I came home one day from work to find my front door open. Rushing inside, I looked around for signs of a break-in. There were none. So I told myself off very sternly for not locking the door when I’d left in the morning. And I thanked God for protecting my house from both two-legged and four-legged intruders.
For the next few days, I was very diligent about ensuring the front door was locked when I left in the morning. However less than a week later, I again arrived home to find the house wide open. I rushed inside, checked around, came to the conclusion that everything was as I’d left it and turned, with growing suspicion, to the door itself.
After a careful inspection, I decided something was wrong with the top hinge. It had moved slightly and, consequently, the door wasn’t locking properly—even when I thought it was. Not a big deal and easily fixed. I’d probably have forgotten about the issue, except a day later, the hinge on one of the main doors at work was faulty and then, the following day, there was a problem with one of the doors at church. You guessed it: the hinge was defective. Then the hinge on one of my bathroom cabinets broke. By this time my knee, the hinge of the leg, was acting up—and it had finally dawned on me that God was trying to get my attention. Something to do with hinges.
‘What does a hinge symbolise?’ I asked God. He didn’t answer. Sometimes He doesn’t answer because He already has, so I decided to see what I could find in Scripture. The only thing I could find was Proverbs 26:14—‘As a door turns on its hinges, so a sluggard turns on his bed.’
After two weeks of meditating on the possibility God was trying to alert me to the fact I was a lazybones who needed to get my act together, I decided that wasn’t His message. I tried another search. Digging deeper into Scripture, I discovered this word for hinge, ‘tsiyr’, had a double meaning. It also means ambassador. Sometimes it’s not clear from the context whether it’s hinge or ambassador. In Isaiah 57:9, for example, it’s usually translated ambassador but the previous verse mentions doors and pillars, so it’s obviously intended to have a dual sense. I was actually looking at an antique commentary on this chapter in Isaiah when it mentioned that these verses referred to the threshold covenant of Isaiah 28:16.
What on earth, I asked God, is a threshold covenant? A few minutes later I’d googled up Henry Clay Trumbull’s The Threshold Covenant. When I finished it, I had one big question: covenants have curses as well as blessings. This explains the blessings but what happens when someone is in breach of a threshold covenant? I had no idea it was a question that would change my life.
This is Grace Drops and I’m Anne Hamilton. May Yeshua, Lord of the Threshold, bless you today.
Thank you to Lorna Skinner of www.riversofmusic.co.uk for the background music.