Nobody Uses The Past Tense About Me

Temporary lights on a country road, red for a long while, a hedge cutter working somewhere up ahead and the whole lane smelling of cut hawthorn. There are four cars behind them and a tractor behind those.

Her sister is driving and her sister is talking about next summer. The camper again, maybe, if they book early. Whether the twins will be old enough for the coast path. Whether they should do the thing they always say they will do and never do.

And she sits in the passenger seat with her arm along the open window and does what she always does now, which is to run the arithmetic quietly underneath the conversation while making the right noises on top of it.

Because everyone speaks to her in the future tense, and they all use the same one. You'll be back on your feet. They'll sort something out. You'll feel more like yourself when the weather turns. Every single person means it lovingly and not one of them is being dishonest, and she has a folder at home with letters in it that use a different set of verbs altogether, and the verbs in the folder are the ones she believes.

She is forty-four. She has been told, in a kind room by a kind person, what her body is going to do. Nobody in the whole of her life has ever once told her what God has already said about her, in the finished past tense, done and entered and not subject to revision.

If you have your own folder, then you already know how it feels to be the only person in the car doing honest sums, and you know that the kindness is not the problem.

Five verbs, and the last one is not where you would put it

First, the weight, and I am not going to hurry past it to get somewhere nicer, because that is the exact trick this subject invites and it is not going to happen here.

The weight you carry costs what it costs. The stairs you used to take two at a time and now plan. The thing you had to stop doing that nobody else noticed you had stopped doing. The energy budget that has to cover a shower and a conversation and cannot cover both. The particular loneliness of being the only one in the car who is not planning anything, and the tiredness of holding your face in the right shape while somebody who loves you talks about the coast path.

I am not going to tell you it could be worse and I am not going to set it beside anybody else's. There is no ranking on this site and there never will be. It is heavy, and it is yours, and it is real, and any word from God that requires your today to be shrunk first is not a word from God.

Right. Now look at what He actually said.

And plainly, before we go any further: if the arithmetic in that car has taken you somewhere darker, as far as thinking the people who love you would have easier summers without you in the passenger seat, tell one living person today. Your doctor, your sister, or a crisis line where you live, 988 by call or text in the United States and its equivalent wherever you are. Scripture asks nobody to hold that alone, and the Holy Spirit has always moved through people who drive and keep talking.

And those whom he predestined he also called, and those whom he called he also justified, and those whom he justified he also glorified.Romans 8:30

Five verbs in that chain and the whole argument sits in their tense. Foreknew. Predestined. Called. Justified. And then the one nobody expects, in exactly the same tense as the other four: glorified.

Paul had every reason to write that last one differently. He is writing to people under real pressure, in bodies that were failing and cities that were dangerous, and he knows perfectly well that not one of them is glorified in any sense they could see in a mirror. He could have written will glorify. It would have been true and it would have been safe. He does not write it. He puts glorified in the finished past, alongside called, as a thing that has already gone through.

I keep books for a living, in a manner of speaking, so let me say what that is. It is a posted entry. Not a projection, not a forecast, not a hope in the notes at the back. In the accounts God is keeping, that transaction has cleared, and He does not deal in provisional figures and He does not issue corrections.

So here is what is true of you at a set of temporary lights on a Tuesday, with the hedge cutter going. You are a person God has already spoken about in the past tense. That is not my flourish. Romans 8:30 chose that tense under pressure, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes an old man's grammar and makes it something you can lean your weight on.

And now let me be exact about what that sentence does not say, because enough loose promises have already been handed to you by kind people.

It says nothing whatever about your body. Not a word. It does not predict your stairs, your energy, your folder or your next appointment, and I am not going to predict them either, and anybody who does is guessing in a confident voice. What it settles is you: the person in the passenger seat, the one your sister loves, the one doing the sums. God has finished His sentence about that person and He said it before the folder existed.

You have been graded all your life on what you can do, and this verb is not on that scale. Notice that not one of the five verbs is something the person does. Foreknew, predestined, called, justified, glorified: God is the subject of every single one, and the person is the object of every single one, and Scripture is not being careless with its grammar. His Spirit in you is the guarantee of it, given as a deposit, and He was not issued on the strength of your capacity this year.

Then what is left for you to do with a thing that is already done?

Say amen to it, and I mean that in the strong sense rather than the church sense. Paul writes that all the promises of God find their Yes in Christ, and that through Him we utter our Amen. The Yes was said first and it was said by God. The amen is a person out loud agreeing with a finished sentence, which is why saying it does not manufacture anything and does not have to. Second Corinthians 1:20 is where that stands, and His Spirit is the one who carries an amen further than the sound of it. You are not raising a claim. You are countersigning.

You have a finished sentence to countersign, and countersigning is the whole of the work left. Romans 8:30 puts all five verbs in the past with God as the subject of every one, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a settled verb and carries it into a person.