There is a place on a trail about two hours up where a man turns off and sits, and he has been doing it for nine years.
It is not a viewpoint. That is the thing. The view is better a quarter mile further on, where the ridge opens out and you can see three valleys, and everybody who walks that trail goes to the ridge. He goes to the flat place before it, where there is a rock and some scrub and nothing to look at, and he sits down on the rock.
He can tell you why in one sentence, and I am not going to say the sentence, because it is his. Something happened near there. That is enough.
He brought it to God a long time ago and he meant it, and he has never had any real doubt that God heard him. He is not a man in torment. If you met him on the trail you would find him good company, and he would tell you where the water is.
But every few months he shoulders a pack and walks two hours up to sit on a rock and look at scrub.
I want to name the wound rather than skip it, because a lift that comes before the naming is not worth much. What he is doing on that rock, and he could not have told you this himself for the first six years, is checking whether anything is still there. Not on the ground. In him. He goes up to see if the weight is still where it used to be, the way you press a bruise.
And the finding is always the same, and this is the sad and precise part: he finds nothing definite, and he cannot decide whether nothing definite means it is gone or means he has stopped being able to feel it, and so the visit settles nothing and needs repeating.
That is you on the rock.
You have a place you go back to, in your head if not on a trail, and you press on it to see whether it still hurts, and you cannot read the result either way. So the trip has to be made again. It is not doubt about God. It is the impossibility of proving a negative by feeling around for it.
Hezekiah chose a strange phrase, and the strangeness is the point
A king who had been very ill writes something afterwards, and the sentence he uses about his own past is one nobody would have invented for a doctrine. That is why it is worth so much.
Behold, for peace I had great bitterness: but thou hast in love to my soul delivered it from the pit of corruption: for thou hast cast all my sins behind thy back.Isaiah 38:17
Behind thy back. Stop on that. It is a peculiar image and it does something no other image does. God has no back in the physical sense, and Hezekiah knows this perfectly well. What he is reaching for is a location defined entirely by inaccessibility to the one speaking.
If a thing is behind God's back, then there is no angle from which you can see it. You cannot walk round Him. You cannot go and look. The location is not merely far away; it is chosen so that the person forgiven has no access to it at all.
You have a matter placed where you personally cannot get to it, and the placement was designed with exactly that in mind, and I am not making the wound smaller than it is: Isaiah 38:17 gives that location in writing, and it is the Holy Spirit rather than my telling you so who can bring it to a man two hours up a trail.
Notice what comes before it in the verse as well, because Hezekiah does not pretend the hard part was not hard. For peace I had great bitterness. He names the weight fully before he names the mercy. Nobody is asking you to skip that step and I am not going to rush you past it either. The trail is real. What happened near it was real.
And then, in the same breath: in love to my soul. The casting is not administrative. It was done affectionately, toward him, on purpose.
You have been dealt with in love and not merely processed, and the two are as different as a filing and an embrace, which is written into the verse rather than being my sympathy for your nine years, with the Spirit of God able to reach a man who cannot read his own bruises.
Here is what that does to the pressing. You have been trying to establish, by feel, whether something is still present. But feeling is not the instrument for this. The location is behind God's back, which means the only report available comes from Him, and He has already given it.
This is out of your reach on purpose, and out of reach is the mercy rather than a frustration, because Scripture puts it behind His back, and the Holy Spirit is the one carrying that up a trail where a good man is still sitting on a rock.
The mountain, the meadow and the ridge are all His handiwork and none of them are holding your record. Neither is He.
There is nothing to go back for.
Not because what happened near that trail was small, and not because your care about it was excessive. Because God put it in a place chosen for the specific property that you cannot get to it, and no number of visits changes the geography of that.
The pressing has never given you a reading. It cannot. You have been trying to verify by feel a thing that was settled by decree, and a bruise is not a witness.
You are dealt with in love and the record is behind His back, which is the one address you have no route to, because Isaiah 38:17 says exactly that, and the Holy Spirit is the one making it something you can walk on rather than a phrase you find striking.
Go to the ridge instead. The view is better a quarter mile on.
Declare this over yourself
Say them out loud, in whatever voice this morning has left you. The standing to say them is not something a man works up to and it is not on loan from a good stretch: Christ is in you, and the authority in these words belongs to Him and has been given to you in Scripture, made living by the Holy Spirit rather than by what you can feel on a rock. Jesus put the faith required at a mustard seed, which is His way of setting it under the line where anybody would trouble to measure, and then He said the part that carries: speak to the mountain. The mountain here is not what happened. It is the walk back up. Speak to that. What He does with the rest of it He does in His own way, and the unclenching is yours to do this morning.
- Trail I keep walking back up, you are not mine to climb, and in the name of Jesus I turn round on you. Scripture says He cast it behind His back, and there is no angle on this earth from which a man sees behind God.
- Fear that I have only stopped feeling it rather than been rid of it, you have had nine years of my mornings and you have never once given me a reading. Scripture says the casting was done in love to my soul, so the report comes from Him and never from a bruise.
- Lord God, You chose a place I have no route to and You chose it on purpose, and I am sitting here with both hands open and the pack still on the ground. I thank You, because Your Holy Spirit did the settling and Your word named the one address out of my reach, and I am received at the turning round and not at the end of another climb.
Isaiah 38:17
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