The One Account Never Reconciled

The trial balance is out by eleven pence.

Everyone else went home at six. The cleaner has been round and gone, the kettle in the little back kitchen has clicked itself off cold twice, and it is twenty past nine on a Thursday, and the trial balance is out by eleven pence.

He is fifty-one and he has been doing this for twenty-six years, and he could let it go. Eleven pence. Post it to suspense, write a one line note, be in the car in ninety seconds. Nobody would ever look. He has told junior staff for years that a rounding difference is not a moral event.

He does not let it go. He never has. He goes back to the bank feed and works up the column with the blunt end of a pen, and somewhere near the top he finds it: a ferry crossing keyed as forty-seven when the receipt plainly says seventy-four, back in March, by somebody who has since left for a firm in the next town. He corrects the entry, runs it again, and the two columns agree.

Then he sits there. A reconciled account has a particular clean look to it, and in an office in March it is about the closest thing to a sunrise anybody gets.

And because his hands have nothing to do, he thinks about supper.

At supper his daughter, who is seventeen and asks things straight out because nobody has yet taught her not to, put her fork down and said: Dad, what has God actually done for you? Not for people. For you.

He had answered her. He remembers answering her. It was warm and it was entirely true and it went something like, He has been faithful to this family my whole life and I have seen His hand on us again and again. She had said, okay. Then she took her plate to the sink and went up to do her chemistry, and the kitchen was fine, and nothing at all was wrong.

Except that it is now twenty past nine, and every account in this building agrees with every other account in this building to the penny, because he made them agree, one at a time, over twenty-six years. And there is one account in his life that has never been reconciled once. He has a column of what God has said. He has a column of what God has done. He has never in his life set the two side by side and worked up them with the end of a pen until they answered each other.

He could not name his daughter one promise God swore to him and one morning God kept it. Not one. He is the most careful man in the building.

Perhaps you keep books of some kind too. Perhaps your books are a diary, a class register, a ward round, a house that runs on time, and everything in them is accurate to the day. And off to the side there is one account nobody audits, because nobody has ever asked.

The one instruction given for the safest box in the world

There was a season when Israel had exactly one object nobody was permitted to touch, and God gave the specification for it Himself: the wood, the gold inside and out, the molding, the rings, the poles that were never to be removed. Then, having designed the container, He said in one sentence what it was for.

And you shall put into the ark the testimony that I shall give you.Exodus 25:16

The testimony is the two tablets. It is the covenant in God's own words, cut in stone by God's own act, and the box exists to keep it. That is the whole brief. Later, in the wilderness, Moses is told to take a jar, fill it with a measure of manna, and set it before the testimony to be kept for the generations, so that a child years on could be shown the actual bread that fed the people who came out of Egypt. Hebrews, looking back across all of it, lists what was in that box: the golden jar of manna, the staff that budded, and the tablets of the covenant.

Look carefully at what God chose to keep. On one side, what He swore, written and unrevisable. On the other, what He did, an actual measured amount of actual bread from an actual morning. Not a summary of His provision. The bread.

And hear this as spoken over you and not merely explained to you: you are inside that same keeping tonight, and it began long before you thought about it. Scripture is not a report of words God once said to other people; Exodus 25:16 is God handing over His own testimony to be kept, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has carried that same word across every century between and laid it on your desk this evening.

Reconciliation, and the one thing it is not

You know what a reconciliation is better than most people do. Two records, kept independently, set side by side, and every difference accounted for until the two agree. It is not one side paying the other. It is not an audit. It is two witnesses being made to look at each other.

This matters here, because a careful person's first instinct is to turn a covenant into an account with two sides that must balance: God's promises in one column and his own conduct in the other, and a running total that decides how the year is going. Look in the box. Nothing in it is your contribution. The tablets are God's words. The manna is God's bread. Both sides of that page are His, and there is no column in there with your name at the top of it.

So the reconciliation is not God set against you. It is what He said, set beside what He did, until the two agree in your hands, and they agreed in fact long before your hands got anywhere near them.

You have both records already and neither of them is your work. Scripture holds the first, written down before you were born and never once amended since; and the Holy Spirit, whom Jesus called the one who brings His words back to remembrance, has been keeping the second one on the years you kept nothing at all.

There are no terms in the box. That is the thing a bookkeeper should find most disorienting and, given a night to sit with it, most restful. God did not write a clause into the ark reserving the right to revise the tablets if the people fell short, and He did not attach conditions to the jar. This is yours tonight and it is not a payment for twenty-six careful years. Scripture says every promise of God is yes in Christ, and the Spirit given to a believer is the seal on that yes, which means the account was settled by Him and is only now being read by you.

Both columns have to be particular

Here is where I will be as exact with you as you would be with your own ledgers, because vagueness is the one thing you would never accept from anybody else.

You would not accept sales were good as an entry. You would want the date, the amount, the reference, the second document that says the same thing. And yet asked at your own table what God has done for you, you gave an answer no auditor of yours would have taken for a moment. That is not hypocrisy and it is not a shallow faith. It is simply an account that has never been opened.

So both columns are particular or they are not columns. On the left, a promise by chapter and verse. On the right, one thing that happened, with a month and a year as near as you can honestly get them, in as few words as you would use in a ledger.

And the entry does not have to be large. This is important and I want it plain: the manna was flakes on the ground. It was small, it was ordinary, it arrived on a Tuesday like everything else, and God had it put in gold. If the only thing you can date is the day you first believed, write that. It happened, it has a season and probably a place, and you cannot honestly say it did not.

You were counted in on that day and every unremarkable morning since has been posted to the same account. That is not my opinion about you. Scripture calls the Spirit the down payment on everything God swore, and a down payment is not a sentiment; it is a real amount that has actually changed hands.