Daily Manna · Day 104 · April 14
The Protection of Habitation
“Because thou hast made the LORD, which is my refuge, even the most High, thy habitation; There shall no evil befall thee, neither shall any plague come nigh thy dwelling.”
Is God your address or your emergency number?
That is not a rhetorical flourish; it is the question this passage puts, and there is a fair objection to the way the promise is usually read. There shall no evil befall thee, neither shall any plague come nigh thy dwelling sounds like a guarantee that has failed for every believer who ever got ill, and pretending otherwise is not honest.
So read the first word. Because. The whole promise hangs on a clause that comes before it: because thou hast made the LORD, which is my refuge, even the most High, thy habitation. Habitation is a dwelling word. Not shelter, which is where you go when the weather turns; dwelling, which is where you are when nothing is happening. And read the psalm's own qualification six verses later, where the voice changes and God speaks for himself: I will be with him in trouble. The psalm assumes trouble arrives. It is not a receipt against illness. It is a statement about whose you are, and about what can and cannot ultimately reach a person who lives there.
Between the emergencies, the line has gone quiet. Most of us would recognise that.
So here is what is available, offered rather than demanded. Move the Bible to where your keys land rather than to a shelf, and open it for four minutes on an evening when nothing is wrong. Not because four minutes is impressive, but because a habitation is made entirely out of ordinary evenings, and nobody has ever built one out of emergencies.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 104 is Heart, Soul, Mind (Matthew 22:37).