His Cousin's Papers Came First

The front room is full and there is music on somebody's phone in a bowl to make it louder, and his aunt is crying and laughing at the same time in the doorway to the kitchen.

Tomas got his papers on Tuesday.

He is happy for him. He needs that said first, in his own head, before anything else, because it is true. Tomas is twenty six and he has been sleeping on a mattress in a room with two other men for three years and he deserves this and there is nobody in this family who would say otherwise.

He applied in the March before Tomas arrived in the country.

Twenty two months longer. Same category. Same lawyer, actually, which is the part that makes it feel like a decision rather than a queue.

He came. He shook Tomas's hand properly, with both of his, and he meant it, and Tomas hugged him and said something in the old language that their grandmother used to say and it nearly finished him.

And then he went and stood by the window.

And his face did something. Not a big thing. Nobody looking would have noticed except possibly his wife, who was on the other side of the room and who has not said anything and will not.

He felt it go and he could not stop it and it lasted about two seconds and he has been thinking about it ever since.

If you have stood at the edge of a room that was celebrating and felt your own face betray you, you know that window. And you know what comes afterwards: it is not the papers, it is that I found out what is in me in front of everybody I love, and nobody saw it, and I saw it.

The word, and then a man whose face fell

Let me stand at the window and say the plain thing while the music is loud enough to cover it.

The problem is not Tomas. You shook his hand with both of yours and you meant it and everybody in the room could see you meant it. The problem is two seconds, and that you were the only witness, and that a man cannot argue with a thing his own face did.

So let me put the word straight before we go to the passage.

Blessed does not mean the papers come. It means the favor of God is resting on a person, His face is turned toward them. It is a fact about where He is looking. And there is no queue in heaven, and nothing that arrived for Tomas on Tuesday came out of an allocation with your name on the rest of it.

Now here is the passage, and I want to show you something in it that almost nobody notices.

And Cain was very wroth, and his countenance fell. And the Lord said unto Cain, Why art thou wroth? and why is thy countenance fallen? If thou doest well, shalt thou not be accepted? and if thou doest not well, sin lieth at the door.Genesis 4:5-7

His countenance fell. That is a face doing something a man did not authorize, and it is the first thing recorded about him.

And then, immediately, God speaks to him. Not about him. To him.

That is the part nobody notices. In the worst moment of that man's interior life, before anything has been done, the Lord comes and asks him two questions and gives him a warning and tells him he can rule it. There is a whole conversation, and it is initiated by God, and there is not one word of contempt in it.

You are being spoken to at a window rather than left alone with what your face did, and that is exactly what happens in the passage. Genesis 4:6 has the Lord asking the questions rather than passing sentence, and it is the Holy Spirit who is the one who comes to a person in the two seconds afterwards, which is why you have been thinking about it rather than shrugging it off.

Lieth at the door is not the same as inside

Now the image, because it is precise and the precision is the whole comfort.

Sin lieth at the door. The word is crouching, the way an animal waits outside a tent. It is at the door. It is not in the room. It is not in the man.

Which means what happened to your face by the window was the thing arriving at the door, and God's word to the man in that position is not: you are what is at the door. It is: rule over it.

And thou shalt rule over it is said to a man in the exact moment, with the thing crouching, before he has done anything either way. It is not a verdict, it is a description of what is still available to him.

You have something at the door and you are not the thing at the door, and Scripture keeps those two entirely separate. Genesis 4:7 puts sin outside and the ruling inside the man's reach in the same sentence, and it is the Holy Spirit who bears the fruit called self control, which means the ruling in that verse is supplied rather than demanded from an empty man.

And the tragedy in that chapter is not the fallen face. It is the field. It is what happens later, and it happens because a man went out and did not speak, and the text is almost unbearable about it: Cain talked with Abel his brother, and it came to pass when they were in the field.

Whatever he said, it was not the true thing.

You have the option that man did not take, which is to say the true thing to somebody rather than carry it into a field. The written word gives the whole warning before anything happens, and it is the Holy Spirit who prompts a person to speak while it is still two seconds old rather than two years.

Twenty two months, and what I will not say

Now your own case, because I am not going to walk past twenty two months.

I am not going to tell you it comes through. I do not know. Same category and the same lawyer and twenty two months is a real thing and it may be a decision or it may be a pile, and neither of us can see it from that window.

And I am not going to tell you God arranged for Tomas to go first for a reason. He put in an application and somebody processed it. That is what happened.

And I am not going to tell you the two seconds do not matter. They do, but not in the way you have been reading them. They matter as information about what is at the door, which is the most useful thing a man can be given, and you were given it in a front room with the music loud enough to cover it.

Both halves. Twenty two months is not the withdrawal of God's favor and Tomas's Tuesday is not evidence about you.

You are favored and you are still waiting, and neither of those is evidence about the other. Scripture has the Lord speaking to a man in that exact position without one word of contempt, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a person able to hold the wait and the favor at the same time without needing a story that resolves it.