The Rinse at the Bottom of the Steps

There are forty one steps down from the road to the sand and there is a faucet on a post at the bottom of them, and everybody who uses that beach rinses off there before they go back up. It is a galvanized pipe with a brass handle worn smooth, and the water comes out warm for the first two seconds because the pipe has been in the sun.

Kai is standing under it with his shorts rolled and the water running over his shins.

The salt is off. The salt was off a long time ago. Salt is not a difficult substance and thirty seconds handles it, and he has been standing here going on eight minutes, moving the water around his ankles with the flat of his hand, and the light has gone the color it goes, and up on the road a car door shuts and somebody laughs.

He is not thinking about anything in particular. That is the honest part. If somebody came down those steps right now and asked him what he was doing he would say rinsing off, and he would not be lying.

There was something, years ago. He brought it to God up on the point where his grandfather used to go, and he did it properly, alone, out loud, and he has not gone back to it and does not intend to.

He believes it was dealt with. He would say so plainly to anybody who asked.

And he stands under the faucet at the bottom of the steps for eight minutes at the end of a day when he has done nothing but swim.

If there is a version of that in your week, at a faucet or a shower or a sink, then this is written for you. Not to take the water away, because the water is good and the ocean is good and there is nothing wrong with standing in the last light. To say what the rinse was never able to reach, and where that thing actually went.

Subdue is a wrestling word

The book of Micah ends with three verses that read like somebody stepping back from a piece of work. Here is the middle of it.

He will turn again, he will have compassion upon us; he will subdue our iniquities; and thou wilt cast all their sins into the depths of the sea.

Stop on the word subdue, because it is not a religious word at all. It is a physical one. It means to tread down, to put a foot on and hold. It is what a man does to a thing that is still moving.

That is worth sitting with, because it takes the whole picture out of the courtroom for a second and puts it on the ground. God is not only filing a document. He is holding a thing down.

And notice who is doing the holding. Not the man on the beach. There is no version of that sentence where the people are told to keep their own foot on it and hold steady. He will subdue.

You are standing on ground where something is being held down, and the foot on it has never once been yours. Micah 7:19 puts the treading in God's hands and keeps it there, and it is the Spirit of God who takes a written act and makes it real in a person, so none of it depends on how strongly you can feel it at the bottom of a flight of steps.

I want to say something about the rinsing, because I would not want anybody hearing shame in this.

Rinsing is right. Coming up out of salt water and standing under fresh is one of the good ordinary things and there is no need to spiritualize it or apologize for it. My people have washed at the edge of the water for as long as there have been people at the edge of the water, and that will outlast all of us and it should.

The only thing worth naming is when a rinse quietly takes on a second job that it was never built for. Then a man stands there eight minutes and could not tell you why, and the water keeps running, and nothing at all is happening.

You have a thing already trodden down that you have been standing in cold water trying to hold still. That is written into the promise plainly, and His Spirit is the one carrying a finished act off the page and into a life, which is why it holds on an evening when you cannot feel a single thing about it.

The depths of the sea

Now the second half of that verse, and I want to be careful with it, because people quote it prettily and miss what it meant to the people who first heard it.

Thou wilt cast all their sins into the depths of the sea.

To an ancient audience the deep was not scenery. The deep was the one place nothing came back from. No diver, no net, no rope was long enough. A thing that went into the deep was outside the reach of every technology anybody had. That is the whole force of it. He did not put it somewhere far. He put it somewhere with no salvage operation.

And that is what makes the eight minutes so strange when you say it out loud. A man is standing in shin deep water at the edge of a thing God threw into the deep, running his hand back and forth.

Nobody is diving on purpose. That is not what is happening. But something in him has never accepted that there is no salvage, and so he stands where the water is, at the only depth he can stand in.

You have nothing left in the shallows to recover, because the thing you keep reaching for went past every rope anybody owns. The word says the depths of the sea and means it as a place of no return, and the same Spirit who inspired that line is the one testifying to it inside a person tonight.

One thing has to be said here in the middle rather than at the bottom. If the standing has stretched out, if the evenings have gotten long and the thinking has traveled past regret and out toward wishing you were not here, get somebody alongside you. Call a doctor. Sit down with a counselor. If tonight is a dark one, call or text 988 or your local crisis line and let another person be in it with you. That is not the lesser road and it is not a soft spot in anybody's faith. God has always worked through people, and one sitting beside you is part of what He is doing rather than an alternative to it.

Who is a God like this

There is one more thing in these verses, and it is the writer signing his own work.

The passage opens with a question: who is a God like unto thee, that pardoneth iniquity. Now, the prophet's name, Micah, means exactly that. Who is like the Lord. He spent his whole book saying hard things to a hard nation, and at the very end he asks the question his own mother named him after, and answers it with pardon.

That tells you where he thinks the astonishing part is. Not in the judgment. In the pardon. After everything, the thing he cannot get over is the character of the one doing the pardoning.

And that matters here, because a man standing under a faucet is not really asking a question about himself. He is asking a question about God. He is asking whether God is the kind who really lets a thing go, and he is asking it with his hands in the water instead of out loud.

You were pardoned by a God whose character is the entire security of it, and your case never had a vote on His character. Micah 7:18 asks that question and answers it in the same breath, and the Holy Spirit presses a written answer down into the place where a man keeps his real doubts.

And I will not tell you the eight minutes ends tonight. That is not mine to hand out and I would not respect you if I pretended. The fact and the feeling are two separate items and they do not always arrive on the same tide.

You are clean right now with your feet still in the water, and the standing there is not evidence against the fact. It is written and it is settled, and it is His Spirit rather than the strength of your agreement who makes a settled thing live in a body.