For His Own Sake

He is a man who builds arguments for a living, and he has been building one against himself for five years.

Not deliberately. He would be horrified at the suggestion. What he thinks he is doing is preparing, and preparing is what he does: he reads round a matter until he has both sides, and then he takes a position, and he is very good at it and people pay him for it.

So when the matter is his own, he does the same thing, because it is the only method he has.

He sits at the long table by the window in the late afternoon when the light comes down it, and he works on the case. Not the case for the defense, exactly. Something more like an application. It has a structure. It sets out what happened, fairly, without minimizing. It concedes the points that must be conceded, because a bad application concedes nothing and is dismissed. It establishes the mitigating context. It notes, carefully, the years since and what has been different about them.

And then he reads it back, and he finds it insufficient, and he does not send it.

He has never once sent it. Five years, and the file is thick now.

The insufficiency is always the same, and he could name it if you pressed him. The application has to establish that he is worth clearing. That is the argument the whole document exists to make, and it is the argument he cannot make, because he knows the material too well.

So the file gets thicker, and the light comes down the table, and he does not bring it.

And the thing he has never noticed, because he is inside the method, is that he has assumed the entire time that the decision turns on the strength of his case.

That is you at the table.

You've been assembling. You are honest in it, which is the sad part; you have never tried to lie your way through. You have simply assumed that a pardon is granted on the merits of the one asking, and so you have been trying to become a stronger applicant before you would consent to apply.

The reason clause is on His side of the sentence

Isaiah is speaking to a people who had just been given a long and accurate account of their own record. And then, mid chapter, this arrives. Read to the middle of it and stop, because the middle is where the whole thing turns.

I, even I, am he that blotteth out thy transgressions for mine own sake, and will not remember thy sins.Isaiah 43:25

For mine own sake. There it is. The reason for the blotting out is stated, and it is not located in the one being blotted. It is located in God. Not because you argued well. Not because the mitigating context held up. For His own sake, which is a sentence you cannot appeal, improve or be disqualified from.

You are not the ground on which this rests, and the file you have been building has never once been the deciding document, and I am not thinning the seriousness of anything: Isaiah 43:25 puts the reason clause in writing on God's side, and it is the Holy Spirit rather than my saying it who can get that past a man trained to argue.

Now let me take the language slowly, because it repays it. The opening is emphatic in a way English struggles with: anochi anochi hu, I, I am He. The doubling is the Hebrew way of putting weight on the subject, and it is doing exactly one job, which is to make unmistakable who is acting. Not the applicant. Him.

Then the verb, machah, to blot out, which is what you do to writing on a scroll: wipe it so that the surface takes new writing. And then the last clause, which is the one that undoes a file: will not remember. Not cannot find. Chooses not to bring to mind.

You have a record that God has chosen not to call to mind, and choosing is a stronger thing than forgetting, which is written into the verse rather than being my consolation for a careful man, with the Spirit of God able to close a file that five years of reading has only thickened.

Here is what that does to the method. An argument is only worth building if the outcome depends on it. If the reason clause sits on the other side of the sentence entirely, then a better file changes nothing, and a thinner one changes nothing, and the man at the table has been doing skilled work on a document that was never going to be read.

That is not an insult to the work. It is the release from it.

This is yours right now, with the file unsent and the case unproved, because Scripture locates the whole reason in God, and the Holy Spirit is the one carrying it down a long table in the late afternoon light.