The Jar She Keeps Opening

There is a row of them cooling on the counter on a folded towel and they have been going ping, one after another, for about twenty minutes, which is the sound a lid makes when it pulls down and takes.

Eight of them have gone. The ninth went while she was rinsing the pot.

Verna is sixty seven and she has been canning since she was eleven years old, standing on a stool beside her mother, and she has put up more jars than she could begin to count, and she has had maybe four fail in fifty six years and she remembers all four.

She knows how to check a seal. You press the middle of the lid with one finger. If it gives, it did not take. If it does not give, it took. It takes half a second and it is not a difficult test.

She presses them all in the morning, which is right, and everybody does that.

And then there is one jar. Not a particular one, and that is the strange part, just one out of the batch, and she takes it back off the shelf later in the week and breaks the seal and looks inside.

It is always fine. Then she has to use it, because you cannot re-seal a thing like that, and so it goes in something that evening, and everybody says it is lovely.

She could not tell you why she does this and she has never mentioned it to a soul.

There is a thing from a long time ago. She settled it with God and she has settled it with God a great many times since, and about two years back, holding a jar over the sink, she saw that the two are the same shape.

If there is a seal you keep breaking, this is written for you. And I want to give you one sentence from Hebrews that is built like a door closing.

Where remission is

Here is the verse.

Now where remission of these is, there is no more offering for sin.

That is a conditional, and I want you to see the shape of it, because the shape is doing the work.

Where X is, there is no Y.

That is not an instruction and it is not advice. It is a statement about what can and cannot coexist. It says that in any place where remission is present, an offering for sin is not merely unnecessary, it is absent. There is no more. Not: you may stop. Not: you would be wise to stop. There is not one available.

The writer is not telling anybody to change their behavior. He is describing a structure and pointing out what is not in it.

You are standing in a place where the thing you keep reaching for is not present to be reached for. Hebrews 10:18 states it as a conditional about what can coexist, and the Spirit of God is the one who takes a written structure and makes it real in a person, so this does not rest on how much of it lands over a kitchen sink.

Now I want to be gentle here, because a woman who has settled a thing with God many times could hear that as a criticism and it is not one.

Nothing here forbids you to bring it. God is not weary of you and He never has been. Bring Him anything, as often as you want, for the rest of your life, and He will receive every one with the same attention.

The verse does not touch the may. It touches the must, and it touches it by describing a room rather than by giving an order.

You have had a structure described to you rather than a habit corrected, and those are not the same kind of sentence at all. It is written as a statement about what is and is not in a place, and His Spirit is the one carrying a described structure into a life, which is why it holds on an afternoon when you took the jar down again.

What a seal actually is

There is something about seals that a woman who has put up ten thousand jars knows in her hands and has probably never said out loud.

A seal is not a claim. It is a condition.

A claim is something somebody asserts and you can doubt it. A condition is the actual state of a thing, and the state is what it is whether or not anybody looks. That lid is either pulled down or it is not, right now, on the shelf, in the dark, at three in the morning, and it does not become more sealed by being examined.

And here is the hard part, and every canner knows it: checking destroys the very thing being checked. Not the food, usually. The seal itself. The moment the lid comes up, the state in question no longer exists, and a sealed jar has become an open one in order to find out whether it was sealed.

That is not a failure of nerve. It is what happens to a person who has no way to rest in a condition they cannot see.

You are inside a condition rather than holding a claim, and it does not become truer by being examined. Scripture states remission as a thing that is present rather than as an assertion to be tested, 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 taking down has grown into something that governs your weeks, if the nights have been getting long, or if the thinking has traveled out past regret and toward wishing to be gone, get a person alongside you. Ring 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 anybody's faith. God has always worked through people.

No more offering

And now the second half of the conditional, which is the part that lands.

There is no more offering for sin.

I want to be exact about what that removes and what it does not.

It does not remove prayer. It does not remove sorrow over a thing, or the ordinary Christian business of bringing your life to God daily and honestly, and it does not remove the freedom to say a thing again because you want to. All of that stands and it should.

What is gone is the offering. The transaction. The act performed in order to secure or maintain a state.

So when a woman takes a jar down on a Thursday, what she is doing is not prayer. She would be the first to say so if you put it to her plainly. It is a transaction, in the shape of a check, performed to secure a state that was secured in the fall of whatever year it was.

And there is no more offering. Not because it is forbidden. Because there is not one there.

You have nothing available to offer, and the emptiness of that shelf is the mercy in it. Hebrews 10:18 says there is no more offering as a description of the room rather than a rule about conduct, and the Spirit takes what is written and makes it living in a body.

I am not going to tell you the jar stays on the shelf next week. Fifty six years of hands go at the pace they go and if you take one down in October it would not mean one thing had failed. Nobody has any business handing you a date.

You are clean right now with a broken seal in your hand, and this week's jar changed nothing in either direction. It is written and it is remitted, and it is His Spirit rather than the strength of your agreement who makes a remitted thing real in a body.