Eleven Years of Signatures

The folders are out of the box and they have taken over the whole table, and it is ten past one in the morning.

He is not looking for evidence. He has the evidence. It came four days ago in an email from somebody who was very careful and very kind about how she worded it, and he has read it eleven times, and none of the readings changed anything.

What he is doing now is something else, and it is worse.

He is looking at his own signature.

Here it is on the lease from the first place, the one above the tire shop, where the heating never worked and they used to keep their coats on until noon. His name in blue, quick, sure of itself. And beside it, in the space to the right, an easy loop of a signature, done in the same minute, at the same table.

Here it is again on the bank forms. On the second lease. On the framed announcement they put up in the hallway. And on the card he wrote out himself for the man's daughter's wedding, in his own handwriting, wishing her every good thing, and meaning it.

Page after page. Two names. His hand, and a hand that was doing something else entirely the whole time.

That is the thing nobody warns you about. It is not the money and it is not the meetings and it is not the lawyer who is very calm on the phone. It is sitting at your own table at one in the morning re-reading eleven years of your own life and finding you cannot tell which parts were real.

You know this. Maybe it was not paperwork. Maybe it was a pastor, and you are going back through sermons. Maybe it was a marriage, and you are going back through a vacation in a place you loved, wondering what was happening behind the photographs.

Three things, before anything else, and I mean all three.

I am not going to prosecute him. He does not need my help and you do not need my opinion, and there is nothing I could say about him that would put one thing back where it was.

I am not going to ask you to forgive tonight. Not tonight. Comfort is not something you have to qualify for by producing the right feeling about a man first, and anybody who arrives at your table at one in the morning with that as their opening line can be shown out.

And I am not going to suggest that you should have seen it coming. You did not see it coming because it was built not to be seen. Being deceived is not a report card on your discernment. It is a report card on his.

The one character that cannot do it

Paul writes a short letter to a man working on Crete, an island whose reputation for lying was so established that it had become a proverb people repeated about themselves. And in the second line of the letter, before any instruction, before anything practical, he reaches for the one thing that is not like that.

In hope of eternal life, which God, that cannot lie, promised before the world began.Titus 1:2

Cannot. Not will not. Not usually does not. Not has a good record so far.

The word in the original is built as a negative of the word for false, and it describes what a thing is made of rather than how it has been behaving. A God who cannot lie is not exercising admirable restraint. He is a God for whom the thing that was done to you is not available.

You are dealing with a God who cannot do to you what was done to you. That is not my reassurance. Titus 1:2 puts the impossibility into His nature rather than into His track record, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes that from a fact about God and makes it something a man can lean on at his own kitchen table.

And hold on to where the promise is dated. Before the world began. Before Crete, before proverbs about Crete, before the first liar and every one since. It was not drafted in response to anybody's behavior and it does not run through anybody's character but His.

You have a promise under you that was made before the world began and has never depended on a second signature. What is written puts the guarantee in the God who gave it rather than in the conditions around it, and the Spirit of God is the one who seals a person into that rather than leaving them to hold it by their own grip.

You were not a fool for trusting, and Scripture never once treats an honest man as the guilty party in another man's deceit. The written word carries a long line of people who were lied to by their own family and their own friends, and not one of them is handed the blame for believing, and the same Spirit who kept them is at this table now.

What actually got broken

Let us be exact about the injury, because vague comfort is no comfort at all.

The money is a solvable kind of problem, with accountants and lawyers and time. Use them. They are good and ordinary and God is not embarrassed by any of them.

The injury is different. What broke is the instrument. You used to look at a room and read it, and be right often enough not to think about it. Now every reading has a question mark on it, including the readings you made years ago, including the ones about people who never did a thing to you.

That is not a character flaw. That is what happens to a man who trusted properly and got a false reading back.

You are not required to forgive him tonight in order to be comforted tonight. Nothing written makes comfort a reward for a settled heart, and the Holy Spirit is named the Comforter rather than the Prosecutor, which is a distinction worth sitting with at one in the morning.

You have not been deceived by God, not once, not in eleven years, and not on a single page in that box. That is the claim of Titus 1:2 and it stands whatever else has turned out to be false, and it is His Spirit who bears witness to it in a person rather than leaving it as somebody else's assurance.