Reading the Sky for a Verdict

The rise west of the windmill is the highest ground on the place, and he has walked out to it before light most mornings of his working life. It is a good habit and a practical one. From up there a man can see forty miles of it and read what is coming: the way the anvil tops are leaning, whether the wind has swung around to the southeast overnight, whether there is that particular hard shine on the horizon that means nothing is going to happen today.

He is good at it. Better than the app on his phone, and he says so, and the neighbors agree.

Somewhere across those forty years, though, without a day he could point to, the reading got a second column.

Column one is rain. Column two is God's opinion of him.

He would not put it that way. He would say he was raised to know that the Lord runs the weather, which is true and which he was not taught wrong. But what has grown out of it is a private arithmetic he performs on the rise every morning and never mentions to anyone. Good cloud building at daybreak: things are all right between us. Wind switched around dry: something is off. Three weeks with nothing on the gauge: he starts going back through his own conduct looking for the line item.

Then came the July afternoon.

A storm built up in the southwest around four, the real thing, black underneath and the smell coming ahead of it. He stood in the yard and watched it come and he had the feeling he had been waiting on all summer, that the account was being settled and settled in his favor.

Two miles out, it split.

It parted around the place the way water parts around a rock, went north and east, and dropped two and a quarter inches on his neighbor's grass. He got eleven drops on the hood of the truck. He knows it was eleven because he counted them.

And he stood there in the yard in the dry and said out loud, without deciding to say it, in a voice he did not recognize as his own: All right. What did I do.

His granddaughter was on the step behind him. Eight years old, barefoot, waiting to be taken to see the storm.

She said: What did you do, Grandpa?

He turned around and he had no answer for her, and while he stood there with his mouth open a thing went through him that he has not been able to put down since. He was not just doing the arithmetic. He was teaching it. She had been standing behind him on that step for years.

You have run that same column.

The first thing He said when the water went down

Noah comes off the boat onto a scoured world, and the very first thing God does is not give an instruction. He speaks a sentence to Himself, in His own heart, and then He puts a sign in the sky about it.

And the LORD said in his heart, I will not again curse the ground any more for man's sake; for the imagination of man's heart is evil from his youth; neither will I again smite any more every thing living, as I have done. While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease.Genesis 8:21-22

Read the reason He gives, because it is not the one anybody would write.

He does not say, I will hold off because these eight are decent people and I have hopes for them. He says the imagination of man's heart is evil from his youth, therefore. The very thing you would expect to be the grounds for a threat is the grounds for the promise. God takes the worst true fact about the human heart and makes it the reason He is binding His own hands rather than the reason He is not.

That is not sentiment. That is load bearing. An oath resting on the swearer holds under any weather; an oath resting on the sworn-to is a rope tied to the thing it is meant to hold up. And notice what He did not attach. No terms. No review clause. No if you people manage a better century. Seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, running on His word alone while the earth remains.

Now let me turn this on you, because you are the one on the rise at daybreak doing arithmetic. You are living inside an oath that was sworn with your worst heart already entered into the record and factored in. Genesis 8:21 says so in as many words, and the Holy Spirit put that sentence into Scripture on purpose, for the exact morning you are having.

The sky is a notice board, not a bench

And here is the piece that ought to take the top of your head off.

After He swore it, God hung the sign for it in the sky. The bow in the cloud. The one place a man like you looks at a hundred times a day. He did not file the token of the oath in a vault or a temple, He set it in the weather, so the very instrument you have been reading for a verdict was appointed to be a standing reminder of a verdict already handed down. Genesis 9:13 puts the bow in the cloud as the token of it, and the Holy Spirit is not shy about pressing a detail like that on the man who needs it.

You have been reading the notice board as a bench, and it has been posting the same notice the whole time. Scripture never once seated the sky as a judge over you, and His Spirit is taking the gavel out of the weather's hand.

And in case anyone thought this was only about rain, He came back to it centuries later and said it out loud to a people who were sure He had gone off them.

For this is as the waters of Noah unto me: for as I have sworn that the waters of Noah should no more go over the earth; so have I sworn that I would not be wroth with thee, nor rebuke thee. For the mountains shall depart, and the hills be removed; but my kindness shall not depart from thee, neither shall the covenant of my peace be removed, saith the LORD that hath mercy on thee.Isaiah 54:9-10

The word in that passage is sworn, twice, and the second one is aimed at a person, in the second person, singular. It is written to be read as spoken to you, and the Spirit of God is the one who takes ink like that and makes it land in a dry yard in July.