Daily Manna · Day 140 · May 20
Preserved by Love
“The LORD preserveth all them that love him: but all the wicked will he destroy.”
A hospital corridor on a Thursday afternoon, and a family who had prayed. Properly, and often, and together, and out loud in front of each other. The person they were praying for died anyway, at about four o'clock.
Somebody will read this psalm at the funeral. The LORD preserveth all them that love him. It is a fair question what that sentence is doing in a room like that one, and the church that first sang it buried its own dead without ever amending the line.
Which tells you what the promise means and what it does not. Psalm 145 is a song of praise, an alphabet poem walking through the greatness of God a letter at a time, and near the end it turns hard. Preserving here is not exemption from harm; the same psalm has already said the LORD upholdeth all that fall, which assumes falling. And the second half of the verse is not softened either. All the wicked will he destroy. Love in this verse is not a fee that purchases protection. It is the direction a life faces. One is turned toward him and kept, through fire if it comes to that. The other is turned away, and God will not keep a man against his will forever.
So this is open to you rather than pressed on you. Which way is your life pointed, judged not by what you believe about yourself but by the last seven days: your calendar, your spending, your temper at home. You are free to look and free not to. If the answer troubles you, he is available tonight, and he has kept worse men than you.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 140 is If Need Be (1 Peter 1:7).