He Walked Between the Pieces Alone

He signed on a Thursday afternoon in a room with a bad print of a harbor on the wall, and he was fairly sure he was signing away four years of his life for nothing.

He was thirty one. The numbers did not work and he knew the numbers did not work, and he signed anyway because the alternative was going back to the thing he had left. And in the car afterward, with the folder on the passenger seat, he said it to God:

Whatever this costs, it gets run straight. However it goes. That is the deal I am making with You.

It did not fail. It is fifteen years old and it employs nine people and it is the reason his daughters had what they had.

And four years ago he did the thing.

He is not going to describe it and I am not going to ask him to, and that is not evasion, it is the entire architecture of this site: an inventory is a tribunal with the furniture rearranged. It is enough to say it was one decision, taken over about eleven days, that he knew was crooked while he was taking it, and that nobody has ever found out about, and that he would take back with both hands if taking things back were a thing that could be done.

Since then he has run everything else straight. Some things more straight than before. And it has made no difference at all to what he believes about his own position, which is this: he made an agreement in a car with a folder on the seat, he broke a material term of it, and he is out.

He is a man who signs things for a living. He knows what a breach of a material term does to a contract. He has enforced one.

You may be someone who understands documents. And if you are, then you may have applied to God a piece of law that is entirely correct in its own field, and entirely wrong here, and I want to show you the night God had that same question put to Him and how He answered it.

How you cut a covenant

I need to explain the ritual, because the whole passage is invisible without it and the point is entirely in the mechanics.

In the ancient near east, when two parties bound themselves, they did not sign. They took animals, cut them in half, and laid the halves out with a path between them. Then both parties walked that path, between the pieces, in the blood.

And the walk meant something specific. It meant: may it be done to me as it has been done to these, if I do not hold up my end. It was an oath sworn with your feet, and it was a self-curse. Both of them walked, because both of them were bound.

Now watch what happens the night God cuts covenant with Abram.

And it came to pass, that, when the sun went down, and it was dark, behold a smoking furnace, and a burning lamp that passed between those pieces. In the same day the LORD made a covenant with Abram.Genesis 15:17-18

You are held by an oath that only one party ever swore, and you were asleep for it. Genesis 15:17 has a burning lamp going down that path alone while Abram lies on the ground, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has kept you inside it for four years.

Abram was asleep

Read the verses just before it. A deep sleep fell on Abram, and a horror of great darkness. He is unconscious. He is on the ground.

And when the sun goes down and the moment arrives for both parties to walk the path, only one thing moves down that corridor of blood. A smoking furnace and a burning lamp. God, and God alone, in the dark, between the pieces.

Abram never walked. He was asleep. He did not take the oath, he did not swear the self-curse, he did not put his feet in that blood, and therefore there is no clause in that covenant that he is capable of breaching, because he never bound himself to anything. God took both halves of the oath.

You stand inside a covenant that only one party ever walked, and you were not that party. Genesis 15:17 is where that is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes it out of a night in the ancient world and puts it in a car with a folder on the passenger seat.

I want to say the honest half now, and I want to say it as a man who takes terms seriously.

The covenant has terms for you. Come. Turn. Run it straight. Those are real, and God means them, and what you did four years ago was wrong and you are right that it was wrong and I am not going to smooth that over, because you would stop reading and you would be correct to.

But there is a difference between a term you are asked to keep and a term whose breach voids the instrument. In the covenant God cut that night, there is no second party who can void it, because there is no second party who bound himself. Your failure is real. It is not structural.

You have done something that cost you and it did not cost you your standing, because your standing was never staked on the walk you did not take. Scripture says it in so many words, and that is what it means that a burning lamp passed alone between the pieces, and the Spirit of God has kept you inside that for four years while you served yourself an eviction notice.

What Christ did with both halves

And then, because the argument is not finished until it reaches Him.

The lamp that walked alone in the dark is the same God who later stood in the place of the second party and took what the second party had coming. That is what the cross is inside this picture: the one who swore both halves also bore the half we would have failed. There is no third position left for you to occupy. You are not a party who breached. You are a beneficiary who has been badly informed.

You have been reading yourself as a defaulting counterparty in a document where you were only ever named as the one receiving. Scripture says the promise is sure to all the seed because it is of faith and not of law, and His Spirit is the one who has been quietly refusing your resignation for four years.