I Have Been Assembling Arguments

There is a document. It is on his computer and it is forty one pages and it has headings, and he has never shown it to anybody and never will.

It began as notes. About twelve years ago he started writing down the answers to the objections he expected, and then the objections he had not expected, and then the historical material, and then a section that addresses the specific things his son had said at a particular dinner in a particular year.

He is a careful man and it is a good document. If you handed it to a stranger they would find it thorough.

His son is thirty and has never been given the chance to read a line of it, because there has never been a conversation in which it would have been appropriate, and he is not the sort of man who forces a conversation.

At that boy's birth, thirty years ago, in a corridor, at about two in the morning, he told God that he would hand the covenant on.

He has not handed anything on. He has assembled.

And what happened last spring is that his son said something to him about the weather, in a car, and he found himself thinking about paragraph four of section three, and he understood in that moment that he has not had a straightforward conversation with his own son in about a decade, because he has been holding a case behind his teeth the entire time.

You may have a document. It may not be written down. But you may have been assembling something for years, waiting for a conversation that never comes, and the assembling may have taken the place of the person.

Who establishes it

Now let me put the founding statement of the whole covenant in front of you, and let me ask you to identify the subject of the verb, because you are a precise man and the precision is the point.

And I will establish my covenant between me and thee and thy seed after thee in their generations for an everlasting covenant, to be a God unto thee, and to thy seed after thee.Genesis 17:7

You are a party to something God establishes Himself, and no clause in it was ever assigned to your case. Genesis 17:7 puts the verb in the first person and reaches to the seed without a father's help, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has been at work in a thirty year old for thirty years.

I will establish

The subject is God, in the first person, and the verb is establish.

Not: I offer a covenant which you will establish among your descendants. Not: I make this available and you carry it forward. I will establish my covenant between me and thee and thy seed after thee.

Abraham is not the mechanism. He is one of the parties, and the other party is doing the establishing, and the reach of it, and the duration, and everything else in the sentence.

Now: where in that verse is the father's argument?

There is no clause about persuasion. There is no requirement that Abraham explain anything to Isaac, and it is worth noticing that the record contains remarkably little of Abraham explaining anything to anybody. What the record contains is a man walking around a country doing what he was told, mostly badly, in front of his household.

You are one of the parties in a covenant that God establishes across generations, and no clause in it was ever assigned to your case. Genesis 17:7 is where that is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes it out of a founding statement and puts it in a room with a forty one page document in it.

And here is the rule of this category, and it does not move: nothing here is exercised over anybody's will, and that includes a thirty year old man's.

Your son is grown and indifferent and entitled to be. There is no lever available, and a document is not a lever, and if a document were a lever the last two thousand years would have gone very differently.

You are released from establishing what God said He would establish. Scripture puts the verb in His mouth and leaves no clause for a father's argument, and the Spirit of God has been at work in a thirty year old for thirty years without reading a page.

What the document cost

And now the actual damage, which is not that the arguments are wrong.

The arguments are largely right. That is not the problem and I am not going to pretend to find fault with a document I would probably agree with.

The problem is what happens to a man who holds a case behind his teeth for a decade. Every conversation becomes a possible opening. Every remark gets assessed. The weather in a car becomes paragraph four of section three, and the son on the other side of that car has spent ten years talking to a man who is only half present, and cannot say why, and has almost certainly concluded that his father does not much enjoy his company.

That is what it has cost. Not the argument. The car.

You are able to have a conversation with your own son that is not an opening. It is written in exactly those terms, and that is precisely what it means that the establishing belongs to God and not to the father, and His Spirit has been the one carrying that relationship through ten years of a man who was somewhere else.