The First Thing Anybody Learns About Him Is the Worst Thing He Did

There is a box on the form and he has learned to fill it in without slowing down, because slowing down does not help.

What he has never got used to is the four seconds afterwards. A person reads it and then looks up, and in that gap something gets decided, and whatever is decided in that gap runs the rest of the conversation.

He is good at the work. He has been told so by three different supervisors, none of whom hired him.

And here is the thing that has started to bother him more than the rejections. He has begun introducing himself with it. Getting ahead of it. Saying it first, in a light voice, so that nobody else has to be the one to bring it up.

Which means the file is not merely arriving before him now. He is carrying it in himself and putting it on the table.

God says what He does with a record, and why

There is a sentence in Isaiah where God describes His own handling of a file, and the reason He gives is the part nobody expects.

I, even I, am he that blotteth out thy transgressions for mine own sake, and will not remember thy sins. (Isaiah 43:25, King James Version)

For mine own sake.

He does not say because the debt got paid off. He does not say because somebody explained himself well enough or waited long enough.

He says He does it for His own reasons, which takes the whole thing off your side of the table.

And will not remember. That is a decision about what gets brought up, not a claim about memory.

You are cleared by somebody whose reasons do not depend on your case. Isaiah 43 puts the reason on His side and never on yours, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes an ink word do something to a box on a form.

The man God used had killed somebody

This is the one people find hard, and it is right there in the second chapter of Exodus.

And he looked this way and that way, and when he saw that there was no man, he slew the Egyptian, and hid him in the sand. (Exodus 2:12)

He checked to see if anybody was watching first. The text says so.

He ran, and lived as a fugitive for forty years, and the record does not get erased from the book. It stays in there.

And then God speaks to him out of a bush and sends him back to the country he fled, to stand in front of the government he ran from, and to lead a nation out.

The record is in the Bible. So is everything that came after it. Both.

You are not disqualified by what stays in the record. Exodus 2 keeps the killing in the book and Exodus 3 sends him anyway, and it is His Spirit who makes an old file that was never deleted feel like good news instead of a threat.

Four names nobody would have put in

There is a family tree at the very start of the New Testament, and it is easy to skip. Do not skip it.

Genealogies in that world listed men. This one stops four times to name a woman, and the four it names are not the respectable options.

And Salmon begat Booz of Rachab; and Booz begat Obed of Ruth. (Matthew 1:5)

Rahab ran a house in Jericho and the book of Joshua says what kind. Ruth was a Moabite, which was a foreigner from a nation with a specific history. Tamar's story in Genesis 38 is one nobody reads out at a family gathering. And Bathsheba is named in that list, though not by name, in the phrase her that had been the wife of Urias.

Somebody chose to put those four in. In a document whose whole purpose was to establish a credential.

You are the kind of name that gets written into the record on purpose. Matthew 1 lists all four when it did not have to, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes an old family tree read like a decision about who belongs.

Paul lists it and then puts a word in front of it

There is a passage in Corinthians where Paul writes out an ugly list, and then does something with a single word.

He lists a series of things people had been. Then:

And such were some of you: but ye are washed, but ye are sanctified, but ye are justified in the name of the Lord Jesus, and by the Spirit of our God. (1 Corinthians 6:11)

Such were. Past tense, and he does not soften what the list said.

Then three verbs in a row, all of them done to them rather than by them, and he names who did it at the end.

Paul does not pretend the list was inaccurate. He puts it in the past and moves on in the same sentence.

You are washed, and the list is in the past tense. 1 Corinthians 6 keeps the record and changes the tense, and it is the Spirit of our God, named in that same verse, who is credited with the whole of it.

And He says how far it goes

The measurement in Psalm 103 is deliberately impossible, and that is the point of it.

As far as the east is from the west, so far hath he removed our transgressions from us. (Psalm 103:12)

North and south have a limit. Go far enough north and you start coming south.

East and west do not do that. You can travel east forever and never once begin traveling west.

Whoever wrote that picked the one axis with no meeting point, and the choice was not an accident.

You have been separated from it by a distance with no end on it. Psalm 103 picks the axis that never meets and says so, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes an old measurement land on a man in a hallway with a folder.