He Swore It Over the Rain

The rain is coming off the shelter roof in a sheet, and the five of them have moved back as far as the perspex allows, and she is doing the thing she does every morning, which is praying with her eyes open so nobody notices.

It is the same words. She has had them for two years, since a hard winter, and she says them at this shelter because it is the one place in the day where nobody needs anything from her for eleven minutes. My steadfast love shall not depart from you. A lorry goes through the puddle at the curb and the man in the hi-vis swears at it. My covenant of peace shall not be removed. She says it under her breath, all of it, and then, without deciding to, she adds the line she always adds, so quietly that she has never really heard herself say it until this morning. If You feel like it.

She hears it this time. She stands there under the drumming roof and hears her own mouth put a condition on the end of God's promise, and she knows exactly where she learned it. Her father was a man whose word depended on his day. He promised a bicycle when she was nine, and it arrived when she was eleven, on a Saturday when the football had gone his way. He promised to come to the play and came to the second one, not the first, because the first was a bad week. He was not cruel. He was weather. And she learned, at nine, that a promise is a thing the promiser does when he feels like it, and that a wise child watches the sky.

So that is what she has done with God for two years. She prays the promise, and then she reads the day. If the bus comes and the meeting goes well and her daughter texts back, He felt like it. If the bus is late and the meeting is canceled and the phone stays dark, He did not, not today, and she goes home and prays it again the next morning, hoping, the way she used to hope on a Saturday when the football was on, that this would be one of His good days.

If you have ever prayed a promise and then spent the rest of the day checking His mood in your circumstances, then you were standing at that shelter too, and you have been watching the sky a very long time.

What an oath is for

Come and stand with me under that roof, and let us look at what God actually said, because the line she prays every morning has a first half that she has never once prayed, and it changes everything.

This is like the days of Noah to me: as I swore that the waters of Noah should no more go over the earth, so I have sworn that I will not be angry with you, and will not rebuke you. For the mountains may depart and the hills be removed, but my steadfast love shall not depart from you, and my covenant of peace shall not be removed, says the LORD, who has compassion on you.Isaiah 54:9-10

Read what He compares it to. Not to a wish. Not to a good intention He had on a good day. He compares His love for you to the oath He swore after the flood, and He uses the word twice, as I swore, so I have sworn, so that nobody could hear it as an offer. An oath is a different thing from a promise made in a mood. Hebrews says that people swear by something greater than themselves and an oath puts an end to every argument, and that God, having nobody greater to swear by, swore by Himself, so that by two unchangeable things, His word and His oath, in which it is impossible for God to lie, we who have run for shelter might have strong encouragement to hold on. Two unchangeable things. Not one changeable mood.

Now let me name the weight, because you have been carrying it under that shelter for two years and it is heavy. You do not doubt that God is good. You doubt that He is consistent, because the only father you had was not, and you have never once been shown the difference between a man who keeps his word when the football goes his way and a God who swore. So you pray the promise and you watch the sky. You have made His love into weather, and you have made yourself into the child at the window, and neither of those was His idea.

You are standing on an oath, not on a mood, and you have been since the first morning you prayed that line. I am not saying that to steady you; I am saying it because Scripture says He swore it, in Isaiah 54:9, in the plainest word the language has, and because the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a sentence you have said two hundred times under a bus shelter and lets you finally hear the first half of it. What God bound Himself to does not consult your Tuesday. It was sworn before your Tuesday existed.

The rain that has never come back

Here is the part I love, and the part that settles it, because God did not leave the oath as a doctrine. He hung a witness in the sky.

After the flood He said, never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters, and He set His bow in the clouds and said, when I bring clouds over the earth and the bow is seen, I will remember. That was the sign He gave. And here is what I want you to notice about it: it has been raining ever since. It rained this morning on that shelter roof. It has rained on every one of your bad days and every one of your good ones, and it has stopped, every single time, and the earth is still here. Not because God was in a good mood on each of those days. Because He swore. Rain is not His temperature. Rain is the thing He swore over, and the fact that it stops is the record of a God who does what He said whatever the sky is doing.

You have never once, in your whole life, seen the rain refuse to stop, and that is a testimony you were born inside. That is not a picture I made up; it is written in Genesis 9 as the sign of a covenant He established, and it is His Spirit who turns a wet morning at a shelter into evidence, so that a woman who has been reading rain as His mood can start reading it as His faithfulness instead. Every shower that ended is a promise kept. You have been standing under the testimony and calling it the weather.

Now the fear, because it has a name and I want to say it. Underneath "if You feel like it" is a smaller sentence, and it is this: He keeps His word for other people, and He keeps it for me when He is in the mood. Sister, that is not a thought about God. That is a thought about your father, and it has been wearing God's coat for two years. God is not a man, that He should lie, nor a son of man, that He should change His mind; has He said, and will He not do it? That is Numbers 23, and it was said by a man who had been paid to say the opposite and could not. His word does not have good days and bad days. It has one setting, and the setting is sworn.

You were not left to guess His mood, because He took mood off the table when He swore. That is the whole reason Hebrews gives for the oath: so that the heirs of the promise would see how unchangeable His purpose was. And the Spirit He gave you is not a mood ring either; Jesus called Him the Spirit of truth, and truth does not change with the weather. Nothing about that changes when the bus is late.