The Covenant Highway

The road down from the blue mountains was steep at first and then easy, and it brought them out at last into a long valley running away east as far as they could see. Down the middle of the valley ran a road unlike any they’d walked.

It was very old, its paving stones worn hollow by more feet than anyone could count, and it was dead straight. It didn’t wander or wind; it went east like an arrow. Down the exact center of it, from one end to the other, a single thin line of gold was set into the stones.

At long intervals along it stood great standing stones, like milestones, each one different, some tall and some broad, every one with something carved on it, though they were too far off to read.

“The Covenant Highway,” said Analogy. He still had his stick, but he was walking better; the old woman’s poultices had done their work. “I’ve read about it all my life. I never thought I’d walk it.”

Right at the start of the Highway, where the mountain road joined it, there was a small stone bench, and on the bench sat a child.

She was tiny, four years old perhaps, barefoot, in a plain linen smock, with a great deal of tangled dark hair, and she was swinging her legs and humming. When she saw them she slid off the bench and came running.

“Are you walking the Highway? Can I come? I always walk it. I have to. I grow.”

“You grow?”

“I’m Unfolding,” said the child, as though that explained everything. “I’m little here at the beginning, and I get bigger at every stone, and by the end I’m all grown up. Watch!” She ran a little way on and pointed at the first great stone, which stood just past the bench. “That’s the first one. Come and read it.”

They went to the stone. It was rough and grey and very ancient, half sunk in the ground, with a garden carved on it, trees and a river and a man and a woman and a serpent. Underneath, in letters so old they were nearly worn away, were the words:

I Will Put Enmity Between Thee And The Woman, And Between Thy Seed And Her Seed; It Shall Bruise Thy Head, And Thou Shalt Bruise His Heel.

The thin gold line in the middle of the road started at the foot of this stone. It started so faintly you could hardly see it, only a thread of gold in the grey.

“That’s the first promise,” said Unfolding, very seriously, the way children are serious. “After everything went wrong in the garden. God said a Seed would come from the woman and crush the serpent. But He didn’t say who. Or when. It’s only a little promise. Like me.”

“It doesn’t sound little,” said Plain-Sense quietly.

“It’s little here. It gets bigger. You’ll see. Everything on this road gets bigger.”

While they were standing at the first stone an old man came walking up the Highway toward them from the east. He was the oldest-looking man Inquirer had ever seen, bent and brown and wrinkled as a walnut, leaning on a staff of almond wood. But his eyes were bright and young.

“Ah,” he said, stopping. “Pilgrims, and Unfolding with you. Good. I’ll walk with you a way. I’m Promise. I’ve walked this road more times than there are stars.” He looked at the first stone with great tenderness. “I was there when that was cut. I’ve been walking toward its fulfilment ever since.”

“Will you tell us about the road?”

“As we walk. It can’t be told standing still. It’s a road. It goes somewhere.”

So they set off down the Covenant Highway, the old man and the child and the three pilgrims, with the gold line running along beside their feet.

“Everything you’ve learned up to now,” said Promise as they went, “has been about reading one passage well. Its words and grammar and shape and setting and main point. That’s right. That’s where you have to start. But the Book isn’t just a heap of passages, however well you read each one. It’s one story, and every passage has a place in it. That’s what this road is. The scholars call it biblical theology: the story of what God has done, from the first promise to the last, in the order He did it.”

“And the stones?” said Plain-Sense.

“The covenants. God binds Himself to His people by covenants, solemn promises sealed with signs, sometimes with blood, and each stone on this road marks one. They come one after another, and each carries the first promise further. There’s a covenant with Noah, with Abraham, with Moses at Sinai, with David, and then the New Covenant the prophets foretold. They aren’t separate roads. They’re stretches of one road. It’s one covenant of grace, given out in stages through the whole history of God’s people. Same God, same promise, same gold line. The road gets wider as it goes, and the light gets brighter, but it’s the same road.”

The second stone, when they got to it, had a great arch carved over the top like a rainbow, and under it a man and his family standing beside an enormous wooden ship stranded on a mountain. The words said:

I Do Set My Bow In The Cloud, And It Shall Be For A Token Of A Covenant Between Me And The Earth.

Unfolding ran ahead and touched the stone, and when she turned round Inquirer saw she had grown. Not much, but she was taller, six or seven now instead of four.

“God promised to keep the world going,” she said, “so there’d be time for the Seed to come. He won’t wash it all away again till it’s done.”

