I Resigned and Said Why

He wrote three drafts and the third one was two pages, and he has a copy of it, and so does everybody who was copied in, which was eleven people.

He was forty three. There was a practice at that firm that he had gone along with for two years and then could not go along with any more, and he did not want to make a scene about it and then he made one anyway, because he decided that leaving quietly would let the thing continue and that he would be complicit in the silence.

So the letter said why. And in the second paragraph he named the reason properly. Not commercial differences. He wrote that he could not reconcile it with what he owes God.

He meant every word.

Four years later, in another firm, in a season when he needed the work and there were reasons, he did the thing. Not something like it. The same thing, in a slightly different arrangement, and he knew exactly what he was doing on the day he did it, and he did it anyway.

Nobody knows. That is the peculiar cruelty of this one. Nobody at the old firm knows, and nobody at the new one knows it was anything, and there is no scandal and no consequence and no conversation waiting for him anywhere.

Except Ruth, who was copied in on the letter, and who wrote back at the time saying it was the most decent thing she had seen anybody do at that firm, and who is now on the committee of something he would otherwise be part of.

He is not going to be in a room with her. That is a settled matter and he arranges his year around it.

You may have taken a stand and then done the thing. And you may find that what you cannot face is not exposure, since nobody knows, but one person who once told you that you had been decent.

A face like a flint

Now let me take you to a passage in Isaiah that is spoken by somebody about to be publicly disgraced, and notice what he does with his face.

The speaker is describing being struck and spat at and having his beard pulled out, which in that world is a specific and deliberate humiliation. And into that, he says this.

For the Lord GOD will help me; therefore shall I not be confounded: therefore have I set my face like a flint, and I know that I shall not be ashamed.Isaiah 50:7

You have a face that is set by something upstream of anything you did. Isaiah 50:7 puts the Lord God helping first and derives both therefores from it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has held that steady through four years of you arranging a diary.

Therefore, and therefore

Two therefores in one verse, and both of them point back to the same first clause.

The Lord God will help me. Everything after that is a consequence: therefore I am not confounded, therefore my face is set, and I know I shall not be ashamed.

Notice that the order is not what a careful man would expect. He does not say: I have set my face, therefore I will not be ashamed. That would be a resolution, and resolutions are what men like you make and then have to keep.

He says: He helps me, therefore I set my face. The setting of the face is downstream. It is not the cause of anything; it is what happens to a face when the first clause is settled.

You have a face set by something upstream of you, and it was never a resolution you had to hold. Isaiah 50:7 is where that is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes it out of a passage about being spat at and puts it beside a man with a two page letter in a drawer.

And now the word again: confounded. The same word as before, and it means what it meant before, publicly shown up. A man who wrote two pages about what he owes God and then did the thing is confounded in the ordinary sense, in his own private accounting, whether or not anybody else ever finds out.

Scripture takes that exact word and puts a therefore in front of it that has nothing to do with the man's record.

You are not confounded, and the reason given is entirely upstream of anything you did. Scripture puts the whole weight on the Lord God helping and derives everything else from it, and the Spirit of God has been holding that steady through four years of arranging a diary.

The letter is still true

And now something about the letter, because you have started to treat it as a lie and it is not one.

Everything you wrote in that letter was true. The practice was wrong. Your reason was your actual reason. The thing you said you owed God, you did owe.

What happened four years later does not retroactively make the letter false. It makes you a man who wrote a true letter and then failed to live up to it, which is a different and much more ordinary category, and it is the category most of the people you admire are in.

Ruth was not wrong. It was the most decent thing she had seen at that firm. That remains a true statement about a thing that happened. Your later failure does not reach back and unmake it, and you have been behaving as though it does, and that is why you cannot be in a room with her.

You wrote something true and then did not hold to it, and only one of those is being scored. That is what it means for the face to be set by God's help rather than by the man's consistency, and His Spirit is the one who has kept your standing settled while you avoided a committee.

You are a man who wrote a true thing and did not hold to it, and only one of those two is being scored. The written word makes a man's standing rest on God's help rather than on his consistency, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has kept it there while you avoided a committee.