I Made a Covenant With Mine Eyes, and He Made It Beforehand

A young man asked me what he was doing wrong, and after we had talked for a while it became clear that he was doing nothing wrong at all. He was doing something at the wrong time.

He was deciding in the moment.

Every single time, at the exact point where the thing arrived, he would weigh it up, and he would attempt to decide well, and sometimes he managed it and often he did not, and he had understood all of this as a question about his strength.

It is not a question about strength. It is a question about scheduling.

Nobody is at their strongest at the moment a thing arrives. That is what a moment like that is. And a person who makes every decision at the point of maximum pressure has arranged their life so that the weakest version of themselves is the one holding the vote.

A covenant is a thing made in advance

Job says one sentence about this and the tense of it is everything.

I made a covenant with mine eyes. (Job 31:1, King James Version)

Made. Past tense. Whatever he is describing was settled before the chapter he is speaking in, and before whatever occasion he had in mind.

And the word covenant is not a word for a resolution. A resolution is a private intention that can be revisited. A covenant, in that world, is a formal arrangement made deliberately, usually witnessed, and it holds, and it is not the sort of thing a person renegotiates in an afternoon.

That is the whole force of it. Job is not describing what he does when something happens. He is describing something he settled when nothing was happening.

You are permitted to settle a thing at a time when nothing is pressing, and Job puts it in the past tense before he describes anything at all (Job 31:1). The Spirit is the one who makes a decision made in a quiet hour hold in a loud one.

Daniel does it before he arrives

There is another example, and the timing in it is stated even more clearly.

But Daniel purposed in his heart that he would not defile himself with the portion of the king's meat, nor with the wine which he drank. (Daniel 1:8)

Purposed in his heart. And then, in the same verse, he goes and asks for the arrangement to be different.

Read where that sits in the chapter. It is at the beginning. He is a young man newly arrived in a foreign palace, and the food has not been served yet.

He does not stand in front of a table making an agonized decision. He decides in a room, in advance, before anything is in front of him, and then all he has to do afterward is act on something already settled.

You have the option of arriving at a table with the matter already decided, and Daniel purposed before the food was ever served (Daniel 1:8), and it is His Spirit who makes an advance decision something a person can actually keep.

And notice what he does next, which people skip. He asks somebody. He makes an arrangement with the steward. The advance decision produced a practical conversation with another human being, which is very often what these decisions produce.

This is not willpower with better timing

I want to be exact, because this could easily be read as a productivity trick with a verse attached, and it is not that.

The petition in the prayer He taught does not ask a person to hold. It asks God to keep and to deliver, and every verb in it is His. Nothing in this article moves that.

What a decision in advance does is not generate strength. It removes a decision from an hour where a person has none, and it puts it in an hour where they do. That is a practical shape rather than a spiritual achievement, and the keeping still belongs entirely to God.

You are not being asked to become stronger, and every verb in that petition is addressed to Him (Matthew 6:13), and that part belongs to the Holy Spirit, who does the keeping, in the hour a person is weakest and in the hour they are not.

And the psalmist describes exactly this practice, and he uses a word about speech.

I have sworn, and I will perform it, that I will keep thy righteous judgments. (Psalm 119:106)

I have sworn. Out loud, past tense, and then the performing follows.

That is why the practical instruction in this article involves saying something rather than only thinking it. A thought can be revised silently. A sentence said out loud is a different kind of object.

You have been handed a way of making something durable that costs nothing at all, and Psalm 119:106 puts the swearing before the performing rather than after it. That work is the Spirit's, and He makes a spoken sentence hold in an hour a silent one never would.

And this belongs here plainly, in every article in this category. Where the situation puts somebody in real danger, themselves or anybody else, the answer is not a decision made in a quiet hour. Tell a person today: a doctor, a counselor, a sponsor, a pastor you trust, or call the 988 crisis line, in the United States. Going is strength.