The gold line was a little thicker past the second stone.

Between the second stone and the third they met the first of the Highway’s other travelers.

He was a brisk, upright, well-dressed man with a clipboard and a whistle, leading a party of twenty or so pilgrims down the road like a schoolmaster on an outing. He had stopped his group beside the Stone of the Bow and blown his whistle.

“Now then, everybody. Noah! What do we learn from Noah? We learn to obey! Noah obeyed God when everybody laughed at him, so we must obey too! Be like Noah! Write it down!”

All twenty pilgrims wrote it down on little cards.

“Next stop, Abraham!” Another blast on the whistle. “What’ll we learn from Abraham? Faith! Be like Abraham! Then Moses, be a leader like Moses! Then David, be brave like David! And Daniel, dare to be a Daniel! On we go!”

The group marched off past the three pilgrims, and the man touched his hat to them. “Be-Like-Them,” he said briskly, by way of introduction. “Tour guide. Character lessons from the great heroes of the faith. Twelve stops, twelve virtues. Care to join us?”

Inquirer looked at Promise.

“Is that wrong? We ought to obey like Noah. Hebrews says so. By faith Noah…”

“It isn’t wrong,” said Promise slowly. “It’s… it’s like looking at a great painting and only seeing the frame. The heroes of the Book are examples, and the New Testament uses them that way sometimes. But that’s not what their stories are mainly about. Read the story of Noah. Who’s the hero?”

Inquirer thought. “God,” he said slowly. “God’s the one who saves. All Noah does is get into the ark. God shuts the door. God remembers Noah. God makes the covenant.”

“Yes. And Noah gets drunk and disgraces himself the minute he’s off the boat, which Be-Like-Them always leaves out. The stories aren’t mainly a gallery of heroes. They’re the story of what God did, through very flawed men, to keep His promise. Read them only as lessons in virtue and you’ll miss the gold line, and you’ll end up thinking the Book’s mainly about how to be good. And then you’ll either despair because you can’t be, or puff yourself up because you think you are.”

Be-Like-Them had heard this. He frowned and blew his whistle very loudly, and his party hurried off ahead down the Highway.

“He means well,” said Promise. “Most of them do. But a sermon that only says be like David has left out the Son of David. And without Him, be like David is just a heavier load.”

The third stone was very tall and carved all over with tiny stars. At its foot was a strange scene: a man asleep beside a row of animals cut in two, and passing between the halves a smoking firepot and a burning torch. The words read:

Look Now Toward Heaven, And Tell The Stars, If Thou Be Able To Number Them: And He Said Unto Him, So Shall Thy Seed Be. And He Believed In The Lord; And He Counted It To Him For Righteousness.

Unfolding touched it and grew. She was ten or so now, long-legged and quick, with her tangled hair tied back.

“Abraham. God promised him a land, and a family as many as the stars, and that in his Seed all the nations would be blessed. And look.” She pointed at the animals cut in two and the fire going between them. “In those days, when men made a covenant, they cut animals in half and walked between the halves. It meant, may I be torn in two like these if I break my word. But Abraham’s asleep. Only God walks between. God took the whole promise on Himself.”

Inquirer stared at the carving. He had read that chapter back home and thought it strange and a bit gruesome, and polished it into something about walking through life’s hard places. He’d never known what it meant.

“Madam Setting would have told me. Or Old Custom. That’s a custom.”

“It’s a custom,” said Promise. “And it’s a gospel. God binds Himself by oath to keep His promise, alone, even if it costs Him being torn apart. And one day, near the end of this road, it will.”

The gold line was a hand’s breadth wide now, bright against the grey.

They met the second traveler at the Stone of the Stars. He was a small, eager, bright-eyed man in a coat covered in little gold stitches, crouched at the foot of the stone peering at the carving through a magnifying glass and muttering with delight.

“Christ! Christ! Christ! Look, there He is again! The heifer, that’s Christ! The goat, that’s Christ! The ram, that’s Christ! The turtledove, that’s Christ! The pigeon, that’s Christ! And the birds of prey coming down on the carcasses, those are the devil! And five animals for the five wounds! And the smoking furnace is hell, and the burning lamp’s the Gospel…”

He looked up, saw them, and bounced to his feet.

