The Chair Nobody Sits In

It is the one at the end, on the side nearest the window, and it has a wobble that everybody knows about and nobody has fixed.

Nothing is wrong with it. It matches. It gets wiped down with the others. At the big meals, when there are too many people and someone is perched on the arm of the sofa with a plate on their knees, that chair stays where it is, pushed in slightly further than the rest, and the room arranges itself around it without a word.

Watch a family do this and you will not believe how good they are at it. The salt goes over the top of it in a long reach rather than round. Conversation crosses it at an angle. A child sat in it once, four years old and delighted with themselves, and an aunt said come here darling, sit by me, in a voice so warm and so quick that the child never knew anything had happened.

Nobody decided this. There was no evening when it was agreed. It simply became the shape of the table, the way a path becomes the shape of a field, one small avoidance at a time until the grass gives up.

And you have eaten a thousand meals at that shape. Birthdays. Ordinary Tuesdays. The tea after the hard day when nobody said much. You have passed things over that gap so many times that your arm knows the reach, and the gap has stopped being an absence and become a piece of furniture.

Perhaps your table is smaller than that. Perhaps the chair nobody sits in is the only other chair there is, and the meal is you and a plate and the radio on for the sound of a voice. It is the same arithmetic. There is a place at your table that has been counted as nothing for so long that you no longer notice you are counting it.

Here is what nobody has told you, and it is the strangest fact in the whole book. When God swore His covenant, the ceremony ended with a meal. Not a speech. Not a lecture. Seventy men sat down on a mountain in front of Him, and ate, and drank.

Seventy men, a mountain, and lunch

Picture the climb, because the picture is the teaching.

The oath had been sworn at the bottom. Words read out, the people answering, an altar, the blood of the covenant thrown against it, and everybody knowing that what had just happened could not be undone. Then seventy elders were told to come up, and they went, in sandals, on a stony path, carrying bread wrapped in cloth because you take food when you go up a mountain.

Near the top something happens that the text hands you almost casually. They see God. Under His feet, they say, something like a pavement of sapphire, clear as the sky itself.

And then this.

And he did not lay his hand on the chief men of the people of Israel; they beheld God, and ate and drank.Exodus 24:11

They ate. On the mountain. In front of Him. Seventy men with bread in their hands and dust on their legs, chewing, in the presence of God, and nothing struck them and nothing went wrong.

That is how a covenant closes. The oath is sworn and then the parties eat, because eating together is the sign that the matter is settled and the two sides are now one household. Nobody eats with a stranger in that world. You eat with your own.

You are inside that ending, and you were counted into it before you ever thought about it: Exodus 24:11 is not a metaphor with a nice application, it is seventy men having a meal in front of God, and the Holy Spirit is the One carrying that mountain lunch down to a kitchen table with a wobbly chair at the end of it.

Which is the empty place, exactly

Now go back to your table and look at it honestly.

Treat that place as a subtraction for long enough and it becomes one. A gap in the count, a piece of furniture, a thing to reach over. It reads that way because the counting only ever included who is visibly there, which is the only method anyone ever taught.

But the covenant meal changes the arithmetic completely, and it does it without pretending anything. Nobody here is going to tell you the chair is not empty. It is empty, that is real, and nothing here asks anybody to feel differently about it.

What is being said is different. It is that a meal eaten by a person in covenant is never a meal eaten alone, because the One who swore the oath is at the table by the terms of the oath itself.

Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and eat with him, and he with me.Revelation 3:20

Read who that is offered to. Anyone. Not households. Not people with a full table. Anyone who opens the door, and the meal named there is not a banquet, it is supper, the ordinary evening kind.

You have company at every meal you eat, and you have had it at meals you thought you got through by yourself. His word puts Him at the door and then inside, eating, and the Holy Spirit is the reason that sentence is a fact about your kitchen rather than a picture in a book.

And there is a response asked of you here, so let me say it plainly rather than letting discovery drift into nothing being asked. God's side is the oath and the invitation, and both are finished. Your side is to open the door and eat like somebody who has company. That is real, and it is small, and it is yours to do.