The Coat That Was Not Needed

The wall was done after the second coat. He knew it was done. He stood back at four o'clock with the roller still in his hand and looked along it in the light from the window, which is how you check, and it was flat and even and there was no shadow anywhere in it.

Rubén cut in the third coat the next morning anyway.

He would tell a customer, and he has told customers, that some colors need three. That is true of some colors. This was not one of them, and he knew that when he opened the tin.

He is forty one and he has been painting since he was nineteen and he is one of those people other trades recommend. What he has never told anybody is that on about one job in four he does a coat that nobody is paying for and nobody needs, and it costs him a morning, and afterward there is a settling in him for a couple of days.

He made the connection three years ago, on a job in a house with a bay window, when he caught himself doing it and heard, quite clearly, a sentence in his own head that he had said to God more times than he can count.

He believes the thing was dealt with the first time. He would say that plainly.

And he cuts in a third coat about one job in four.

If there is a coat you keep putting on, this is written for you. And I want to give you a word out of Hebrews that is not a decorating word at all. It is a legal one, and it is much stronger than covering.

Put away is an annulment

Here is the verse.

but now once in the end of the world hath he appeared to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself.

Put away.

Now, a painter hears that and reasonably thinks of covering. Put away as in out of sight, behind something, no longer visible. And a great deal of teaching has quietly encouraged that, because covering is a real biblical idea elsewhere and it is a comfortable picture.

The word in this verse is not that word.

It is a legal term, and its home is in the annulling of statutes and the canceling of instruments. It means to set aside so as to deprive of force. When a law is repealed, that is the word. When a will is voided, that is the word. It does not describe hiding a thing. It describes stripping it of the power to operate.

So the sentence is not saying sin was covered over so nobody has to look at it. It is saying the thing was annulled.

And you cannot put a second coat on an annulment. That is not a moral point, it is a grammatical one. There is no such action.

You are on the other side of an annulment rather than a covering, and there is no second coat available for a thing that has been struck off. Hebrews 9:26 uses the term for repealing rather than for concealing, and the Spirit of God is the one who takes a written annulment and makes it real in a person, so this does not rest on how much of it lands on a job site.

Now, I have to say this carefully, because a man who has been going back to God for years could hear all of that as a rebuke and it is not one.

Nothing here forbids you to pray about it. God is not weary of you. He has never once received you with impatience and He is not going to start. Bring Him anything as often as you want for the rest of your life.

What the verse removes is the obligation, not the freedom. May and must are two different words and the whole of this article lives in the gap between them.

You have had an obligation lifted rather than a habit corrected, and the two have nothing to do with each other. It is written as a legal act performed on the thing itself and not as a word against anybody who returns, and His Spirit is the one carrying a lifted obligation into a life, which is why it holds on a morning when you opened the tin again.

Once in the end of the world

There is a phrase before it that sets the scale, and it is worth a minute because it tells you what kind of event this was.

Once in the end of the world.

The writer is not describing a private transaction. He is describing something that happened at a hinge, at the turn of the ages, publicly, in history, at a point that everything else is now measured from.

That matters for a man who does a quiet extra coat that nobody is paying for. A private top up implies a private arrangement, something between him and God that could be improved by diligence.

This was not a private arrangement. It happened at the hinge of everything, and the idea that a man in a house with a bay window could add to it, or should, does not survive the scale of the sentence.

You are standing on something that happened at a hinge in history rather than in a private arrangement anybody could improve. Scripture sets it at the turn of the ages and in public, and the same Spirit at work in that letter is the one testifying inside a person now.

Something belongs here in the middle where nobody can skip it. If the extra coats have grown into something that runs your weeks, if the nights have been getting long, or if the thinking has traveled out past regret toward wishing to be gone, get a person alongside you. Call your doctor. Sit down with a counselor. If today is a dark one, call or text 988 or your local crisis line and let another human being be with you in it. That is not a lesser road than prayer and it is not a fault in your faith. God has always worked through people, and one across a table from you is part of what He is doing rather than an alternative to it.

By the sacrifice of himself

And then the last four words, and they are where the whole thing settles.

By the sacrifice of himself.

The instrument is named. It says how the annulment was effected, and the answer is that He supplied the means personally. He did not preside over somebody else's payment and He did not accept a contribution.

Which closes the door on the one thing a conscientious tradesman most wants to do, which is to help.

A man who has spent his life doing good work with his hands has an instinct that says: I will add something. Not out of arrogance. Out of care. And that instinct is a decent one and it is why he is recommended by other trades.

There is nowhere to put it here. Not because your help is unwelcome in general, but because this particular job was finished by the one who supplied the material, and there is no surface left to work on.

You have nowhere to add, and the closing of that door is not a judgment on the instinct that wanted to. Hebrews 9:26 names the sacrifice of Himself as the means, and the Spirit takes what is written and makes it living in a man.

I am not going to tell you the third coat stops on the next job. Twenty two years of a thing goes at the pace it goes and if you cut one in next month it would not mean anything failed. Anybody who hands you a date has invented it.

You are clean right now with the tin already open, and today's coat changed nothing about it in either direction. It is written and it is annulled, and it is His Spirit rather than the strength of your agreement who makes an annulled thing real in a body.