Ordered in All Things

The nurse had gone and the ward had gone quiet in that way wards go quiet at about ten, and he lay there with a drain in his side and his phone face down on the blanket.

He was fifty three. They had told him that afternoon what they had found and what they were going to try, and he had said thank you the way men say thank you when they have not taken it in yet. And around ten o'clock, alone, he said to God:

If You get me out of here, I will call my brother every Sunday for the rest of my life.

They had not spoken in eleven months at that point. It was over a house and a will and some words said at a kitchen table that could not be taken back, and he had thought about it every single day of the eleven months, and lying in that bed with a drain in his side it seemed like the most obvious thing in the world.

He got out of there. He is fine. They got it all.

He called once. Two Sundays after he came home. It went to voicemail and he did not leave one.

That was six years ago. Six years of Sundays. And here is where he has got to: he believes that the whole arrangement fell over the week he stopped calling. Not that he offended God, exactly. Something structural. He made a bargain from a hospital bed, he did not keep his end, and so the thing collapsed, the way a thing collapses when you take out the part that was holding it.

You may have made one from a bed like that. And you may have this same picture in your head, that you were carrying a wall, and you set it down, and everything came in.

What a dying man leaned on

Let me take you to another bed, and another man, and the last thing he ever said.

David is at the end. He is not writing a psalm; the text calls these the last words of David, and a man at that point does not decorate. He says something about his own house, and he says it with his eyes open.

Although my house be not so with God; yet he hath made with me an everlasting covenant, ordered in all things, and sure: for this is all my salvation, and all my desire, although he make it not to grow.2 Samuel 23:5

You are standing inside something that was arranged in every particular before you arrived at it. 2 Samuel 23:5 calls the covenant everlasting and ordered in all things and sure in one breath, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has kept the order through six years of silence.

Although my house be not so

Start where he starts, because he starts with the failure and he does not soften it.

Although my house be not so with God. He is looking straight at his own record. His house was not what it should have been and he knows exactly how it was not, and there is no man in Scripture with more material to work with there.

And then the yet.

Yet He hath made with me an everlasting covenant. Not: yet I hope. Not: yet perhaps He will overlook it. He has made it. Past tense, completed, standing. And then the three words that are the whole reason I brought you here.

Ordered in all things.

You are inside something that was arranged in every particular before you got to it, and none of the particulars were assigned to you. That is what 2 Samuel 23:5 says with a dying man's plainness, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes it out of David's last breath and lays it on a man who has been counting Sundays for six years.

Ordered in all things means somebody did the ordering. Every part of it was set in place, arranged, provided for. And a structure that was ordered in all things by God does not have a load bearing wall in it labeled your phone call.

I want to be careful, because a covenant has terms and this site does not pretend otherwise. The covenant has things in it for you: to come, to walk, to keep short accounts, to do the thing in front of you. Those are real and God means them. But there is a difference between what is required of a man inside a house and what is holding the house up, and confusing those two has cost you six years.

You have been treating a duty as a foundation, and it was never load bearing. Scripture calls the covenant everlasting and ordered and sure in the same breath, and the Spirit of God is the one who has kept it standing without a single one of your Sundays in it.

And sure

Then the last word: sure.

It is the language of a thing you can lean your weight on. And notice what David does with it, because it is the most personal sentence in his last speech: for this is all my salvation and all my desire.

All of it. Not most. The man who had a kingdom and a name and the ark of God in his own city says the everlasting covenant is the whole of his salvation and the whole of what he wants, and he says it while looking straight at a house that is not what it should have been.

You have something to lean your entire weight on that is not your own performance. That is written into the words ordered and sure, and His Spirit is the one who has been carrying that weight through six years of silence between two brothers.

And here is what is not settled, said plainly, because I will not leave you with the idea that nothing you do matters: there is a phone in your pocket and there is a brother on the other end of it. That is real. That is genuinely yours. It is simply not the thing that decides whether you are inside.