“Types-Everywhere,” he said, grabbing Inquirer’s hand and pumping it. “Delighted. You’re walking the Highway! Then you must let me show you how full it is! Christ’s in every stone, every word, every tent-peg! I’ve found Him in the measurements of the Tabernacle and the colors of the curtains. I’ve found Him in the number of fish in the net in John twenty-one, a hundred and fifty-three, you know. I’ve found Him in Rahab’s red cord, and the axe-head that floated, and Samson’s jawbone of an ass! Isn’t it wonderful? He’s everywhere!”

Inquirer felt a thrill in spite of himself. He’d come onto this road to find the gold line, and here was a man who saw it under every stone.

But he remembered the Illuminator in the room with the loom. Every thread is woven toward Him. But a blue thread is still blue.

“Sir,” he said carefully, “how do you know the jawbone is Christ?”

“Why, because it saves! Samson saved Israel with it, and Christ saves!”

“And how do you know the axe-head is Christ?”

“It rises out of the water! Like the resurrection!”

“And the fish?”

“There must be a reason for the number! A hundred and fifty-three… a hundred and fifty-three…” He faltered. “Well, I’m still working on the fish.”

Promise sat down on the bench beside the stone and leaned on his almond staff.

“My friend, there are types. Real ones. God built His story so that earlier things foreshadow later ones, the way a seed foreshadows a tree. The Passover lamb. The bronze serpent lifted up in the wilderness; the Lord pointed to that one Himself. The high priest going into the holy of holies once a year. David the anointed king. Those are true types, and you can tell, because they’re part of the story’s own pattern. Lamb and priest and king and temple and sacrifice are woven right into God’s covenant dealings with His people, and the later Scripture picks them up and shows you where they lead. The type and the thing it points to are tied together by God’s own plan, not by some clever likeness.”

He tapped the foot of the stone with his staff.

“But a jawbone that saves isn’t a type of Christ just because Christ saves. Lots of things save. A doctor saves. A rope saves. A floating axe-head isn’t the resurrection because it comes up out of water. Plenty of things come up out of water, my friend. Fish do. You’ve stopped asking what God was doing in the story and started asking what the story reminds you of. And when everything reminds you of Christ, nothing tells you anything about Him. You can’t learn who He is from your types, because you made them up out of what you knew already.”

Types-Everywhere’s bright face fell. “But I only want to find Him. Everywhere. The Lord Himself said all the Scriptures spoke of Him.”

“They do,” said Promise gently. “Every one of them. But they speak of Him the way a road speaks of the city it goes to. Every stone on this road is on the way to Him, and every stone gets its meaning from where the road’s going. But not every stone’s a picture of the city. Most of them are just stones, good honest stones laid in their place, taking you there.” He smiled. “Walk with us, if you like. You’ll see more of Him in the line than you ever did in the tent-pegs.”

Types-Everywhere hesitated. Then he put his magnifying glass in his pocket and fell in behind them.

The fourth stone was black and shaped like a mountain, with smoke and fire carved at its top, and below them two tablets of stone, a tent with a curtained inner room, and an altar. The words on it read:

Now Therefore, If Ye Will Obey My Voice Indeed, And Keep My Covenant, Then Ye Shall Be A Peculiar Treasure Unto Me Above All People.

Unfolding touched it and grew again. She was about thirteen now, serious and thoughtful.

“The Law. God brought Israel out of Egypt first, see? He saved them first. Then He gave them the Law at the mountain, to show His saved people how to live. And the tabernacle, so He could live among them. And the sacrifices, because they’d sin and need covering.” She ran her fingers over the carved altar. “But the blood of bulls and goats can’t really take sin away. It’s only a shadow. It’s pointing.”

They heard the Flattener a long while before they saw him. A tremendous rumbling and grinding came up the Highway behind them, with a hiss of steam, and when they turned round there was an enormous machine coming down the road at them: a steamroller as big as a house, black and gleaming, with a huge iron drum at the front and a tall smokestack pouring out black smoke. High up on its seat, gripping the controls, sat a stern, square-jawed man in a black coat.

As it came it rolled over the paving stones and pressed them perfectly flat. Behind it the road was smooth and level and grey, and the gold line down the middle had been pressed so flat into the stone you couldn’t see it at all.

“Out of the way!” shouted the man on the steamroller. “Out of the way! I’m levelling the road!”

The three pilgrims and the old man and the child and Types-Everywhere scrambled to the side. The machine rumbled up to the Stone of the Mountain and stopped, hissing, and the man looked down at them.

