Ninety Seconds

Ninety seconds. He has timed it since, more than once, which he knows is not a healthy thing to have done.

He looked down. That is the whole event. There was a message and he read it and he answered it, and it took as long as reading and answering a message takes, and everything that has happened in his life since has been arranged around that interval.

Five years.

He is forty-seven. Everybody who was on the sand that day has told him the same thing, in the same words, and he can recite them now: it could have happened to anybody, it happened in seconds, you did everything right afterward. He knows they mean it. He does not think they are being kind at the expense of the truth. He simply cannot get any of it into the room where the case is being heard, because that room does not admit witnesses.

And people say the sentence to him. You have to forgive yourself. His wife has said it. His father said it once, which nearly finished him. A man at church said it with a hand on his shoulder and total sincerity.

And every time, in a place he has never put into words for anybody: he does not know what he is being asked to do.

He knows what it is to be forgiven by God. He is not a man in doubt about that. He took it there on the third night, on the floor of a garage, in language he could not repeat, and something real happened and it has stayed.

What he cannot locate is the second office. Where is it, what happens in it, and what does a man come out holding.

Maybe somebody has told you to forgive yourself. And maybe you nodded and walked off down the beach and had no earthly idea what the instruction meant, and put the not knowing on the pile with everything else.

Sit down here by the fire. Nothing coming is going to hand you a procedure.

There is no second office

Let me say it plainly, because five years is long enough and softness that leaves a man exactly where he stands is not kindness.

That office does not exist.

Not far off. Not something stronger people have found. It is not there. Nowhere in Scripture does a person forgive himself. Not one person in the whole book does it, nobody is told to do it, and the phrase does not appear in it anywhere. It came into ordinary speech in the last hundred years or so, usually from people trying to name something real, and what they are pointing at exists, but it is not a second pardon.

You have not been failing at anything, and Scripture never once puts a second forgiveness between a man and his rest, and it is the Holy Spirit who has kept you unable to find an office nobody ever built. Five years of not completing an impossible errand is not a defect in you. That is the right result.

He was wounded for our transgressions; He was crushed for our iniquities; upon Him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with His stripes we are healed.Isaiah 53:5

Read where the chastisement landed. Upon Him. Not partly on Him and the remainder held in reserve for the man to administer to himself over five years on a beach. All of it, upon Him, and the result named in the same sentence is peace.

You are covered by a chastisement that has already fallen somewhere else, and Isaiah 53 is where that is written, and it is His Spirit and not your own daily sentencing that carries the peace it produced.

Three offices, one man

So if the office does not exist, what have five years been? Something real. It has a name and the name is not forgiveness.

Three jobs have been held in one room by one man.

There is a prosecution, and it has the ninety seconds in extraordinary detail, and it never once calls a witness from the sand. There is a jury, and it consists of one person who has already read the prosecution file. And there is a judge, and he is that same person, and he has never once ruled, because a court in which every office is filled by the defendant is not a court and cannot produce a verdict. It can only sit again tomorrow.

That is what five years has been. Not an unfinished forgiveness. A hearing that cannot conclude, in a room with no authority in it, staffed entirely by one exhausted man.

You were never appointed to any of those three offices, and 1 Corinthians 4 says Paul refused to judge even himself and left the verdict to the Lord, and it is the Spirit who lifts a man out of a chair he was never qualified to sit in. If Paul would not take one of those jobs, no man was ever meant to hold all three.

Not a step to add, three offices to resign

Here is the turn, and it is a resignation and not a promotion.

The trouble was never a second thing left undone. It is a first thing that was never yours to do: running a court on a matter God has already ruled on. And a man cannot close a case he had no authority to open. What he can do is resign all three posts and walk out onto the sand.

Who are you to pass judgment on the servant of another? It is before his own master that he stands or falls.Romans 14:4

So the move is not to forgive yourself. The move is to say out loud that you are not the judge in this, and then to say who is. That is all of it. There is no technique, no wording to get right, and it will not feel like a win. It is a man leaving a building that was never a courthouse.

You have a case that was closed by the only judge with standing in it, and it is written that there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, and the Spirit is what makes that a fact about a man who looked down for ninety seconds.