Nevertheless

Eight years is four hundred and sixteen weeks and she did the arithmetic in the corridor outside the courtroom before the doors were even open again.

She was standing by a window with a radiator under it that was too hot, and her sister was somewhere getting the car, and she had heard the number read out and she had watched him turn around once to look for her before they took him through.

And she said it to God right there, with her hand flat on the windowsill:

Every visiting day. Every single one. I will be at that gate for all eight years.

She managed two.

The first year she never missed. The second year she missed twice and hated herself for both. Then the third year came, and the drive is two hours each way, and her mother got ill, and her hours changed, and it went from every visiting day to most, and then to some, and then to the ones where she could face it, which turned out to be very few.

He has four years left. She writes. She sends what she can. And she has stopped praying, and if you asked her why she would tell you it is because she is not going to stand in front of God and ask Him for things after what she said in that corridor.

Two years out of eight. She uses that number like a name.

You may have taken on something that was never physically possible, in an hour when nobody could have thought clearly, and then broken under the weight of it, and read the breaking as a verdict on your character. What I want you to see today is a psalm where God names the breaking first, out loud, in advance, and then says one word after it.

God says the failure out loud first

Here is what makes Psalm 89 different from almost anything else you will read on this subject.

God does not say: if my children keep this, I will keep my part. He goes the other way. He describes the failure in detail, in advance, in His own voice, and He is not gentle about it.

If his children forsake my law, and walk not in my judgments; if they break my statutes, and keep not my commandments; then will I visit their transgression with the rod, and their iniquity with stripes. Nevertheless my lovingkindness will I not utterly take from him, nor suffer my faithfulness to fail. My covenant will I not break, nor alter the thing that is gone out of my lips.Psalm 89:30-34

You are held inside a nevertheless that God spoke before anybody had forsaken anything. Psalm 89:33 puts the hinge after the rod and before the mercy, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has kept His lovingkindness on you through six years of missed gates.

Read the order of it

Forsake. Walk not. Break. Keep not.

Four verbs, and God is the one saying them, and He is saying them before anybody has done anything. He is not caught out. There is no version of this where He is surprised.

And He does not pretend it costs nothing. Look at the rod and the stripes. There are consequences in this covenant, and I am not going to skip that line to make you feel better, because you have lived long enough to know that things have consequences and you would not trust me if I said otherwise. The two years and the six cost something. They cost you, and they cost him.

But then comes the word this whole article is named after, and it is the most important word in the psalm.

Nevertheless.

You are held inside a nevertheless that God spoke before the forsaking happened. Psalm 89:33 is where that is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes it out of a song about David's line and stands it in a corridor beside a hot radiator.

Nevertheless is not a softening. It is a hinge. Everything before it is the failure and the consequence, stated at full strength. Everything after it is God, and what He does not do: not utterly take, not suffer to fail, not break, not alter.

What He will not alter

Look at that last line, because it is the most specific promise in the passage.

Nor alter the thing that is gone out of my lips.

Once it has left His mouth, it is out of the negotiation. Not because He is stubborn, but because a word from God is not a proposal. What He said stands as said, and nothing that happens afterward on our side edits the text.

You have a word spoken over you that cannot be amended by what you did or could not do. Scripture says it in so many words, and that is the plain sense of nor alter the thing that is gone out of my lips, and the Spirit of God is the one who has held that text unedited through six years of missed gates.

And here is the honest division, because this category has terms in it and refuses to pretend otherwise.

What is settled: His lovingkindness not utterly taken. His faithfulness not suffered to fail. His covenant not broken. His word not altered. None of that is on you and none of it ever was.

What is yours: to come back in. To pray again. And, from inside, whatever He shows you about the four years that are left, which may be a great deal less heroic than four hundred and sixteen weeks and a great deal more possible.

You are being asked to walk in, and you were never asked to hold the thing up while you walked. It is written in exactly those terms, and that division is exactly how the psalm is built, and His Spirit is the one who has been keeping the first half true while you stood outside it.