The Front Of The Line

Ten to six, and Marva is already at the stop.

She is always first. Not because she is anxious, though she is, and not because the bus is early, because it never is. She is first because that is the position she has held since she was nineteen years old and somebody had to be.

Two bags. One on the right shoulder with her work shoes and a lunch she made at half past five. One on the left with her mother's repeat prescription list, the appointment card for Thursday, and her son's football kit because he will forget it, and if he forgets it she is the one the school phones.

By the time the others arrive at the stop she has already read the timetable board, worked out that the six oh four is running late again, and told the man with the walking stick that there is a seat free on the wall. She does that everywhere. She goes into the room first. She asks the questions first. She hears the bad news first and arranges her face before she turns round, because behind her there is always somebody whose face she is managing.

Twenty two years of doors. The doctor's door, the school office door, the door of the room where they tell you what the scan showed. She has gone through every single one of them at the front, and it did not feel like heroism at the time. It felt like the only arrangement available.

And she could not tell you the last time somebody went through a door ahead of her. Not helped. Not sympathized. Went in first. Stood between her and whatever was in there.

She has stopped picturing it. That is the part that would break you if you watched it closely: not that nobody stands in front of her, but that she no longer imagines anybody could, and so she does not look for it, and so she does not miss it, and so it never occurs to her to ask.

That is you, is it not.

You are the front of the line for people you love, and you have been for so long that being behind somebody would feel like falling. You would not say any of this out loud. It sounds like complaining and you are not complaining; you would do it all again tomorrow, and you will, at ten to six. But somewhere under the two bags there is a woman or a man who has never in living memory had anybody walk in ahead of them, and nobody has ever explained that an oath was cut with a clause in it about exactly that.

The clause about your quarrel

When two houses cut an oath in the ancient world, they did not only exchange promises to be nice to one another. They exchanged trouble.

Picture it plainly. Two families stand together in a yard at the end of a long day and swear, and from that hour a thing said against one of them is said against both. If a matter came up against the smaller house, the head of the larger one took it up. Not advice. Not sympathy at the gate. He stood in the doorway of it, and everybody in the district understood that whoever pressed the matter now had a different person to deal with.

The man in trouble was still in the trouble. He had simply stopped being first in it.

But if thou shalt indeed obey his voice, and do all that I speak; then I will be an enemy unto thine enemies, and an adversary unto thine adversaries.Exodus 23:22

That is the clause, and it is God speaking about His own house.

Now, before another sentence: the adversary in your life is not a person, and I am not going to hand you one. Not your family, not the woman at the desk, not the church that let you down, not anybody with a face. What comes against you has other names and you know them. The dread that arrives at four in the morning. The debt that will not shrink. The word from the consultant. The silence in the house since the funeral. Those are what the clause is about, along with the powers of darkness behind them, and never the people you love.

So take that in where you are standing. You are inside an oath with a clause about your quarrel, and it was written long before you ever picked up the two bags. Exodus 23:22 is not a poem about God's temperament; it is the covenant term, and the Holy Spirit is not reading it to you as history this morning. He is putting your name in the sentence.

Who is actually standing in front of what

Notice what the clause does not say. It does not say God will make you better at the front. It does not say He sends help so that you can carry more. It moves the position.

And notice the shape of it, because a covenant has terms and this message will not pretend otherwise. Walk in His voice, it says, do what I speak. That is not a fee for protection and it was never a performance review. It is simply the description of a person who is inside the oath and living in it, rather than admiring it from the road. What is settled is His word and His strength. What is yours is to walk with Him, in the open, out loud, as one of His.

And that is what makes the next thing true rather than sentimental. You are backed, right now, in the matter you have not told anybody about. His word says He takes up the quarrel of His own household, and the Spirit is the One putting weight under that sentence while you read it, so that it stops being a comfort and starts being a position you are standing in.

What changes, and what nobody can promise you

Here is where I have to be honest with you, because cheerful people have lied to you before.

Nothing here promises how the matter turns out. Not the appointment on Thursday, not the letter, not the conversation you keep rehearsing. Anybody who tells you a covenant guarantees a particular ending is selling you something, and when it does not land that way you will be told it was your fault, and that is a cruelty I will not put my name to.

What changes is the order of the line. Who is in front. Whose strength the thing has to come through before it reaches you. That is not a smaller comfort than the one you wanted; it is the one that holds when the outcome is still unknown, because it does not depend on the outcome at all.

So put the bags down for a second. You have been the wall for a long time, and you were never appointed to it. Isaiah 54:17 hands the servants of the Lord a heritage they did not build, and the Holy Spirit is not asking you to feel strong this morning. He is asking you to step back one place.