The Filthy Garments Came Off Him

Before anything: the coal is still lit in you.

If it were not, you would not have chosen the back. A man who had stopped caring would sit wherever was convenient and think about the afternoon.

He is fifty-two and it took about three years to arrive at the arrangement and he has never once described it to anybody.

He comes in four or five minutes after it starts, which means the singing has begun and nobody has to greet him properly. He sits in the second-to-last row, on the end. He does not sing. He stands when everybody stands, because not standing would be a statement, and he holds the book and looks at the words and does not open his mouth.

He is not in scandal. Nobody would guess any of this, and if you asked around he would come back as a quiet, decent man who has gone a bit private lately.

What is actually going on is a judgment he has passed, and he passed it carefully, the way a fair man does. He knows what has been true of him in the last few years. He knows what he thinks about when he cannot sleep, and what he has and has not done about it, and he has concluded, on the evidence, that a man in his condition ought not to put himself forward in the presence of God.

So he has taken himself to the back. And he thinks of that as honesty, and there is a kind of integrity in it, and it is also the single most effective thing he has ever done to keep himself cold.

The scene in Zechariah

There is a vision in Zechariah of a man in exactly your position, and he is a priest, which makes it worse.

Joshua the high priest is standing before the angel of the LORD, and he is in filthy garments, and there is an accuser standing at his right hand to resist him. The clothes are not a metaphor anybody has to explain; everyone in the vision can see the state of him, and the accusation is not false.

And then this happens.

Take away the filthy garments from him. And unto him he said, Behold, I have caused thine iniquity to pass from thee, and I will clothe thee with change of raiment.Zechariah 3:4

Notice who does what.

Joshua does not leave to change. He is not sent out to make himself presentable and come back. He is not told to step down from the position while the matter is dealt with.

He stands there, in the filthy clothes, in front of everybody, and the changing is done to him where he stands.

You are being dressed by Somebody rather than sent out to change, and the standing came before the clean clothes. That is not me softening the seriousness of your situation; Zechariah 3:4 has the garments removed from a man who is already standing in the place, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that vision and lays it over a second-to-last row.

Who is doing the accusing

Now let me point at something in the vision that I think you have never noticed, and it is the most important detail in it for you.

There is an accuser in the scene. He is standing at Joshua's right hand, and his job is to resist him, and his case is accurate. Everything he could say about those clothes would be true.

And the accuser is not God. He is the other party. God's contribution to that scene is one sentence to the accuser and then the order about the clothes.

So when you sit in that row and go through the evidence carefully and arrive at a judgment about your fitness, whose work are you doing?

You have been performing the accuser's job on yourself with great care. The written word puts the resisting in somebody else's mouth entirely, and the Holy Spirit is not the one who has been building the case at the back of the hall.

And the coldness. You have wondered why three years at the back has left you flatter than the years that put you there. Here is why, and it is not a punishment. You cannot receive anything at a distance you chose in order to be fair. The withdrawal you made out of integrity has done more to keep you cold than the things you withdrew about.

You are not disqualified, and nobody removed you from the room. Scripture has the unfit man standing where he stands while God orders the change, and the Holy Spirit has been in that hall on every one of the mornings you came in four minutes late.