He Vouched for It in Front of Everyone

The hall smelled of coffee and floor polish, the way it does every time anything happens in it.

Forty-one chairs, put out in rows by two men who always put the chairs out. The urn at the back. The paper cups. The window down the long side with the last of the light coming through it and making a stripe across the floor at that hour.

He stood up at the front because they asked him to, and because he had believed it for two years, and because he was the man in that room people looked at when they wanted to know whether a thing was solid.

He said he had looked into it himself. He said he had put his own in first, which was true. He said he would not stand there and tell them something he had not already done, and that was true as well.

Then he sat down, and afterwards there were paper cups and everybody was cheerful, and a woman he has known since school touched his arm on the way past and said, well, if you say so.

If you say so.

Eleven months later there was a letter, and then a meeting, and then a longer meeting, and now there is a phrase that gets used about it that he cannot make himself say out loud.

He goes back into that hall sometimes. A funeral tea. A school thing. The chairs are in the same rows, put out by the same two men, and the stripe of light comes across the floor at the same hour, and he stands at the back near the urn and cannot lift his eyes to head height in a room of people who once made a decision because of him.

That is you.

Maybe not a hall. Maybe you told your sister it was fine. Maybe you brought somebody into a church, a job, a friendship, a treatment, a house. Maybe you were the one who said, I have known him twenty years, and you meant every word of it, and the words turned out to be about somebody who did not exist.

And now there is a room you go quiet in.

Two things before anything else, and I want them said plainly. What happened to you is not a failure of faith. And I am not going to explain it to you, or tell you what it was for, because I do not know, and I would rather sit here with you and say nothing than hand you a reason somebody made up.

The word in the text is not "reliable"

Deuteronomy 7 is spoken to people who have just come out of a place where every promise made to them was a lever. They were lied to by an empire for four hundred years. Moses is not introducing them to trust. He is telling them what kind of thing they are dealing with now.

Know therefore that the LORD thy God, he is God, the faithful God, which keepeth covenant and mercy with them that love him and keep his commandments to a thousand generations.Deuteronomy 7:9

Look at the guarantee attached to it. A thousand generations. That is not an intensifier and it is not poetry doing a job. It is a length of time no human being has ever been able to offer about anything, and it is put there on purpose, because the difference between God and a man who lets you down is not a difference of degree.

You are dealing with a different kind of thing entirely, and the last eleven months did not put God in the same category as the man who was lying to you. Deuteronomy 7:9 calls Him the faithful God and then bonds that word to a covenant with a term on it no person can match, and it is the Holy Spirit inside you who can tell the two apart on a night when your whole instrument for telling things apart feels broken.

The Hebrew word behind "faithful" there is the one we still say at the end of prayers. Amen. It means a thing that holds when you put your weight on it.

You have not been deceived by God, and nothing you put your weight on in Him has given way. What is written stands over your situation like a beam that was set before the house was built, and the Spirit of God is the one who quietly keeps a person able to trust at all after their trusting has been used against them.

Nobody builds a deception a careful man can see

Here is the sentence I most want you to have, and I want it before anything else in this section, because I think it has been missing.

Being deceived is what deception is for.

You have not gone down in God's estimation because a thing built to get past you got past you. Deuteronomy 7 speaks to a people who had been systematically lied to for four hundred years and calls them treasured in the same breath, and the same Spirit who carried that sentence to them is the one standing with you at the back of that hall.

A fraud that a careful person spots is a bad fraud, and nobody bothers to build those. The thing that got past you was constructed by somebody who put real work into getting it past exactly the sort of person they knew would be asked: careful, slow to speak, respected, the one a room turns to when it wants to know whether a thing is solid. Your carefulness was the target. It was not the failure.

So I am not going to tell you what you should have noticed. I do not think you missed it. I think it was hidden, professionally, by a person who is not in this room and who is not the subject of this message.

And I am not going to ask you to forgive anybody today. That is a real thing and it will have its own hour, and this is not that hour, and anyone who puts it in front of your comfort has the order wrong.

You were acting in good faith on the night you stood up in that hall, and good faith is not a defect in a man. Scripture never once treats trust as the sin of the person who was cheated, and the Holy Spirit does not come to a deceived man with a list of what he should have caught. He comes with company.