Jars in a Hot Water Bath

Ten minutes at a rolling boil and then out with the tongs, and you leave them on a towel on the long table and you do not touch them, and after a while, if you are doing something else, you hear them.

That small metallic sound. One at a time, in no order, over about half an hour. That is the lids going down as they cool, and it means it has worked, and there is no woman in that kitchen who does not feel a small satisfaction every time one goes.

Three of them this afternoon. Plums, mostly, because somebody had a tree come down and there was no arguing with the amount of fruit. A pan that is too big for the ring and has to be moved twice. A pair of tongs that everybody agrees are the wrong ones and that nobody has replaced in eleven years.

She is on labels. She has good handwriting and she got the job by default about a decade ago and has never got out of it. Name, month, year. Forty-odd of them while they cool.

And the whole time, in a kitchen full of steam and plums and other women's voices, there is the other one. Going. Same as it goes at four in the morning and same as it goes on the drive home and same as it went last Thursday.

It keeps her hours exactly. It has done for a long time, and it started because of something another person did.

Let me say who I am speaking to. Today I am speaking to the one whose weight belongs to what somebody else did. I am not going to ask you what it was, and I will not ask you to tell one human being anything, ever. Nothing here wants the thing itself.

I want to talk about the voice, and about what kind of thing Scripture says it is.

The accusing has a name, a schedule and a place

I am going to say something plain and I want to say it carefully, because there is a way of talking about this that turns frightening very quickly and I am not going to do that.

Scripture does not treat accusing as weather. It treats it as an activity, done by somebody, in a place, on a schedule.

For the accuser of our brethren is cast down, which accused them before our God day and night.Revelation 12:10

Three things in that sentence.

There is an accuser. It is a legal role, and the word means exactly what it sounds like. Somebody standing up in a court to bring a charge.

There is a schedule. Day and night. That is not occasional. That is a full working week, kept without a break, which is why yours is there at four in the morning and again on a Thursday afternoon over a pan of plums.

And there is a result. Is cast down. Thrown out. Removed from the room. That is the report, and it is in the past tense.

You are hearing a voice with no standing left in the room, and you were never listening to a judge. I am not offering you a comfort. The written word names the role, gives its hours, and reports where it has been put, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that off a page and gets it into a kitchen at three in the afternoon.

What this does not put on you

Now let me be careful, because this is exactly where people get given a job they were never meant to have.

I am not handing you a technique. There is nothing here you have to do properly, no wording to get right, no procedure to follow, and if a voice starts up tonight it is not because you failed to apply something.

The casting down in that verse is not done by the people it concerns. It is done, and reported, and then the rest of the passage says the brethren overcame by the blood of the Lamb and the word of their testimony, which is to say by what Somebody else did and by saying so.

That is all. What was done, and saying it out loud. There is no third thing.

You are on the side of a thing already finished, and you were never issued a job in it. Scripture puts the casting down in the passive and puts the victory in the blood, and it is His Spirit who makes a finished report actually quiet a kitchen.