The Tally He Kept in the Back of the Book

The room empties fast at nine because most of them have buses, and by five past there is nobody left in it but Adam and a whiteboard he has only half wiped.

He teaches two evenings a week. He is forty. He is good at it in an unshowy way and the class is oversubscribed and he has never advertised it.

He puts the chairs back. He wipes the rest of the board. He picks up the notebook he uses for the class, which is a plain hardback with a rubber band round it, and he sits down on the edge of a table to write up two things he wants to remember for next week.

And then, because it is Thursday, he turns to the back.

There is a page at the back of that book that has nothing to do with the class.

It is a tally. Small marks, grouped in fives, in pencil, going down and then across in columns, one page per year, and there are eleven pages.

He started it when he was twenty-nine, and he started it with the best intentions anybody ever had. It was a diagnostic. He wanted to know, honestly, whether the thing was getting better or worse, because he could not tell from inside it, and a man who is careful about evidence does not rely on an impression.

That was the intention.

It did not stay a diagnostic. Nothing that gets counted stays neutral for eleven years. Somewhere in about year three it became a scoreboard, and somewhere after that it became something else again, and the something else is this: when Adam thinks about where he stands with God, the number in his head is the number on that page.

Not the cross. Not anything anybody ever preached to him. A pencil count in the back of a notebook with a rubber band round it.

Tonight he counts the year so far, because he does that on the last Thursday of the month.

It is lower than last year. Noticeably lower. It is the lowest it has been since he started.

And it does not help. Not for a second, not even slightly, and he sits on the edge of that table in an empty room with the number in front of him and understands, for the first time in eleven years, that the problem is not the reading.

The problem is the instrument.

You have a tally somewhere. Yours might not be on paper. But you know the count, and you know how quickly you could give me the figure, and you know it is the number you reach for when you think about where you stand.

The verse is about jurisdiction

Romans 6 finishes a long argument, and the sentence it lands on is one people quote for encouragement without noticing that it is a legal statement.

For sin shall not have dominion over you: for ye are not under the law, but under grace.Romans 6:14

Take the noun in the first half. Dominion.

The word behind it means to lord it over, to exercise mastery, to be the one in authority. It is a word about who is in charge, and it says nothing whatsoever about whether something is present.

A thing can be present in a territory and have no authority in it. That is an ordinary situation and everybody understands it in every other area of life.

You are living in a territory where that thing holds no authority, and the verse is about mastery and not about presence. That is the written word and not my consolation in an empty classroom, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes the closing sentence of Paul's argument and lays it on the edge of a table at ten past nine.

And then the reason, which is the half that speaks directly to a man with a pencil.

For ye are not under the law, but under grace.

That is the ground given. Not: because the count has come down. Not: because you have improved, or because the pattern has broken, or because you have finally strung together a decent run.

The reason is a change of jurisdiction.

A tally is an instrument of a court you are not in

Now put those two things together, because this is where eleven years of pencil meet a sentence written two thousand years ago.

What is a tally?

A tally is a legal instrument. It is a record kept for the purpose of establishing a standing. That is its entire function; nobody counts anything they do not intend to weigh. It belongs, by its nature, to a system in which a person's position is determined by an accumulation of instances.

That system has a name in Paul's argument, and the name is the law.

And Paul says, in plain words: ye are not under the law.

So the instrument you have been running for eleven years is a court document from a jurisdiction that has no authority over your case. It is not that the numbers are wrong. The numbers may well be perfectly accurate. It is that they have no standing, because they are being submitted to a court you were removed from before you started counting.

You are under grace, right now, as you read, and a tally has no standing in that jurisdiction. Romans 6 says ye are not under the law but under grace in exactly those words and in the present tense, and the same Spirit who is the subject of the whole of chapter eight is the one making it a present fact in a man sitting on a table with a pencil in his hand.

That is also why the low number did not help tonight, and I want you to see that clearly, because it is the most useful thing on this page.

If the tally were the right instrument, a lower count would have produced relief. It produced nothing. A good reading on the wrong instrument gives you no more information than a bad one, and eleven years of your interior life have just been quietly telling you so in a room with the chairs put back.

Let me guard this properly, with the precision you would want.

I am not telling you that what you do does not matter. Romans 6 is a chapter about not continuing in sin and it says so at the top and I am not going to soften it.

And I am not telling you never to examine your own life. Honest self knowledge is a good thing and your original intention at twenty-nine was not foolish.

I am telling you what the verse gives as the reason. It does not give the count. It gives the jurisdiction. And a man who reads his standing off an instrument God does not use will be miserable at a low number and miserable at a high one, which is exactly the eleven years you have had.