Somebody Signed For You

The pen at the letting office was chained to the desk, and that is the part Delroy still remembers.

He was twenty four. He had eleven months at the tire place, first month and deposit counted out in an envelope in his jacket, and his good shirt on for a woman who was never going to look at it. She turned the form around so it faced him and went down the boxes with the blunt end of her pen. Name. Date of birth. Employer. Length of service. Then she stopped near the bottom, at a box drawn with a heavier line than all the others, and asked who was signing as his guarantor.

He did not know the word. She explained it the way you explain something to a person you have decided not to embarrass: somebody whose name the landlord will accept, in case yours turns out not to be enough.

In case yours turns out not to be enough.

He said he would take the form home. He sat on the low wall outside for a while with the envelope in his jacket and the form folded in three in his hand, and what he felt was not disappointment. It was shame, and it had an exact shape. He had the money. He had the job. It was his name that was the problem, and there was nothing on earth he could do about that on a Tuesday afternoon, because what makes a name good is years, and he had not had them yet.

His mother's cousin Marva signed it on the Thursday. She came round after her shift, read the form twice, asked what the heating was like in the flat, and wrote her name in the heavy box in blue ink, slowly, the way people of her generation write, as though the paper were listening. She made no speech. She put the cap back on her pen and said, "Now. Show me that kitchen once you are in there."

He got the flat.

And here is what he did with that afternoon, which is what most of us do with ours. He decided, without once putting it into a sentence, that he was a man who has to be signed for, and he carried it into everything after. He is thirty eight now, with a mortgage and two references he never had to ask twice for. And he still cannot walk into a room where something is being decided about him without the old feeling arriving first and sitting down before he does: they are going to look at me properly and find out I am short.

He has never once been the one whose name made an agreement good. That is how he puts it to himself, on the drive home, when it is quiet. Never once.

So when somebody stood up on a Sunday and said that God has entered into a covenant with him, Delroy heard what a man like that hears. He heard a form with his name on the line, and a box at the bottom with a heavier border around it, waiting.

If you have been reading the whole thing that way for years, stay here with me a minute. I think you have been looking at the wrong box.

The one whose name made it good

There is a word in Hebrews that Delroy would have recognized instantly at that desk, and most of us read straight past it because our Bibles print it in old clothes.

By so much was Jesus made a surety of a better testament.Hebrews 7:22

A surety is a guarantor. It is the same office as the heavy box on the form: the one who steps in and says, let this fall on me if it does not come good. In the world that sentence was written into, a surety was not offering moral support. He took the debt onto himself, and if the debt went unpaid, the creditor came to his house instead of yours.

Now read the line again and notice what it does not say. It does not say Jesus witnessed the covenant, or that He recommended you the way a decent referee recommends a candidate and then goes back to his own afternoon. It says He was made the surety of it. The whole weight of this agreement rests on His name, and His is the only name that was ever good enough to carry it.

So take this as something already settled about you: you are not the guarantor here and you never have been. That is what Hebrews 7:22 says, written down centuries before you started worrying about it. His Spirit is what carries a word like surety across two thousand years and lays it in front of a man sitting on a low wall with a form folded in three.

There is a second thing, and it does not merely answer the argument. It undoes the shame.

When God made His promise to Abraham, He did something that stays strange until a person has sat on a low wall outside an office with a form folded in three.

For when God made promise to Abraham, because he could swear by no greater, he sware by himself.Hebrews 6:13

Men swear by something above them. That is the whole mechanism of an oath: I put a greater name behind my word, so that if my word fails you have somewhere to go. God had nothing above Him. So He put His own name in the box. He guaranteed His promise with Himself, which means the only route by which this agreement fails is if He does.

You were never asked for a name in this. Two unchangeable things stand behind you now, His promise and His oath, and Hebrews 6:18 says it is impossible for God to lie in either one; His Spirit is not waiting for you to feel that before it counts.

And that is where the shame gets answered rather than argued with. Delroy's shame at twenty four was that his name was not enough. It was not enough, and nobody telling him otherwise would have made it so. The good news does not walk up to that man on that wall and inform him his name was fine all along. It tells him something better and stranger: his name was never the one being asked for.

Then comes the part most of us skim, and it is the reason this was ever called a family.

According as he hath chosen us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before him in love: having predestinated us unto the adoption of children by Jesus Christ to himself.Ephesians 1:4-5

Read the timing before anything else. Before the foundation of the world. Before there was a world to be born into and a family to fall short of, there was a household planned, and a place in it with your shape already cut out of it. Marva did not sign because Delroy had proved something in the fourteen days before Thursday. She signed because of what he was to her, and that was decided long before he ever needed a flat.

So this is yours right now, and not at the end of some improvement: you are inside a family that was promised before it had anybody in it. You were chosen in Him before the foundation of the world, and the Spirit of adoption is the reason the word Father does not stick in your throat the way it used to.

For ye have not received the spirit of bondage again to fear; but ye have received the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father. The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God.Romans 8:15-16

Notice who does the testifying there. Not you. You have a witness living inside you whose whole work is to say the thing you cannot talk yourself into on a bad afternoon, and Romans 8:16 puts that testimony in the Spirit's hands and not in your mood.