One Nation, And He Does The Making

The drawer in the hall table has three things in it that are not his.

A key, first, to a side door of a building he has no reason to go near, which he kept because at the time somebody would obviously need it back and then, later, there was nobody obvious to give it to. A mug with a chip out of the rim, from a weekend away in the rain twenty two years ago, when nine of them stayed in a house with one working radiator and laughed until two in the morning. And a small brass bell that used to be rung, ridiculously, at the start of a Tuesday evening, because a woman who has since died thought it was funny.

Three groups. Not one of them ended in a fight he could describe to you. The first one thinned. People moved for work, a couple of families had babies, and the room went from eighteen to nine to four, and then somebody said maybe we take a break over the summer. The second came apart over a decision that everybody insisted was about the decision. The third simply stopped, the way a clock stops, without anybody hearing it happen.

He takes the box out to the back step in the evening and sits with it on his knees, and this is what he has concluded, quietly and without any drama, over twenty two years. That he is not against people and people are not against him. That he would like company. And that if some were given to him tomorrow he would lose them by about the fourth year, because that is the pattern, and a man who has seen a thing three times has seen a pattern. You have your own number. Yours might be two and it might be five, and the sentence underneath it is the same one, and you have never said it out loud to anybody.

The joining happens in His hand

Ezekiel is told to do something with two sticks, and where he is told to put them is the entire lesson.

The people he was speaking to were not a hopeful group with a project. They were the fragments. Their nation had already come apart, twice, and the pieces had gone in different directions across generations, and the ones listening to him had grown up knowing that reunion was the sort of thing old men talked about. Ezekiel is handed two sticks, one for one kingdom and one for the other, and told to join them, and the text is very particular about the location: they become one in his hand. Then God says what it means.

And I will make them one nation in the land upon the mountains of Israel; and one king shall be king to them all: and they shall be no more two nations, neither shall they be divided into two kingdoms any more at all.Ezekiel 37:22

I will make them one. Not they will finally manage it. Not I will help them if they are willing to work at it. The verb is His, the initiative is His, and there is not a single conditional clause anywhere in the sentence for the sticks to fail.

And that detail about the hand is not decoration. Two sticks laid on a table stay two sticks. What made them one was not that they gripped each other; it was that they were held. Which means the joint in this whole business is not between the pieces at all. It is in the hand of the one holding them.

You are held by the hand that does the joining, and you were never the glue in any of this. Ezekiel 37:22 puts the making in the first person and leaves the pieces no part in it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has been doing the holding through all twenty two of those years.

So consider what that does to your pattern. You have read three endings as three pieces of evidence about your capacity to keep people. But you were never holding those groups together. Nobody in them was. A room of people is not held by anybody's talent for it, and when one thins out because of work and babies and a summer break, that is not a report on the man who kept the key.

You have a place among God's people that has outlasted three endings, and none of those endings ever touched it. The word says I will make them one, and it is the Holy Spirit who turns a promise made in the first person into something standing under a man on a back step.

One king, and that is why it holds

Now take the second half of the verse, which is the reason the first half can be said at all.

One king shall be king to them all. That is the mechanism. The unity of this people is not horizontal, held in place by everybody getting along, agreeing about the decision, staying in the same town, or being well enough that year to keep turning up. It runs through one person, and it is as durable as He is.

Think about what that means practically for a man with three things in a drawer. A unity held together by agreement is only ever as strong as its weakest week. Every group you have loved was carrying its own future on its members' backs, and members get tired, and move, and get ill, and get things wrong, and eventually somebody says maybe we take a break over the summer. That is not wickedness. It is weight in the wrong place.

And I am not going to tell you that those three groups are coming back, because I do not know that, and it is not what the verse says. I am not going to promise you that people are on their way this spring either. Nobody honest can promise you that, and I would not insult you by supplying an imaginary friend at the end of an article. What Scripture settles is not who arrives. It is who is keeping you, and the answer has not changed since Ezekiel had two sticks in his hand.

You were joined to this people by God's own doing, and He has never once handed the keeping of it to you. God promised it in writing and used no conditional anywhere in the sentence, and the Holy Spirit did not quietly attach one afterward.

Right now, as you read this, you are one of God's people, kept by one king rather than by any room that stayed together. Scripture gives the joining to God and never to the pieces, and the same Spirit has been doing that holding on every Tuesday of your life, including the ones with nobody in them.