There Is No Charge Being Read Out

Camille wakes at three in the morning and the charge is already being read.

Not every night. Four, five nights a week. And it does not begin with a thought, which is what makes it so hard to argue with. It begins with a feeling arriving fully formed, the way the smell of something burning arrives, and only after that do the words show up to explain the feeling.

The words are always the same words. She could recite the charge. She has heard it more times than she has heard any song.

And it is in her own voice. That is the detail she has never said to anybody, because it sounds strange out loud. It is not a stranger accusing her and it is not a memory of somebody who once did. It is her, in her own accent, using phrases she uses, making a very well constructed case.

By half past three she is normally back asleep. By seven she is up and getting the children out of the door and there is nothing about her that anybody would look at twice. She is quick and she is funny and she is the person other people at work go to when a thing needs sorting.

There is nobody in her life who knows about three in the morning. Not one person. She has been in that room alone with that voice for a long time.

And here is the question nobody has ever put to her, which is the only question that matters.

Who is bringing the charge?

Not what is the charge. Who is bringing it. Because a charge is not a feeling; a charge is a legal act, and a legal act requires somebody with standing to perform it, and a court with jurisdiction to receive it. And at three in the morning there is a woman in a bed and there is nobody else in the room.

And this is where I stop writing about Camille, because you know your own hour.

Maybe not three. Maybe it comes at four, or in the ten seconds after your alarm, or every time you sit down and stop moving. I am not going to ask what the charge says. Not once, not in a hint, not in a category. It is yours and it stays yours.

Condemnation is a courtroom word

I want to give you the most legally precise sentence in the New Testament, and I want you to hear it as the piece of law it is.

There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus.Romans 8:1

Condemnation is not a mood. The word is katakrima and it belongs in a courtroom: it means the sentence handed down after a verdict. It is the thing the judge says at the end. It is not the feeling of being in trouble; it is the formal outcome of a case that has been tried and lost.

So Romans 8:1 is not telling you to feel better. It is reporting the state of a case.

Look at all three of its parts, because every one of them is doing work.

Therefore, which points back at eight chapters of argument, so the sentence is a conclusion and not a mood. Now, which is present tense, today, in this hour, not eventually. And no, which is total: not less condemnation, not manageable condemnation. None.

So take it into the dark where you actually wake up. You are not under a sentence at three in the morning, and Romans 8:1 says there is now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, and the Holy Spirit is the one who bears witness to that in a person, which is exactly what the same chapter goes on to say He does.

And then there is the last part: to them which are in Christ Jesus. That is the address. Not to them who feel innocent, not to them who slept well, not to them who have told somebody. In Christ. It is a location, and you are in it right now, and being awake at three does not move you out of it.

Which means the voice in your own accent, however well constructed its case, is not reading from anything a court would accept. The written word has already closed that file, and the Spirit of God is not the prosecutor. Scripture puts Christ Himself at the right hand of God making intercession, which is the opposite job.