The Clause You Assume Is In There

The lease ran to eleven pages and Wendell read page eleven first.

He always did. He had done it with the truck paperwork and the insurance booklet and the little folded card that came taped to the washing machine. Turn to the back, find the paragraph with the word Termination printed over it, read that one twice. The front of an agreement is a mood. The back of it is what they can actually do to you.

The young woman behind the desk said take your time, so he did, running a finger under each line and mouthing the words the way he had since school.

Landlord may terminate this agreement upon sixty days written notice, with or without cause.

He left his finger on it a second longer than he needed to, the way you press on a bruise to see whether it still answers.

Wendell was sixty-three years old. He had moved eleven times before he turned fourteen, and every one of those eleven had started with a paragraph very much like that one, read out loud by his mother at somebody else's kitchen table in a voice she was working hard to keep level. Sixty days. With or without cause. He could still hear the cadence of it.

So he had grown into a man who reads the back page first. It had saved him money and it had saved him surprise, and of those two he valued surprise the least.

He signed. He shook her hand. He carried the box with the coffee maker up the front steps of a small brick house on Chandler Street and set it on the counter, and the light through that kitchen window was the low amber kind you only get in the last hour of the day, and for about four minutes he was flat-out happy.

Then the other thing came back, the way it always does, and it came back quiet.

Because he had done it with God too.

Twenty-nine years a believing man. He could tell you the story of the cross the way a person tells a story they love. And underneath all of it, running the whole time like a refrigerator you have stopped noticing, sat the certainty that somewhere in the back of that agreement was a paragraph nobody had ever shown him. Sixty days. With or without cause. Something about conduct. Something about how many times a man is allowed to come back before a door stops being a door.

He never once went looking for it. That is the part I want you to catch. He never looked, because he did not want to find it, and a man will not read the paragraph he is already certain is there.

If you are carrying a version of that paragraph, sit on the step with me a minute. I have read the agreement all the way through, and I want to tell you what is on the back page.

I went looking for it myself

Start with the shape of the document, because the shape is most of the answer.

The word our Bibles translate as covenant was, in the ordinary Greek of the first century, the word a man used for his will. Not a contract. A will. And that difference is not a technicality, it is the whole thing. A contract is two parties holding each other to terms, and it carries an exit for each of them because either one might fail. A will carries one signature. The person named in it does nothing to earn it and nothing to keep it. He is named, and then somebody dies, and then it is his.

Wendell's reflex was not stupid, it was trained. Every agreement he had ever stood inside had that exit paragraph, and so has yours. Experience taught the habit honestly. It just taught him about the wrong document.

Now watch Paul do the arithmetic out loud.

And this I say, that the covenant, that was confirmed before of God in Christ, the law, which was four hundred and thirty years after, cannot disannul, that it should make the promise of none effect.Galatians 3:17

Four hundred and thirty years. God makes a promise to one old man with no children. Four and a third centuries go by, and the law arrives at Sinai in smoke and thunder, and Paul's whole argument is that the later document has no power to reach back and void the earlier one. If the greatest body of instruction ever handed to human beings could not cancel that promise, a bad Tuesday is not going to manage it. You are standing inside something a later paragraph has no power to annul, and that is not my confidence talking, it is the plain arithmetic of Galatians 3:17, and the same Spirit who moved Paul to count those years out loud is in the room with you while you read them.

Then there is the question of who swore.

When God wanted the heirs of that promise to hold something even more solid than His character, He did a strange thing. He took an oath. And having no one greater to swear by, He swore by Himself.

Wherein God, willing more abundantly to shew unto the heirs of promise the immutability of his counsel, confirmed it by an oath: That by two immutable things, in which it was impossible for God to lie, we might have a strong consolation.Hebrews 6:17-18

Two immutable things. His promise, and His oath upon His promise. Read the sentence for who is doing the work in it. Not the heirs. The heirs are the ones being reassured. You were never the guarantor of this and you were never once asked to be, and what is written in Hebrews 6 is that God bound Himself so that men like Wendell would have strong consolation, and His Spirit will not let that sentence stay theoretical in a person who reads it slowly.

Here is what follows from it, and the back-page habit has no way to account for this.

If there is only one signature, then there is no clause for the other side, because there is no other side. An exit paragraph exists to protect a party who might fail. God is not protecting Himself from you. He is not sixty days from cause. The reason you cannot find the small print is not that it is well hidden, and it is not that somebody is keeping it from you. It is not in there.

And what He put in its place was not a clause at all. It was a family.

Having predestinated us unto the adoption of children by Jesus Christ to himself, according to the good pleasure of his will.Ephesians 1:5

Adoption is a legal word and it was chosen on purpose. In that world an adopted son could not be un-adopted, because he had been taken by a deliberate act in front of witnesses and the act did not run backward. You have been placed into a family that was promised before it had a single person in it, according to the good pleasure of His will and not according to your recent run of form, and the Spirit of adoption teaches a grown man to say Father without checking the doorway behind him first.

Which is why Paul says this next.

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.Romans 8:15

Again is a tender word to find in a verse. It takes for granted that you have already spent years under the other thing, listening for sixty days notice, and it says plainly that whatever you were given when Christ took hold of you, it was not that. You have received the Spirit of adoption, and Romans 8:15 hands Him that name because that is His actual work. He is not in you to keep you nervous.