“Mr. Flattener,” he said curtly. “Road works. This Highway’s a disgrace. Stones all different heights. Wide in some stretches, narrow in others. The line getting thicker the further you go. Confusing for pilgrims! I’m putting it right. One level, all the way. Every stretch the same as every other.” He jerked a thumb back at the flat grey road behind him. “The Law at Sinai’s the same as the New Covenant. Same rules, same everything. Every ceremony, every food law, every sacrifice, still binding. Or else,” he added, “none of it is. One or the other. I’m not fussy which, so long as it’s level.”

Promise got up slowly from the bench.

“It is the same road. You’re right about that. One road, one God, one covenant of grace, one promise from the first stone to the last. That’s the truth you’re trying to hang on to, and it’s a precious one. There are some who’ve tried to tell pilgrims the Old part of the road is a different road with a different God, angry where the New one’s kind, and they’re far more wrong than you are. But you’ve forgotten that the road grows. It’s one road, but it’s going somewhere. The shadows are real, but they’re shadows, and when the thing comes that cast them, the shadows are done with. The law having a shadow of good things to come, and not the very image of the things. You can’t flatten the road without crushing the line. Look behind you. Where’s the gold?”

The Flattener didn’t look behind him. “Gold!” he said scornfully. “Decoration. I’m a practical man. I want a road you can drive on.”

He threw a lever. The great drum began to turn again, and the steamroller lurched forward onto the next stretch of the Highway.

Toward Unfolding.

She had gone on a little way ahead, the way she always did, to the next stone, the fifth, and was sitting on the step at its foot swinging her long legs. She didn’t see the machine until it was nearly on top of her.

Inquirer told me he didn’t remember deciding anything. He only remembered running, with Plain-Sense running beside him, and Analogy limping and shouting behind, and Types-Everywhere with his gold-stitched coat flapping.

The steamroller was faster than it looked. The great drum rolled on, pressing the road flat. The child looked up at last and saw it, and froze.

Plain-Sense got to her first. He scooped her off the step and threw himself sideways, and the drum missed them by a hand’s breadth and rolled on up to the fifth stone and hit it.

It rang like a great bell.

The steamroller stopped dead. Its drum was jammed against the foot of the stone and its wheels spun and smoked. The Flattener heaved his levers back and forth, bellowing, but the machine wouldn’t budge. It couldn’t roll the stone flat. The stone wouldn’t be flattened.

Inquirer looked up at it. It was the tallest stone yet, with a throne carved at the top, and beneath the throne a crown and a harp and a shepherd’s staff. The words said:

Thine House And Thy Kingdom Shall Be Established For Ever Before Thee: Thy Throne Shall Be Established For Ever.

“David,” said Promise, coming up behind them out of breath. “The promise to David. A Son of his would sit on his throne for ever. You can’t flatten that one, Mr. Flattener. Not with any machine. It hasn’t happened yet, not on this stretch. It’s still a promise, still pointing ahead. You can’t make it level with what came before it, because it’s higher.”

The Flattener climbed down off his seat. He stood looking at his jammed machine, and at the great stone, and then, for the first time, back along the flat grey road he’d made. There wasn’t a speck of gold to be seen in it anywhere.

He didn’t say anything. But he took his hat off.

Unfolding was sitting on the grass where Plain-Sense had put her down, white in the face. As Inquirer watched, she got up and laid her hand on the Stone of the Throne, and grew again. She wasn’t a girl any more but a young woman of eighteen or so, with her dark hair pinned up and a new depth in her eyes.

“After David it all goes wrong. The kings get worse and worse. The people turn away. Jerusalem falls, and they’re carried off to Babylon, and it looks as though every promise is broken.” She looked off down the road, east. “But that’s when the prophets speak. And what they say is, it isn’t broken. It’s coming. Something new is coming.”

She led them on to the sixth stone. It wasn’t tall. It was low and broad, with a human heart carved on its face and, over the heart, the words:

Behold, The Days Come, Saith The Lord, That I Will Make A New Covenant… I Will Put My Law In Their Inward Parts, And Write It In Their Hearts; And Will Be Their God, And They Shall Be My People… For I Will Forgive Their Iniquity, And I Will Remember Their Sin No More.

Past this stone the gold line was very broad, nearly a third of the width of the road, and it shone so brightly it lit up the stones on either side.

