A Will Comes Into Force

She asked him for one thing at the end and it was not a large thing.

She was seventy nine and she had about a week left and she knew it, and on the Tuesday she took his hand, which she had not done in that way since he was a boy, and she said: keep it. Whatever else you do. Keep what I gave you.

He said he would. He said it properly, looking at her, with his other hand on top of hers, because he was not going to say it any other way.

She died on the Sunday.

He has not prayed since the funeral. That was eleven years ago.

He is not angry. That is the thing people assume and it is not true and it has never been true. There was no crisis and no argument with God, and he cannot point to a moment. What happened is that after the funeral he found he could not do it, and then he found he was not doing it, and then enough time passed that not doing it became the arrangement, and now he is a fifty eight year old man who was handed something by a dying woman and put it down in a parking lot and never picked it back up.

And what he believes, in the part of himself that does not get said out loud, is that it has been withdrawn. That there was an inheritance with his name on it, and there was a condition attached to it, and he did not meet the condition, so it has gone back into the estate and been distributed elsewhere.

You may be carrying something like that. Not anger. Just the settled sense that there was something for you, and that it has been reallocated by now, because these things do not sit around waiting for eleven years.

The word is the same word

Here is something the English hides from you, and once you see it you cannot unsee it.

The word translated covenant through the New Testament is the ordinary Greek word for a will. A last will and testament. The document that says who gets what when somebody dies. It is the same word, and the writer of Hebrews leans on that on purpose, mid-argument, in a way that only works if you keep both meanings in your head at once.

For where a testament is, there must also of necessity be the death of the testator. For a testament is of force after men are dead: otherwise it is of no strength at all while the testator liveth.Hebrews 9:16-17

You are named in an instrument that came into force at a death and has never once been reopened. Hebrews 9:17 says a testament is of force after men are dead, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has kept your name inside it for eleven years of silence.

Beneficiaries do not negotiate

Think about what a will actually is, because you have probably sat in a room while one was read.

A will is drawn up by one person. It is the expression of one person's intention about their own property. The people named in it are not parties to it: they did not draft it, they did not sign it, they were not consulted, and their opinion of it is legally irrelevant.

And here is the part that matters to a man who thinks he lost an inheritance. A will comes into force by the death of the one who made it. Not by the behavior of the beneficiaries afterward. Not by whether they turn up at the reading in a good state. The instrument becomes operative at the moment of death, and nothing a beneficiary does in the following decade reopens the drafting.

You are named in something that came into force at a death and cannot be redrafted by your eleven years. Hebrews 9:17 is where that is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes it out of an argument about the tabernacle and puts it in a fifty eight year old man's kitchen.

I want to say the honest half now, because a covenant does have terms and this site does not pretend otherwise. There are things in it for you. Come. Turn. Take what is yours and use it. Those are real, and your choices are not scenery.

But there is a difference between what an heir does with an inheritance and whether the inheritance is his. The first one is genuinely his business and can go badly for years. The second was settled at a graveside a long time before he got there.

You have an inheritance that was settled by somebody else's death and not by your conduct after it. Scripture says it in so many words, and that is the whole force of a testament being of force after men are dead, and the Spirit of God has kept your name in that document through every one of the eleven years.

What his mother actually handed him

Now let me say something about that Tuesday, gently, because it has been misread.

Keep what I gave you. He has heard that for eleven years as a condition on a bequest. It was not. It was a mother telling her son what she had loved most, in the last week she had to tell him anything.

She was not the testator here. She could not attach a condition to God's covenant any more than a guest can amend the deeds of a house. What she did was point at something and say: that. That is the good thing. Hold on to that.

And a man who has not prayed in eleven years is not a man who forfeited a bequest. He is a man who has been living in a house he still owns and never once opening the front room.

You are the owner of something you have not been using, and that is a completely different position from a man who lost it. Scripture calls us heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ, and the Spirit of God is described as the earnest of that inheritance, which is to say the deposit that guarantees the rest, and He has been that deposit in you the whole time.