I Set My Face Like a Flint Is What a Man Does With a Verdict

A man told me he thinks he has about another twelve years to go.

He said it as a plain estimate, the way you would talk about a mortgage. He believes there is an amount owing for a thing he did, and that it is being paid down slowly by a life lived carefully, and that at some point the balance will clear.

He is not miserable about it. That is what makes it hard to argue with. He is not depressed, he is not self hating in the obvious way, he is simply operating a schedule and he is about two thirds through it.

I asked him who set the term. He laughed and said nobody, obviously, and then went quiet for a while, because the answer he had given out loud did not match how he was living.

There is a passage in Isaiah about a person who has been publicly humiliated, and the reason he gives for setting his face is worth reading slowly.

The verse before it describes what happened to him

The context matters or the sentence sounds like bravado.

I gave my back to the smiters, and my cheeks to them that plucked off the hair: I hid not my face from shame and spitting. (Isaiah 50:6, King James Version)

I hid not my face from shame and spitting. This is not somebody who avoided humiliation. It is somebody describing having stood in it.

And then, immediately after:

For the Lord GOD will help me; therefore shall I not be confounded: therefore have I set my face like a flint, and I know that I shall not be ashamed. (Isaiah 50:7)

Therefore. It appears twice, and both times it points backward to the same thing: the Lord GOD will help me.

So the not being ashamed is not grounded in the situation improving, and it is not grounded in his own resilience. It is grounded in who is on his side, stated as the reason, twice, in one verse.

I know that I shall not be ashamed. That is a settled thing rather than a hope, and it is settled in the middle of the humiliation rather than after it.

You have a knowing that is grounded in who is helping rather than in what has changed. Isaiah 50:7 gives the Lord GOD will help me as the reason twice over, and it is His Spirit, Romans 8:26 who helps our infirmities, who is named for the helping in exactly those terms.

What was paid, and what was left owing

Here is the problem with a twelve year balance. Somebody has to be collecting it, and Scripture is explicit about where the payment went.

But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed. (Isaiah 53:5)

The chastisement of our peace was upon him. Chastisement is the punishment word and it is assigned to a location, and the location is named.

And Hebrews states the accounting in one sentence that leaves nothing outstanding:

For by one offering he hath perfected for ever them that are sanctified. (Hebrews 10:14)

By one offering. Singular. For ever. And perfected, which is a completion word.

Which means a payment plan has nobody on the other end of it. The man with twelve years to go is making payments into an account that was closed, and nothing is being credited because there is no balance to credit it against.

You are paying into an account that Scripture says was closed by one offering. Hebrews 10:14 says by one offering he hath perfected for ever them that are sanctified. It is the Holy Spirit, named in the very next verse as a witness to us of that covenant, who testifies to the closing.

What a schedule is actually doing

I want to be fair to the man with the estimate, because I ran a version of this myself and I know why.

A schedule feels responsible. It is the only way he knows to take the thing seriously, and the alternative, as he understands it, is treating it lightly, which he will not do.

It also, and this is the part nobody says, keeps him in control. A man paying a balance is a man with a role. He is doing something. Receiving something already finished requires him to stop and stand there, and that is the harder posture by a distance.

The psalm's picture is the one that undoes it:

As far as the east is from the west, so far hath he removed our transgressions from us. (Psalm 103:12)

He chose the axis with no poles on it. North and south end; east and west do not. There is no distance to be traveled back over, which means there is no route by which a person can make a payment toward it even if they wanted to.

You are not able to reach the account, and that is by design. Psalm 103:12 chooses an axis with no end to it. It is the same Spirit, Romans 8:16 bearing witness with our spirit, who tells a person where a thing is when they keep going out looking for it.

And if the schedule has stopped feeling like responsibility and started feeling like something heavier, say it out loud to a person: a doctor, a counselor, a pastor you trust, or the 988 crisis line, which answers every hour there is. A private sentence with a term on it is exactly the kind of arrangement that should be said out loud to somebody else.

Set my face like a flint

And there is the phrase itself, which is about a posture rather than about a feeling.

I have set my face like a flint. Flint is hard stone. Setting a face is a decision about direction: it is what a person does before a journey they know will be difficult.

Luke uses the same idea about Jesus going to Jerusalem: he steadfastly set his face to go.

Notice what it is not. It is not a claim about feeling nothing. The man in Isaiah 50 has just described being spat at, and the setting of the face happens in that condition rather than instead of it.

So a person can be humiliated, and feel it, and still set a direction, and Scripture treats that as one posture rather than as a contradiction.

You are able to set a direction while still feeling the whole of it. Isaiah 50:7 has the face set in the same passage as the spitting, and it is the Spirit of God, Galatians 5:22 naming longsuffering among His fruit, who supplies what a decision alone will not carry.