Twisted Threads

Behold, it was for my welfare that I had great bitterness; but in love you have delivered my life from the pit of destruction, for you have cast all my sins behind your back. -- Isaiah 38:17

King Hezekiah was stricken with a disease to the point of death.  In affliction, as might be expected, he despaired.  No matter how harsh and hopeless we may find life from time to time, the thought of its cessation can be frightening and overwhelming.  There is an interesting metaphor in Job 7:6 -- My days are swifter than a weaver's shuttle and come to their end without hope.  Matthew Henry comments on this verse, saying, “Our days are compared to the weaver's shuttle … passing and repassing very swiftly, every throw leaving a thread behind it; and when finished, the piece is cut off, taken out of the loom, and showed to our Master to be judged of.”

I had never thought of the “finished product” but always focused on the swiftness of the passing.  Each day, though, is a strand added to the tapestry of our lives.  Some are bright, others dark, forming a pattern and telling a story that can be seen and comprehended now only by the Weaver, the one who knows the pattern He follows. 

Hezekiah longed to live and for good reason:  that he might faithfully lead his people and serve the God of Glory.  The love and mercy of the Lord spared his life, yet there is a twist to this story.  Hezekiah lived fifteen more years, during which time the son who would inherit the throne was born.  His name was Manasseh, and he may have been the most wicked of Judah’s kings.  It is the sin and abominations of Manasseh that led to the eventual fall of Jerusalem and the deportation and dispersion of the Jews by the Babylonians under Nebuchadnezzar.

 A lot of my days are composed of black threads.  Many, many years ago, I was still a relatively young man, and I had a dream or perhaps a vision.  In it I saw a man clad all over in dark brown leather standing on a road.  His hands were gloved and balled into fists.  He extended his left hand and opened it to reveal something white and bright, like a large diamond, or a star.  The vision had a specific meaning for me at the time that doesn’t matter anymore.  I think there was also another interpretation in the longer term, that no matter how dark and muddy and colorless my life may appear, there is always some light.  It may illuminate my own path, or it may help someone else find their way. 

I don’t know.  I can’t know, any more than Hezekiah could know what his life or death would mean.  God responds to our cries and to our faith and makes that part of the picture.  Maybe He is making a rug that pulls the room together.  Hezekiah’s healing, by itself, was a good thing because Hezekiah was a righteous king.  Manasseh and his apostasy, taken in isolation, were unholy and unrighteous and evil.  But what are those threads laying side by side, the black mark on the white paper?  What is that message and what does it say?   In love you have delivered my life from the pit of destruction, for you have cast all my sins behind your back.  Or, as the final and ultimate Heir of the throne of David (and Hezekiah and Manasseh) said, For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.

Ashes, For All Fall Down

Who is a God like You, pardoning iniquity and passing over transgression for the remnant of His inheritance? He does not retain His anger forever, because He delights in steadfast love. He will again have compassion on us; He will tread our iniquities under foot. You will cast all our sins into the depths of the sea. — Micah 7:18-19

One of the horrors of having a good memory is that we tend to remember. I can give you my university student ID number which is not my Social Security number and for which no one has asked since 1975. I remember the phone number that I had for a couple of years back in the late '70's — partly because the last six numbers were 96-48-24, in that order. The first digit was an 8 — 3*8, 6*8, 12*8 — it was a thing of beauty. Even the area code added up to eight. Without question, until I got the landline number I have now, that was the best phone number I ever had. Of course, these days I have a lot more phone numbers to remember and, with every dinky cell phone having its own contact list, phone number memorization isn't so vital. My wife was always astounded that I was able to recall numbers, but one of my tricks was that I usually had to get only the last four digits prior to the proliferation of area codes and exchanges that cells have stimulated.

Back in school, I could, during a test, often see the page in the book where the answer could be found. Naturally, I had a lot fewer books back then. I was the same way with the Bible, seeing a quote in the approximate physical location on the page and relative to the front and back covers, even when I could not recall the reference. That was back when I had one old hardcover copy of the KJV that I used all the time.

I remember things that I wish I could forget — ugly things I've done and said, sins and errors that still reverberate through my life and, even worse, through the lives of others. Then there are things I probably should forget — you know, now that I am a well-respected, grandfatherly Christian sort. There are the jokes we told one another, the parties, kisses in parked cars, and movies I never really saw at the drive-in. There are skills I should forget, like how to roll a number on a rubber raft in the dark, how to pick a lock, or the exact moment to move a chair out from under someone sitting down. I remember the taste of a first cold beer on a hot day down on the river and the cool fire of sippin' whiskey by the evening blaze.

We had an office manager who was quite an attractive young lady. One Friday she wore leather pants to work — nothing gauche, but they did fit, shall we say, "quick". She had her hands full of files when she got to the exit. I was heading out the same door at the time — quite innocently. She was in front of me. I was going to step around her to open the door which had a lever instead of a knob. "Oh, no," she said, "I can get it." She backed up to the door and opened it with her butt, looked up at me and smiled.

"That," I said, "is just showing off. But it is impressive." Obviously, twenty-plus years later, I still remember it.

Sometimes I ask the Lord to purge my memory, to let me forget all the failures and even the distractions. Joseph, after enduring so many trials, named his elder son, Manasseh, saying, "God has made me to forget all my troubles in my father's house". Joseph could forget the wrongs done to him, the treachery by his brothers, their envy and animosity. He forgot only those things that came between him and others, for those are also the things that would have come between him and God.

And God, too, forgets. Isaiah said, "...[F]or You have cast all my sins behind Your back." In doubting that God does forget, I'm a little like Joseph's brothers in that they doubted Joseph had forgotten the little episode of being thrown in the well and sold to the Ishmaelites. I've always thought that the worst moment of Joseph's life was probably not being thrown in the well or getting sent to the dungeons for a crime he didn't commit, but that one moment when his brothers pulled him out of the well. Don't you figure that he thought they had been playing a joke on him, and they were about to let him go back home? He would have been thinking better of them. Then the chains were locked on, and he was dragged away behind a camel, able to look back for an hour and see his brothers standing around laughing about how they had finally gotten some profit out of the favorite. What an utterly dismal memory that must have been.

But Joseph did forget, not the episode but the negative intent. He forgot his own toxic bitterness. When Jesus said on the Cross, "Forgive them for they know not what they do", He could easily have paraphrased Joseph, saying, "Forgive them. They mean it for evil, but I know You, Father, mean it for good." The Bible says that a woman forgets the pain of her labor the moment she has her child in her arms. Again, it doesn't mean she forgets the travail, but she does not regret it. She is not embittered by it.

Memory is a blessing; so is forgetfulness. God says that if I will not remember the wrongs done to me, He will not remember the wrongs I have done to Him. If I cannot put my bitterness behind me, I hold my own sins always before His face.

Tomorrow many of my brothers and sisters will have a little cross of ash upon their foreheads, ashes of repentance and humility. In that little fire, literal or figurative, let us burn all tainted memories. We need not worry about loss for pure things will always pass through the fire unharmed. What will be consumed and turned to ashes are the impure, the hurts, the dirty deeds, the bad intentions. The ashes are a sign that we have let the fire purge us, that we forget all that has been burnt up and dispelled in smoke and wind.

As we relinquish to the flames the trespasses done against us, our own transgressions are turned to ash as well, trodden under foot and washed away into the vast, forgetful sea.