Anchor of the Soul

An anchor works by going down.

That is what makes the image in this passage strange, and I want you to notice it rather than read past it, because the whole comfort is in the direction. Hope, the writer says, is an anchor of the soul, both sure and stedfast, and which entereth into that within the veil. Into the veil. Upward, inward, into the holy of holies. Not down into a seabed that might shift, not into anything on your side of the curtain at all. And then the reason it holds, which is a person rather than a principle: whither the forerunner is for us entered, even Jesus.

Forerunner is the word I would put in your hands. It is a runner sent ahead, and the term only makes sense if others are meant to follow; a forerunner who arrives alone has failed at the job. In the old arrangement the high priest went behind the veil once a year, alone, and came back out, and nobody followed him. This one went in and stayed, and the text says why he can: made an high priest for ever after the order of Melchisedec.

And read the two verses before it, because the writer has been building to this. God confirmed his promise with an oath, so that by two immutable things, in which it was impossible for God to lie, we might have a strong consolation. Two things. The promise and the oath. He is stacking guarantees for people he expects to be frightened.

Somewhere in the small hours the storm gets a vote, and everything you settled in daylight is up for renegotiation.

So the question is only this, and it is worth answering before tonight rather than during it: are you holding the anchor, or is it holding you? Because one of those is a grip that gets tired, and the other is a rope with somebody on the far end of it who has been in that room since before you were born.

Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 120 is Crowning the Year (Psalm 65:11).

All 365 readings in Daily Manna