The Arithmetic Says No

He has written it out. That is the part he would least like anybody to know.

Not once. Several times, over about nine years, on paper, at a desk, in the evening, and each time he has folded the paper and put it in the fire or the bin, and each time he has got the same answer, and each time the answer has felt less like despair and more like a result.

The method is not complicated. He would tell you it is not even wrong.

On one side there is what he holds to be true about God, which he holds carefully, and which he could defend in a room full of people who disagreed with him and has, twice. God is holy. God is just. God does not overlook. God is not indifferent to what was done to the people who were affected by it, and he is not indifferent to that either, and any doctrine that lets him off by being vague about them is a doctrine he wants no part of.

On the other side there is what he did, which is his, and which is not going in here, and which he has never minimized by one degree in nine years.

And in the middle there is a line, and under the line there is a number.

He is sixty-three.

He would want you to understand that this is not self-pity. He genuinely dislikes self-pity and would tell you so. It is not even sadness most days. It is the settled, slightly tired condition of a man who has done a sum properly and has to live with the answer, and who thinks it would be intellectually shabby to keep redoing it in the hope of a different one.

He goes on Fridays. He gives. He reads. He does all of it as a man doing what is right regardless of outcome, which he would say is the only honorable way to hold a position like his.

And what he has never once considered, in nine years and several sheets of paper, is whether the sum has a term missing.

The term you left out

I am not going to tell you that God is nicer than you think.

That is the standard move and it would insult you, and it would also be a worse doctrine than the one you are holding. You are right that He is holy. You are right that He is just. You are right that a mercy which is vague about the people who were affected is not worth having, and you are more right about that than a great many cheerful people are.

So I am not going to soften a single one of your premises.

I am going to point at a term that is not in your sum.

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

Read the last four words of the first clause, because that is the whole of what I have to say to you and everything else is commentary.

For mine own sake.

Your sum has two sides: what God is like, and what you did. And you have been trying to find a mercy that can be justified from your side of the line, which is why it never balances, because it cannot and it never will.

That verse says the blotting out is done for God's own sake. It is not a concession to the offender and it is not an assessment of the offense. It is an act He performs out of His own interest, for reasons internal to Himself, and the offender is not consulted and does not contribute a term.

You are a man whose transgressions are blotted out for God's own sake, and that is not a comfort I am offering you, it is what is written, and the Holy Spirit is the reason it is landing on the paper rather than on a verse you could parse better than I can.

And look at the doubling at the start. I, even I. Isaiah has God say the pronoun twice, which in that language is emphasis to the point of insistence: nobody else is doing this, nothing else is doing this, and no other party is involved in the transaction.

Which means your sum was never a two-sided equation. There is a third party in it who acts unilaterally.

Now let me say the thing about the people who were affected, because you raised it and it would be cowardly of me to leave it alone.

You are right that it matters. A forgiveness that treats what happened to them as a rounding error is not a Christian idea and you have been right to refuse it for nine years.

But notice: for mine own sake does not do that either. It does not say the offense was small. It says the blotting out is God's act, done for God's reasons, and it leaves what was done to them fully what it was. Those two things sit together in that verse without either one being reduced, and that is more than your arithmetic could manage, which is why yours has never balanced.

You have been carrying it in a way nobody asked you to carry it and never once redoing the sum with the actual terms. Scripture says He blots out and does not remember, and the Spirit of God is the one who has kept you going on Fridays for nine years as a man doing right regardless of outcome, which is not a small thing and He has not missed one of them.

And here is the last of it. You are blotted out, and it was done for reasons that have nothing to do with your side of the line. The word says it twice over, with the pronoun doubled, and the Spirit is the seal, and there was never a version of that sum in which the man doing it could make it come out.

And if what is on you tonight is heavier than this, if it has got as far as not wanting to be here at all, please tell one human being tonight. A doctor, a crisis line in your own country, one person who can sit with you. That is not a detour from any of this. It is part of it, and you are worth the phone call.

You are a man whose transgressions are blotted out for God's own sake, which is a term your side of the line could never supply. The written word doubles the pronoun so that no other party can be put in the transaction, and the Holy Spirit has kept you going on Fridays for nine years.