Though They Be As Scarlet

They have been trying to work out the lesson for seven months.

That is genuinely how they have spent it. Not in self pity: in study. They have gone over what happened looking for the thing they were supposed to learn, on the assumption that a thing like that does not happen for nothing and that there must be a shape to it.

They have found several candidates. None of them fit properly. Each one explains part of it and leaves a piece over, and the piece that is left over is usually the part that hurt somebody else, which is exactly the part a lesson ought to explain.

Somebody at church said, kindly, in the first fortnight, that God never wastes anything. They have been living inside that sentence ever since and it has become a machine.

Because if it was a lesson, then it was assigned, and if it was assigned then somebody decided that other people should pay for their education. And they cannot say that out loud in any room they are in, because it sounds like blasphemy, and so it runs underneath instead.

Seven months of looking for a curriculum in something that they did.

You may have your own machine. A sentence somebody handed you in the first fortnight that has been quietly organizing your understanding of God ever since.

What He actually says about it

Here is God speaking to people who have got a great deal wrong, and I want you to notice what He does not do.

Come now, and let us reason together, saith the LORD: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool.Isaiah 1:18

Come now, and let us reason together.

That is an invitation into a conversation. It is not an assignment and it is not a debrief. He does not say let me explain what this was for. He does not say now do you see. He says come, and then He says what He is going to do about the color.

And the language is about a stain, and stains are not curricula. A stain is not there to teach anybody anything. It is there to be removed.

You are being invited into a conversation rather than examined on a lesson. Isaiah 1:18 opens with come now and let us reason together and moves straight to the removing, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes the invitation and puts it in front of somebody who has been revising for seven months.

Now I am going to say something plainly, and I want to be careful because a kind person said it to you and they meant well.

God did not arrange your mistake to teach you something.

He is able to bring good out of anything, and He does, and that is a different sentence entirely. Bringing good out of a wreck is not the same as ordering the wreck. You did something, and it had consequences, and the consequences fell partly on other people. That is what happened. It was not assigned.

And you already worked out, underneath, why that matters: because if it was assigned then other people were made to pay for your education, and no honest person can hold that idea about God without something in them going quiet.

You are looking at something you did rather than something you were given. The written word offers reasoning and the removal of a stain and never once frames the stain as instruction, and the Holy Spirit is not the author of what happened to those people.

The honest half. It cost somebody something and no reframing changes that. I am not going to minimize it and I am not going to tell you it was not yours.

What is on offer is not an explanation. It is a conversation and a color change, and I know that is less satisfying than a lesson would have been, because a lesson would have made it make sense. Mercy does not make things make sense. It makes them finished.

There is a part only you can do, and it is two sentences and the first one will be hard. You say what it actually was. And then you say what He said about it.