The Anchor You Cannot See

You cannot see an anchor. That is the first thing to say and most of this follows from it.

If you stand on a quay and look at a boat lying at anchor, what you can see is a boat, a bit of chain going into the water, and then nothing. The part doing the work is on the bottom, in the dark, out of reach, and there is no way to inspect it without hauling the whole thing up, and hauling it up is the one action that guarantees it is not holding.

Now, here is a man on that quay at seven in the morning.

He turned a fortnight ago. He meant it, and he has not gone back on it, and if you asked him plainly whether it was real he would say yes without hesitating.

And every morning since, he has been trying to check.

Not deliberately. He would not describe it as checking. What he does is read the surface. How he feels on waking. Whether the pull is weaker. Whether anything in his circumstances has shifted. Whether he prayed with any warmth last night. He runs across the top of all of it looking for a reading, and the surface gives him a different answer every day, because surfaces do.

A fortnight of that, and he is less sure than he was on the first morning, and he has concluded that this must mean something.

That is you on the quay.

You've been reading the top of the water. And the top of the water is weather, and it changes hourly, and it has never once been where the holding was happening.

The writer puts the anchor somewhere you cannot go

Hebrews reaches for the image and then does something with it that most people miss, because they stop reading at the word anchor.

Which hope we have as an anchor of the soul, both sure and stedfast, and which entereth into that within the veil.Hebrews 6:19

Which entereth into that within the veil.

The anchor does not go down. It goes in. Into the holiest place, behind the curtain, the one part of the temple nobody could enter except once a year and only one man. The writer takes the ordinary picture of a harbor and moves the anchorage into the place least accessible to any person alive.

That is not an accident of imagery. He wants you to know exactly how far out of reach the holding is.

You are held by something anchored in a place you have no access to, and the inaccessibility is the point rather than the problem, and I am not stretching a verse: Hebrews 6:19 says within the veil, in writing, and it is the Holy Spirit rather than my saying so who can get it to a man reading the surface at seven in the morning.

And look at the two words attached. Sure and stedfast. Sure means it will not fail. Stedfast means it will not shift. Both of those are properties of the anchor rather than of the boat, which is a distinction worth sitting with, because you have spent a fortnight assessing the boat.

The boat moves. Boats always move. A boat at anchor swings with the tide and the wind, and it can be forty feet from where it was at breakfast, and every bit of that movement is normal and none of it is a report on the chain.

You have been assessing the boat and drawing conclusions about the anchor, which is written into the sure and stedfast rather than into my sympathy for a fortnight of mornings, with the Spirit of God able to settle a man where daily readings have only unsettled him.

Here is what I would say if we were sitting on that wall with the mugs. The only way to check an anchor is to pull it up, and a person who checks it daily has a boat that is never actually anchored. Your fortnight of inspections has been the one activity capable of unsettling you, and the thing you were inspecting has not moved once.

This is holding this morning, in a place you were never given a way to see into, because Scripture puts the anchorage within the veil, and the Holy Spirit is the one carrying that onto a quay at seven.