Let Your Light Shine
Day 262 – 19 September
A Road Laid Before You
For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand so that we would walk in them. (Ephesians 2:10, NASB)
The Road Under the Road
The A5 north-west out of London runs, for most of its length, on Watling Street, a road the Roman army laid within a few years of landing in AD 43. The A15 north of Lincoln follows Ermine Street, including a thirty-three-mile stretch so nearly straight that it is still the longest straight road in England; the Fosse Way from Exeter to Lincoln, two hundred miles of it, wanders less than six miles from a ruler line the whole way. By one reckoning the legions and their engineers built something like ten thousand miles of road in Britain in the century after the invasion, and they built them to last: topsoil cleared, a firm base laid, a raised bed of rammed stone and earth called the agger, a metalled surface of small stones cambered so the rain ran off, and a ditch on either side. When the Romans left in 410, nobody in Britain built a paved highway again for thirteen hundred years, so for all that time every traveller in the land walked, rode, or drove on roads that had been finished long before they were born. The medieval kings gave the four great ones their personal protection. And in places the old agger still stands, a mile-long ridge in a field, higher now than when it was laid because each generation resurfaced it and walked on. There is a whole theology in that. A Briton on Watling Street does none of the engineering. The road was prepared beforehand, and all that is asked of the traveller is to walk in it.
His Handiwork, Made for Works
Ephesians 2:10 comes at the end of the most famous sentence about grace in the New Testament. By grace you have been saved through faith, Paul has just said, and this is the gift of God, and it is nothing you did, so that no one can boast. Then he explains why: “For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand so that we would walk in them” (Ephesians 2:10). The Greek puts the pronoun first for emphasis, αὐτοῦ γάρ ἐσμεν ποίημα (autou gar esmen poiēma, His handiwork are we). The word ποίημα (poiēma, a thing made, a craftsman’s product) is rare in the New Testament, used elsewhere only of the works of creation; in the Greek Old Testament it names what God made, and in classical writers a craftsman’s finished piece, a crown. Our word poem descends from it, and there is a real beauty in that lineage, though in Paul’s Greek the word means what a maker makes, and the point is the Maker. We are His handiwork, κτισθέντες (ktisthentes, having been created), a fresh act of creation in Christ, and we were made ἐπὶ ἔργοις ἀγαθοῖς (epi ergois agathois, for good works). Paul chooses ἀγαθός (agathos, good) here, the plain word for good in substance; the beauty we have watched all week, the καλός (kalos, beautiful) of Peter and of the Sermon, is what such works become when they are walked in graciously. And then the clause that changes everything: the works were prepared beforehand.
Prepared Beforehand
The verb is προητοίμασεν (proētoimasen, He prepared beforehand), and it is a road-builder’s word. It is built from πρό (pro, before, ahead) and ἑτοιμάζω (hetoimazō, to make ready, to prepare), the verb used of preparing a way, a room, a meal; so its whole force is readiness that comes first. Paul uses it only one other time in all his letters. The old commentators read it plainly: God has prepared, ahead of us, the occasions of good works, the means and the opportunities of doing them. That is to say, the beautiful works of this week were never ours to invent. The mercy loved on Tuesday, the open hand of Wednesday, the patience under wrong on Thursday, the secret gift of Friday: none of them was a road we had to build. They were laid down, drained, and cambered before we arrived at them, by a Maker who had already surveyed the ground of our lives. This is the footing under the whole arc. A beautiful work is beautiful partly because it carries no strain of manufacture; it has the ease of something walked into, the naturalness of a road that was already there. Paul’s purpose clause makes the picture complete: ἵνα ἐν αὐτοῖς περιπατήσωμεν (hina en autois peripatēsōmen, so that we might walk in them). Walk, περιπατέω (peripateō, to walk about, to go one’s way), the ordinary verb for a life’s daily going. We are asked to do the one thing a traveller on Watling Street does: put one foot in front of the other on a road someone else engineered. The works are His preparation. The walking is ours. And the glory, as the week has said since Monday, goes to the One who built the road, never to the feet that found it already finished.
Walking Into It on a Saturday
A Saturday changes shape when you believe this. You stop looking at the day as a set of good deeds you must somehow generate, and start looking at it as a road already laid, with the works waiting on it like milestones. That changes the question from what can I manufacture to where has He already gone ahead. Somewhere in today there is a prepared work: a person you were meant to be kind to, an opportunity to give that will present itself without your arranging it, a wrong you will be given the chance to bear well, a secret good the day will hand you unasked. Your task is to walk into it when you reach it, without strain, the way your car takes the A5. And two further things follow. First, you can walk without anxiety, because the road’s quality was never your responsibility; the engineering was finished before you ever set out. Second, you can walk with a lightness that is itself beautiful, because a person who is walking in prepared works has none of the sweat of a person building his own. Tomorrow the crown gathers the whole week’s works into one, and next week the arc turns to walking in the light, so this verse is the hinge between them: the works are beautiful, and they were prepared, and the life that follows is simply a walk along them. Go and find today’s milestone. It was set there for you long before this morning.
Declaration
The good I will do today was laid down before I arrived at it. I am handiwork, made on purpose, and the works I was made for were readied ahead of me the way a road is finished before the traveller ever sets out, drained and cambered and firm, waiting for feet. So I lay down the strain of trying to build a good life from scratch. That engineering was never mine; it was done before I was born again. My part is smaller and lighter: to walk into whatever the day has readied, kindness or gift or patience or secret good, without strain and without delay. I will go my way today untroubled about the surface underfoot, because it was laid by better hands than mine, and I will go easily, as one who carried none of the stone. Every good thing I step into today was set there for me. Let me walk in it, and let the One who built the road have the thanks.
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