did not come into it. The girl from the coast, who had been in the city for eleven months and thought she did not count, was inside the same sentence as everybody else.

And you have been standing on a wall doing arithmetic since you were young.

You keep a record on yourself. Not written anywhere, and not something you would show a soul, but you could produce it in about four seconds if somebody asked, and you have been quietly certain for years that protection, provision and any real kindness from God go to people whose record survives being read out. Yours would not. So you have arranged your whole life around not being looked at too closely, and you call that humility, and it is not.

Nobody has ever told you the reason God actually gives.

The reason God gives out loud

Here is the sentence the man read on the wall, and I want you to notice what is missing from it.

For I will defend this city to save it, for mine own sake, and for my servant David's sake.Isaiah 37:35

Two reasons are given and neither of them is the city.

Nobody's conduct is mentioned. Nobody's faith is measured. The city is not told to improve, apologize or produce anything at all. God names His own honor first, and then He names a man who had been dead for generations and whose covenant He had sworn and would not go back on.

That is how covenant kindness travels. It arrives at people for the sake of somebody else, and it always has.

So let this land where you are standing on your own wall. You are covered for a reason that was never yours to produce, and you were covered before you ever heard the reason spoken: Isaiah 37:35 has God naming His own sake and His servant's, with not one word about the people behind the gate, and the Holy Spirit is not reading you an old siege story. He is telling you why the gate has been holding all this time.

The kindness that comes for somebody else's sake

Years before that siege, a young man who could not walk was carried into a king's hall and set down on the floor, certain of what was coming.

He had every reason to be. He was the grandson of the old king, from the house that had been swept away, and he had spent his life in a town at the edge of nowhere keeping his head down. When the king spoke, he braced.

And what the king said was: fear not, for I will surely show thee kindness for Jonathan thy father's sake. Then he gave him land, and a household to work it, and a place at the king's own table, and there was not one thing in that man's record that produced any of it. It came down a line of friendship sworn between two men years before, one of whom was gone.

Read it slowly, because the same door is the one you came through. You are shown kindness for the sake of Another, and it is written that way on purpose so that nobody at the table ever has to defend their own record: 1 Kings 15:4 says a lamp was left in Jerusalem for David's sake, and the Spirit is putting your own name into that grammar right now, in the room you are in.

Why this does not make you a charity case

Now I want to take something out of your hands, because I know exactly what you are about to do with all this.

You are about to accept it as pity. You are about to say: fine, He lets me in on somebody else's ticket, which makes me the one who did not qualify, sitting among people who did.

There are no people who did.

That is the part the wall never sees. The baker, the man from the north tower, the girl from the coast and the priest with the spotless record were all inside the same sentence, and it named neither the best of them nor the worst. Every single person inside this covenant is inside it for the sake of Christ, and there is no second entrance where a better record gets you a shorter queue. The woman in your church whose life looks effortless from the outside came in through the same door you did, and Scripture leaves nobody a different one to boast about, which is exactly why the Holy Spirit can seat you tonight without embarrassing anybody.

Being included for the sake of Another is not charity. Charity is what happens when somebody has no claim and is given something anyway. You have a claim, and it is a covenant claim, and it stands in a Name that has never once been refused.