The Ledger That Is Actually Binding

He is a careful man. That is the first thing to understand about him, and it is not a criticism.

He is the sort of person who reads the second page. He does not sign things without knowing what they say. When something goes wrong he does not rage about it, he goes and finds out precisely what happened and in what order, and this quality has served him and everybody near him extremely well for a long time.

And he has spent years auditing a book that has no legal force whatsoever.

Let me describe it, because it is a real book, even though it is not written anywhere.

It is the record other people keep about him. What they saw, what they concluded, what they have said since, what they have not said and what the not saying might mean. He has been reconciling it for years: adding entries, checking one recollection against another, working out whether a particular silence in a particular month should be entered on the left or the right.

And every so often he balances it against himself and finds the same result.

Now here is the thing. He is not doing this out of anxiety. He is doing it because he is thorough, and because somewhere early on he made an assumption that has never once been examined, which is unusual for him.

The assumption is that this book is the binding one.

Nobody told him that. It is not written on the front of it. He simply began keeping it, in the weeks after everything happened, at a time when a man reaches for whatever tool he has, and he has been maintaining it with real diligence ever since.

I am not going to ask what is in it. Not one line. God has read it, you have read it, and there is no third audit required.

What I want to ask is the question a careful man will not be able to leave alone once it has been put to him: which book is binding, and who says so.

The document that had force, and what was done to it

Colossians 2 uses a word for a document, and the word is precise, which is why this passage is worth reading slowly.

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

Handwriting there is a specific thing. It is the word for a note of debt written in the debtor's own hand: an acknowledgment, signed by the person who owed it, which is exactly what made it enforceable.

So Paul is not describing gossip. He is not describing what a town thinks. He is describing the one record that actually had force against a person, the one with a signature on it, the only document in the whole situation that a court would have looked at.

And then he uses three verbs on it, and I want you to watch all three.

Blotting out: the ink taken off, so that the surface is clean rather than annotated.

Took it out of the way: removed from the middle, lifted out of the space between the parties, so that nothing stands between them any more.

Nailing it to his cross: fixed publicly to the place where the sentence was carried out, which is what was done with a charge once it had been executed.

Three verbs and not one of them is conditional, and not one of them is future.

Here is what that puts in your hands, and I will state it the way a careful man would want it stated. You are not being audited by anybody with jurisdiction, because the only enforceable record against you has been blotted, removed and nailed up as finished, and Colossians 2:14 does all three in the past tense while the Holy Spirit makes that land in a man who has been reconciling the wrong book for years.

Now put the two books side by side, which is the whole point of a message like this one.

The book you have been keeping has no signature on it. It is a collection of impressions held by people who were not in possession of the full facts, some of them kind, some of them mistaken, none of them enforceable anywhere. It cannot be discharged, because nobody can be found who has the standing to discharge it. That is not a defect in your accounting. It is what happens when a careful man audits a document that was never a document. Colossians 2:14 names the one record that did have force, and the Holy Spirit is not asking you to reconcile any other.

The book that was binding has been dealt with, and it was dealt with by the only party who could.

You have been given a clean surface rather than an amended one, and Colossians 2:14 says blotting out and not correcting, and the Holy Spirit is not maintaining a shadow copy of a thing He removed.

And let me say the thing about those people, because precision requires it.

They owe you nothing. They are not obliged to revise their impressions, and a great many of them are not even holding the impression you think they are holding, and some who are may have grounds you have never been told about. Where somebody was hurt, that is real and it is theirs, and it is not being written off here. If there is an honest amend still open to you, make it, and make it because it is right rather than as a payment on a debt that Colossians 2:14 says has already been discharged elsewhere, and the Holy Spirit will keep those two things from getting confused in you.