The Ledger Was Nailed to Something

The lamp has a green glass shade and it belonged to somebody's grandfather and it throws light in a circle exactly the width of the desk and nothing else in the room gets any of it.

Half past eight. The office above the yard. Three of them, because his brother came in to sign something and then the kettle went on and now nobody is leaving.

The ledger is open because it is always open. He closed it about a minute ago and one of them opened it again to look at a figure and they are all laughing at something in the margin from years back.

He keeps good books. Everybody says so.

He also keeps another one, and nobody has ever seen it, and it is entirely accurate.

It has in it every school play he attended and did not watch. Every conversation he was in and was not in. The month his mother was ill. The years, roughly, that he was going through the whole thing at a slight remove and nobody noticed because the accounts were always right.

He reads it at night. Not deliberately. It reads itself to him at about half past two, and he has got used to it, the way you get used to a noise.

Sit down at the desk with me, brother, and put your hand on the ledger you can see. Because there is a verse about a different kind of record and what happened to it.

What happened to the handwriting

Paul is writing to the Colossians about what was accomplished, and he uses the language of a debt document.

Blotting out the handwriting of ordinances that was against us, which was contrary to us, and took it out of the way, nailing it to his cross.Colossians 2:14

The word is cheirographon, which is a handwritten certificate of debt. A person's own signature acknowledging what they owe. It is a specific commercial document and everybody reading that letter knew what one looked like.

And now count what is done to it. Three things.

Blotting out. The writing is canceled. Took it out of the way. The document is removed from the middle, from where it was standing between two parties. Nailing it to his cross. And it is fixed, publicly, to something.

That is not a debt reduced or rescheduled. It is a document taken off the table and pinned somewhere everybody can see that it has been dealt with.

You are dealt with by Somebody who took the handwriting out of the way and nailed it up, and there are three separate actions in that verse and not one of them is partial. That is not a lenient reading of a legal metaphor; Colossians 2:14 blots out, removes and nails, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes the language of a debt certificate and stands it up in an office above a yard with a green glass lamp on. What you read to yourself at half past two is not the document that governs anything.

Now the ledger you keep, and here is what I want to say to a precise man.

Your night ledger is accurate. I am not going to pretend it is not. You did attend that school play without watching it, and you were at a remove for a stretch, and it is a fact and not a distortion.

But accuracy is not the same as standing. A document can be entirely correct and have no force whatsoever, because it has been canceled by a party with the authority to cancel it. That is exactly what a blotted out cheirographon is: it still exists as a piece of paper and it no longer governs anything.

So the question about your night ledger is not whether it is true. It is whether it has any authority. And the verse answers that.

You have been reading out a document that has been canceled by somebody with the authority to cancel it, and accuracy was never the same as force. Colossians 2:14 says it was taken out of the way, which is language about jurisdiction rather than about the facts in the file, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that distinction operative in a man at half past two in the morning.

The reading at half past two

One more thing, practical, because you are a practical man.

You said it reads itself to you. That is worth examining, because it means you are not the author at that hour, you are the audience.

Scripture is quite clear that there is an accuser, and that accusing is what he does, and that his method is not invention. He works with true material. That is what makes it effective.

I am not going to build you a whole spiritual warfare framework at half past eight in the evening. But you should know that a nightly recitation of true things arranged to condemn is a recognized activity in that book and it is not attributed to God.

You are not the author of the reading at half past two, and a nightly recitation of accurate things arranged to condemn is not how He speaks to anybody. Revelation 12:10 names an accuser of the brethren which accused them before our God day and night, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that identification useful rather than frightening, because a man who knows what he is listening to can stop taking it as a verdict.

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

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 how correct your accounts are. 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.