The Case the Court Already Closed

The matter was concluded fourteen years ago. He has the order. He knows the file number without looking it up, which after fourteen years is itself a fact worth sitting with.

Ilan is a paralegal and he is a good one, and the thing he is best at is a kind of patience that other people do not have. He will read a schedule of exhibits four times. He finds what nobody else finds because he goes slower than anybody else is willing to go.

He does not file in that matter anymore. That would be improper and he is not an improper man, and besides there is nothing to file, because the court closed it and closed means closed.

He drafts them, though.

Not on paper. In his head, mostly on the walk from the station, and about once a month at some length, and there is a version he worked out about four years ago that he thinks is genuinely strong. It addresses a point that was never properly dealt with. Nobody dealt with it because nobody needed to. The matter was concluded on other grounds entirely.

He still thinks it is a good point.

And there is a thing in his own life that he has taken to God many times, and he made the connection about a year ago on that same walk from the station, because it has the identical architecture: a matter concluded, and a man who keeps drafting.

He believes it was dealt with. He would say so plainly.

If you keep drafting motions in a closed matter, this is written for you. And I want to give you four words in the middle of a verse, because they say whose case it actually was.

For mine own sake

Here is the verse.

I, even I, am he that blotteth out thy transgressions for mine own sake, and will not remember thy sins.

Now, most people stop at blotteth out, which is a strong image and worth stopping at.

I want the four words after it.

For mine own sake.

That is a statement of motive, and it says the motive is God's and not the reader's. He is not blotting it out because a case was well made. He is not blotting it out because somebody argued persuasively or often. He is doing it for reasons internal to Himself, having to do with His own name and character and purpose, and He says so plainly and without any softening at all.

Now think about what that does to a drafted motion.

A motion is an attempt to move a court by argument. It works, when it works, because it supplies the court with a reason it did not previously have.

And there is no reason to supply. The court did not act on a reason anybody gave it. It acted on its own grounds, from its own motive, and a further submission cannot improve a decision that was never resting on submissions.

You are outside a decision that was never made on the strength of any argument anybody brought. Isaiah 43:25 names the motive as God's own, and the Spirit of God is the one who takes a written motive and makes it real in a person, so this does not rest on how much of it lands on a platform.

Now I want to be careful, because a man who has taken a thing to God many times could hear that as a rebuke and it is not one.

Nothing here forbids you to pray about it. God is not weary of you and has never once been short with you. Bring Him anything, as often as you want, for the rest of your life. He is not a court with a listing schedule.

What the verse removes is not the freedom. It removes the necessity, by removing the mechanism the necessity was assuming.

You have had a necessity dissolved rather than a habit criticized, and the two have nothing to do with each other. It is written as a statement about God's own motive and not as a word against anybody who comes back, and His Spirit is the one carrying a dissolved necessity into a life, which is why it holds on a walk when you drafted it again.

I, even I

There is something at the front of that verse too, and in Hebrew it is emphatic in a way English struggles with.

I, even I.

It is a doubling. The pronoun is repeated for weight, and it is the construction you use when you want to make absolutely certain that nobody misattributes an action. It says: this one, and no other, and specifically not anybody you might be tempted to think of instead.

And I have come to think it is there for exactly the person this article is written for.

Because a man who drafts motions has, without ever deciding to, cast himself as a participant in the proceedings. Not as the judge, he is not arrogant. As counsel. As somebody whose diligence bears on the outcome.

And the verse opens by doubling the pronoun, which is God saying: this was Me, and it was only Me, and there was nobody else on the record.

You were never on the record in that matter, and the doubling at the front of the verse is there to make sure of it. Scripture repeats the pronoun for emphasis, and the same Spirit at work in that passage is the one testifying inside a person now.

Something belongs here in the middle where it cannot be skipped. If the drafting has grown into something that governs your evenings, 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. Talk to your doctor. Sit down with a counselor. If tonight 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.

The point that was never dealt with

Now I want to say something about the strong version, the one from four years ago, because I suspect that is where the weight sits.

It probably is a good point. I have no reason to doubt it, and a man who reads a schedule four times is not usually wrong about these things.

The reason it was never dealt with is not that anybody missed it. It is that the matter concluded on grounds that made it unnecessary. That happens constantly in real proceedings and it is not a defect. A point can be entirely sound and entirely irrelevant to a decision that was reached another way.

So the good point is not a loose thread. It is a sound argument about a question the court never had to reach, and it will stay sound and stay unreached for as long as the order stands, which is permanently.

You are holding a sound point about a question the decision never had to reach. Isaiah 43:25 grounds the whole act in God's own sake and leaves no question outstanding that any argument could bear on, and the Spirit takes what is written and makes it living in a body.

I am not going to tell you the drafting stops on the next walk. It has been going on a long time and things like that go at their own pace, and if you find yourself doing it tomorrow it would not mean anything failed. Anybody who hands you a date invented it.

You are clean right now with the strong version fully formed in your head, and it changed nothing in either direction. It is written and it is blotted out, and it is His Spirit rather than the strength of your agreement who makes a blotted thing real in a body.