He Said It To People Who Were Not

The last flight of the night gets in at ten past one, and by the time it empties the arrivals hall has already been swept.

The coffee stand has its shutter down. One of the two escalators is stopped for the night. A cleaner runs a floor machine in long slow passes near the rental desks and steers around the barrier without looking up, because he has done it a thousand times and the barrier has not moved in years.

The greeting crowd is long gone. The balloons went home at nine with the family they were bought for. The man with the laminated sign folded it into his jacket after the earlier flight and drove off into the dark. What is left is a security guard, a taxi driver eating out of a plastic tray, and a wall of screens where the departures used to be.

Then the doors go, and a man comes through last of all, wheeling a case with a wheel that will not run straight. He has the walk of somebody apologizing for the hour. He gives the guard a small embarrassed smile. He is sorry to have arrived so late, and he could not tell you who he is being sorry to.

You know that walk. You have been doing it since you were thirty-nine.

That is the number, and you say it the way a man reads out the mileage on a used car. Everybody else seems to have been handed all of this at seven years old, in a kitchen, by a grandmother with flour on her hands. They know the songs without looking at the words. They have a shelf of Bibles with different colored ribbons hanging out of them. There is an entire childhood folded into the way they say the word Sunday.

And you came in at thirty-nine with a bad wheel on your case. So you filed yourself, quietly, under a heading you have never said out loud. Not excluded. You would never use that word, and nobody has been anything but kind to you. Something more like attached. Present, welcome, permitted, and attached to a thing that was finished and furnished long before you got anywhere near it.

The sentence was spoken over people who were not anything yet

I want to take you to the bluntest naming in Scripture, because a man who thinks he arrived late needs to see who this sentence was originally aimed at.

The prophet Hosea was told to name his children as living signs, and one of them he was told to call Lo-ammi, which means Not My People. Not the strugglers. Not the lukewarm. Not the ones who came in at thirty-nine. Not a people at all. That name is a legal void. It says that whatever a people is, this is not it, and there is nothing standing here to build on.

The ones you imagine were already assembled before you arrived, the ones with the ribbons in their Bibles, are described in their own book as a nothing that God spoke into a something.

You are one of God's people tonight, and the sentence that made it so was addressed to people who had no claim on it whatsoever. That is written at Hosea 2:23, in a book older than every language you speak, and it is the Holy Spirit who carried it off that page and set it down in a man of thirty-nine with a case that will not run straight.

And I will sow her unto me in the earth; and I will have mercy upon her that had not obtained mercy; and I will say to them which were not my people, Thou art my people; and they shall say, Thou art my God.Hosea 2:23

Read what actually happens in that verse. God does not find a people. He does not recruit one, interview one, or locate a promising remnant and promote it. He speaks, and the speaking is the making. The entire existence of the thing you have been trying to get inside of rests on one sentence said by God over people who were not it.

You have a place that was never issued on the strength of when you started. That stands on what is written and not on my sympathy for your situation, and the Spirit of God is the one who signed it into you rather than the calendar on the wall. Mercy reached you exactly as it reached everybody else in that book: from outside, unearned, and well before you were in any condition to receive it gracefully.

Late is a word for trains

Now let me take the other half of it, because the ache in you is not really theological. It is about an hour.

Late is a genuine category in this world. Trains are late. Rent is late. A man who walks into an arrivals hall at one in the morning has in fact arrived after everybody else, and no amount of warm language moves the clock on the wall.

But go looking for late in the account of God's people and see what turns up. Abram was seventy-five years old when he left Haran, and nothing had begun before that. Moses had a whole career behind him and a desert in the middle of his life. The men hired at the eleventh hour in the parable Jesus told received the same wage as the men who had been standing there since morning, and the ones who had been there since morning were the only people in the story who thought that was a problem. There is a thief at the very end of Luke's account who came in with hours left on the clock and was told he would be in paradise that day.

You will not find one person in that book who arrived on time, because there is no on time. There is a house, there is a door, there is a table, and the only thing the house has ever asked at the door is whether you came in.

You are inside a people assembled entirely out of latecomers, and your arrival is not the odd one in the room. Scripture tells the story that way from one end to the other, and His Spirit is not running a comparison between your start and anybody else's.

Here is what I know about a well kept house, and I say it as a man whose whole charge is thresholds. Where hospitality is kept properly, the guest who comes at one in the morning is not served a lesser meal. The bread is not stale because the hour is odd. Nobody removes the good plate and brings out the chipped one. Somebody kept the lamp lit and the pot warm precisely because they knew a traveler would come in late, and the lateness was accounted for long before the road was ever walked.

Right now, as you read, you are reckoned among the people of God on the same footing as every other person in it. He promised that in writing, and the Holy Spirit is not in the habit of reading a promise aloud and then leaving the room while you decide whether it applies to you.