The road went on a long way after that, down through a darkening valley. Promise told them it was the long silence between the prophets and the coming, four hundred years without a new word. There were hardly any stones there, and the gold line ran on alone, bright in the dusk.

And then, at the very end of the valley, with night coming on, they came to the last stone.

It wasn’t a stone at all.

It was a Cross.

Inquirer knew it at once. It was the same Cross he had knelt in front of out on the headland by the Lighthouse, grey and weathered and plain, with the spring coming up at its foot. Or one very like it. And here at its foot every line of the road came together.

The gold line in the center of the Highway ran straight up to the foot of the Cross and didn’t stop there. It climbed the wood, up and up, and spread out along the crossbeam and blazed. And Inquirer saw now that from every stone they’d passed there had been other lines all along, fainter ones of silver and bronze that he hadn’t noticed in daylight, all running along the road and drawing in together like threads gathered into one hand. From the Stone of the Garden came the Seed. From the Stone of the Stars came the one in whom all nations would be blessed. From the Stone of the Mountain came the true sacrifice, from the Stone of the Throne the King, from the Stone of the Heart the New Covenant in His blood. All of them met here.

For all the promises of God in him are yea, and in him Amen.

Inquirer didn’t know he’d said it out loud until he heard it.

Unfolding had gone up to the Cross ahead of them as she always did. She put her hand on it and grew one last time.

She was a grown woman now, tall and grave and beautiful, no longer a child or a girl, and when she turned and looked at them Inquirer saw all the stones of the road in her face at once, all the promises.

“You see now why I had to be little at the beginning. The first promise was true, but it was only a seed. If you’d met me grown up at the first stone you’d have thought Eve and Abraham and Moses knew everything we know. They didn’t. They knew in part. God told it a little at a time, the way you tell a child a story, a bit more at each stone. But it was the same story from the very start. That’s what I am. Not a different story at every stone. The same story, growing.”

“Progressive revelation,” said Analogy softly.

“That’s my long name,” said Unfolding, smiling. “I like the short one better.”

Then she looked past them, back down the road they had come. A long way back a light was moving. It was the steamroller’s lamp, Inquirer realized. The Flattener was walking back along his flat grey road with a lantern, slowly, stooping every so often as if he were looking for something in the stones.

“He’s looking for the line,” said Promise. “Good. It’s still there under all that flatness. It always is. He’ll find it if he looks.”

Types-Everywhere was standing at the foot of the Cross with his magnifying glass in his hand, not using it, just looking up. There were tears on his face.

“I never needed the tent-pegs, did I. It was all leading here. All of it. The whole road.”

“All of it,” said Promise.

They all slept that night at the foot of the Cross, and in the morning Promise and Unfolding said goodbye.

“We walk it again,” said Promise. “From the beginning. There’s always another pilgrim at the first stone.”

“And I’m little again there,” said Unfolding, and laughed the clear laugh of the child she’d been. “I like being little. It’s the best way to see it the first time.”

Inquirer saw that the road didn’t stop at the Cross. It went on past it, east, with the gold line broad and blazing down the middle. There were stones beyond, though fewer: an empty tomb, a wind and a fire, a table with bread and a cup. And further off, faint in the distance, one that looked like a city coming down out of heaven.

“The road goes on to the end of all things,” said Promise. “The New Covenant isn’t the end of the story. It’s the last age of it, the one we live in. There’s a stone at the very end none of us has reached yet. But the line runs to it, and it’s the same line. He which testifieth these things saith, Surely I come quickly. From now on, when you read any passage of the Book, you’ll know where it stands on this road. How far along. What it was pointing toward. And how it’s fulfilled, in Him.”

He turned to go, then turned back.

“One more thing. You’re for the Concordance Country next. It’s a land where every passage in the Book lives next door to every other passage that talks about the same things. It’s a good land, and your friend the bookbinder will be at home there.” He nodded at Analogy, who beamed. “But there’s a stretch of it they call the Mirage. In the Mirage everything looks like everything else. Be careful there. You learned on this road how the stones are joined. In the Mirage, things that aren’t joined will look as if they are.”

He and Unfolding went back west along the Highway hand in hand, the old man and the young woman, and the three pilgrims stood and watched them go. After a moment’s hesitation Types-Everywhere went after them.

“I want to walk it again,” he called back. “From the start. With my eyes open.”

Inquirer watched the three of them dwindle down the long straight road with the gold line shining at their feet. Then he turned with the others and went on east, past the Cross, into the morning.