East From West, and No One Is Measuring

The shelf of notebooks goes back further than he would like anybody to know, and they are not in order, and the one in his hand is from a year he had to work out from the handwriting.

Late. Lamp on. Window black. Two friends came round for something else entirely and now all three of them are reading bits out and laughing, which is what happens when you get a box of old notebooks down.

And he has stopped laughing about four minutes ago.

Because there is an entry in this one, half a page, and it is not embarrassing and it is not naive. It is a man writing about something he was in the middle of with God, and it is alive on the page, and the man who wrote it is clearly wide awake.

He does not recognize him.

Not in a poetic way. He read it twice and thought: that is a different person, and I have been living in his house ever since, and I have let it go cold.

So he has spent the last four minutes doing the thing, and the thing is a comparison, and the comparison has one loser in it.

Friend, put the notebook face down on your knee for a second. Because there is a psalm that measures a distance and I want you to notice the two points it picks.

Why He said east and west

Psalm 103 is David at his most generous, listing what God does, and in the middle of the list is this.

As far as the east is from the west, so far hath he removed our transgressions from us.Psalm 103:12

Now this is a chosen measurement and the choice is deliberate.

If you go north, you eventually reach the North Pole, and then you are going south. North and south are finite. They meet. There is a point at which the distance stops increasing and starts decreasing.

East and west never meet. Go east and you keep going east forever. There is no point at which you turn round.

So when the psalm reaches for an image of how far something has been put, it does not pick the biggest finite distance available. It picks the one that has no end in it.

You are separated from what has been dealt with by a distance chosen because it cannot be measured, and the two directions in that verse are the two that never meet. That is not a clever fact about geography; Psalm 103:12 picks east and west out of four available directions, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes an ancient choice of words and lays it on a man in a lamplit room with a notebook face down on his knee. Nobody is holding a tape measure on this.

Now the comparison, and this is the actual thing you have been doing for four minutes.

You have set the man in that notebook against the man holding it, and you have appointed yourself judge, defendant and clerk of that court.

Look at the psalm again. God removes. That is the only action in the verse and it is His.

Nowhere in that psalm, or anywhere near it, does anybody measure the distance between who somebody was and who they are. That comparison is not a divine activity. It is a private one, run late at night, by a man on his own, using evidence he wrote himself.

You have been running a comparison nobody else is running, and God has never once weighed a person against an earlier version of them. Psalm 103:14 says for he knoweth our frame, he remembereth that we are dust, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that a description of how He actually deals with a man rather than a nice line about human weakness.

What that man in the notebook actually was

One more thing, and it is a kindness rather than a technicality.

The man who wrote that entry was not a better Christian. He was a man in a particular season, and seasons have weather, and he was writing on a day when something was alive in him and near the surface.

You do not know what he was like six weeks later. You do not know how many entries he did not write. You are comparing your entire present interior, which you know exhaustively and unforgivingly, with half a page of somebody's best afternoon.

That is not a fair trial and no court would allow it.

You are comparing a whole known interior with half a page of somebody's best afternoon, and that has never been a fair measurement of anybody. 1 Samuel 16:7 says man looketh on the outward appearance, but the Lord looketh on the heart, and it is the Holy Spirit who applies that verse where it is least often applied, which is to how a man looks at his own past self.

And here is the last piece, because you have a mouth and it does more than read old entries aloud.

Jesus said in Matthew 17:20 that faith the size of a mustard seed, spoken to a mountain, is enough to move it. The smallest seed there is. Not the temperature of the man in that notebook. That a person opens their mouth and says what God has said. You have that standing because you are in Christ and Christ is in you, and speaking is the appointed way this works. We flip the switch. He sends the current.