The Stones By The River

The supper was good. It always is. Ham and three kinds of beans and somebody's mother's rolls, and the folding tables put end to end in the fellowship hall with the paper cloths taped down at the corners because of the fan.

Then somebody said, let's go round and everybody say how the Lord got hold of them.

And it was wonderful. A fellow two chairs down told about a night in a parking lot in Tulsa with his hands shaking on the wheel. A woman across from you told about a hospital corridor and a specific hour, two seventeen in the morning, and she said it like a date on a headstone, and half the table was wiping their eyes.

And you counted the ice in your cup.

Because you have got nothing. Not nothing in the sense of a bad story. Nothing in the sense of no story. You were seven, maybe eight. You were in a Sunday school room with a felt board and the smell of that carpet, and a lady with a soft voice asked who wanted to ask Jesus into their heart, and you did, and you meant it as much as an eight year old means anything, and then everybody went out to the parking lot and got in their cars.

You did not shake. Nothing came over you. There was no parking lot in Tulsa and there was no two seventeen in the morning. There was a bell and a station wagon and a Sunday afternoon.

And it came round to you and you said, oh, I've just always sort of been a believer, and you did the small laugh, and the man beside you said that's beautiful, and the table moved on with a speed that you felt in your stomach.

Here is what you have never told anybody, and you would be embarrassed to.

You have wondered for about thirty years whether you actually got in.

Not in a crisis. You go to church. You give. You pray at the sink. But there is a room way back in you where a question sits with its coat on, and it says: everybody else has a day. You have a general impression. What if the reason you never felt anything is that nothing happened.

I came about that room. Not about your story. About the room.

Where God hangs His signs

Start with the oldest one, because it settles the whole question and almost nobody notices what it says.

After the flood, God binds Himself to the earth and He gives a sign, and the sign is a bow in the cloud. Now read what He says the sign is for. He does not say, when you see it, remember that I am good. He says: I will look upon it, and I will remember the covenant.

The sign is hung on His side of the sky.

That is not a small detail and it is not a poetic flourish. It tells you the whole architecture of how God does this. A covenant sign is not a device for generating a feeling in the smaller party. It is a standing testimony, put where the One who swore the oath looks at it, so that the oath is kept up by His memory and not by yours.

Take that on yourself right now, because it belongs to you and you have never once been handed it. You are inside an agreement whose sign is not stored in your recollection, and you were never the party responsible for keeping it in view. Genesis 9:16 puts the bow in the cloud and has God saying that He is the One who looks at it, and the Holy Spirit is walking that out of an old flood story and setting it down in the exact room where your question has been sitting.

Twelve men, a load of rock, and a completely ordinary afternoon

Now come to the river, because this one is even plainer.

The nation has crossed the Jordan. God tells Joshua to take twelve men, one out of each tribe, and have each of them carry a stone up out of the middle of the riverbed on his shoulder and stack it on the far bank.

Picture it honestly. It is hot. The men are ordinary. Wet to the thigh, mud to the knee, and river rock is heavier than it looks and there is no elegant way to carry one. They walk up the bank and they put them down, and somebody straightens the pile a little, and that is the memorial. No thunder. No shaking. Twelve tired men and a heap of stones on a gravel bar.

And here is what God says it was for.

That this may be a sign among you, that when your children ask their fathers in time to come, saying, What mean ye by these stones?Joshua 4:6

Read who the sign is aimed at. Not at the men who crossed. At children who were not there, who would come by that pile in some ordinary year and ask a question about it.

The sign was never built to hold a memory. It was built to hold a fact, for people who had no memory of the day at all.

That is you. You were seven years old in a room with a felt board and a smell of carpet, and you have no memory worth the name, and the crossing happened anyway, and the pile has been sitting on the bank for thirty years while you have been asking whether you were ever at the river. Joshua 4:6 was written for exactly that person, and the Spirit is the One holding it steady in front of you tonight.

Your pile of stones, and where it actually is

So what did God set up on your bank?

Not your goosebumps. Goosebumps are weather. Not the intensity of an afternoon in 1994 or whenever it was, because intensity is the one thing on that whole list that was never promised to anybody.

He gave His own oath, cut and finished and not amendable, and then He did something more. He put His Spirit in you as the seal on it, which is a legal word before it is a warm one: a seal is what an owner presses into wax so that anybody handling the parcel knows whose it is and that it has not been opened by anyone else.

The seal is on His side. It is His mark, His pressure, His name in the wax. You have never once been the one holding it in place.

So let it land. You are sealed today, not on the strength of what you felt in a Sunday school room, but on the strength of what He did about you, and it is written and it is not a mood. That is Scripture's own word for it, and His Spirit is the very sign it is talking about, which means the thing you have been looking for evidence of is the One who has been in the room with you the entire time you were looking.