The Ledger Closed at the Seventh Year

The lamp over the desk has been on since before it was light, and the ledger is open at page forty-one, the way it is open on the first Saturday of every month.

He is quiet about it. The house is asleep. There is tea going cold at his elbow in the mug with the chipped handle, and the only sound in the room is the small dry noise his finger makes coming down the column, one line at a time, the way a man reads a list he has read four hundred times and cannot leave alone. The figures are in his own handwriting. He can tell you which ones he wrote standing up.

The business closed a long time ago. That page belongs to a season that ended before his youngest started school, and every figure on it was released. There is a letter in the drawer directly under the ledger that says so, on headed paper, in the flat courteous language such letters use, and he has read it more often than he has read anything else in the house. He does not doubt it. Ask him and he will give you the date, and the name of the man who signed it, and he will be right about both.

And then he will put his finger back at the top of the column and add it up again.

That is the part nobody sees. The total comes to what it always comes to. He writes the number on the back of an old envelope, in pencil, and looks at it, and sits with it a while in the getting-lighter room, and then he tucks the envelope into the ledger and leaves the ledger open, because next month he will want the page.

He is not a foolish man and he is not in any trouble. Nothing in his life is being decided by that number. Anyone who knows him will tell you he is doing well, and they will be telling the truth. The account is closed. The ledger is open. Those two sentences have lived side by side on that desk for six years and neither of them has moved.

There is a page you keep open too.

I am not going to guess what is written on it and I would not want to, because it is not mine to guess and it is not the point. The point is the finger coming down the column at first light. Something in your life was settled, in fact, in law, by Someone with the standing to settle it, and the auditing has gone on ever since, quietly, on your own time, troubling nobody, and getting older at the desk. So let me read you what happened at the end of the seventh year in Israel, and then what happened at a cross, because they are one event told twice.

The seventh year did not ask the creditor how he felt

Israel kept a calendar with a release built into it, and the release was not a mood. It arrived on a date. Every seventh year the shemitah came round, and when it came, the obligations of the poor man in the village were let go: not because the lender had a soft week, and not because the borrower had finally got his affairs in order, but because the year had turned, and the year belonged to God.

At the end of every seven years thou shalt make a release. And this is the manner of the release: Every creditor that lendeth ought unto his neighbour shall release it; he shall not exact it of his neighbour, or of his brother; because it is called the LORD's release.Deuteronomy 15:1-2

Read the last clause slowly, because the whole thing is in it. It is called the LORD's release. Not the creditor's, though he was the one who let go. Not the debtor's, though he was the one who walked out from under it. The release carried God's name, which meant that no man in that village had standing to reopen what God had closed, and the man who owed was included in that.

That is where this comes from and it is not my idea: Deuteronomy 15 calls the release the LORD's own, and the Holy Spirit is the one carrying an old calendar into a Saturday morning at your desk. You have a release with God's name written across it and not yours, and the year it belongs to turned a long time ago.

Now notice what the shemitah did not require. It did not require the debtor to feel released. It did not require him to be at peace about it, or to have finished thinking about the season that put him there. A man could sit in his house on the first day of that year with the old tablet in his hand and add the figures one more time, and nothing about that would have made him a debtor again. It would have made him a free man holding a tablet.

That verdict is not mine to give and not mine to withdraw. It is God's, set into the calendar of His own people in Deuteronomy 15, and the same Spirit who put it there is standing at your elbow this minute. You were released on a date and not on a feeling, and the date did not consult you.

The handwriting was taken out of the middle

Centuries later, Paul writes to a small church in a valley town and reaches for exactly that picture, and he is more precise than most readers notice.

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 under handwriting is an ordinary commercial word. It means a note written out in the debtor's own hand, acknowledging what he owed. Not a charge somebody else filed against him. His own writing, his own admission, the one document he could not argue with because he had made it himself. That is what Paul says was dealt with, and he uses two verbs, and they are two different jobs.

Blotted out: the ink lifted off the page, so there is nothing left on the paper to read. And took it out of the way, which in the Greek is out of the middle. A document sits in the middle while it is still doing work. It sits between two parties, and both of them keep consulting it, and that is what makes it a live document rather than an old one. Paul says it was taken out of the middle and fastened somewhere else entirely.

I am not improvising over you. The word written in Colossians 2 says the handwriting was blotted out and taken out of the middle, and the Spirit who moved Paul's hand is the one saying it across your desk this morning. It is already finished, and what was finished was not only the payment but the paperwork.

So look at what the ledger has become. It is a record. Records are good things and there is nothing wrong with keeping one. But a record describes what happened, and a claim makes a demand about what happens now, and the whole quiet ache of that Saturday morning is a man treating a record as though it were still a claim. Right now, as you read this, there is nothing lying in the space between you and God for either of you to consult. His word keeps no second column for men who are still adding, and His Spirit is not quietly running an older total behind the one He published.

One thing plainly, because I would rather say it than leave it unsaid. If what you keep open is not a page of old figures but something heavier, and the early mornings have been going somewhere dark, tell one human being today, and if there is any danger in it, reach the crisis line where you live and let a real voice stay with you. Walking toward help is one of the ordinary things a free man does.