Daily Manna · Day 143 · May 23
Delivered from Temptation
“The Lord knoweth how to deliver the godly out of temptations, and to reserve the unjust unto the day of judgment to be punished:”
The pull is strongest when you are tired. It is late, you are alone in the house, and you are one tab or one message away from the thing you promised yourself you were finished with.
Think about where this sentence was written. Peter's second letter reads like his last one. Early on he says, "shortly I must put off this my tabernacle," meaning the tent of his body. Church tradition places him in Rome under the emperor Nero, an old fisherman a long way from his lake. He is watching false teachers move through the churches, offering a kind of grace that asks nothing of anybody. Chapter two is about those men, and it is angry. They come "with feigned words," which means made-up words. Peter calls them "wells without water," and he says, "While they promise them liberty, they themselves are the servants of corruption."
In the middle of that, Peter writes one long sentence about the angels who sinned, about Noah, and about Lot. Noah and Lot both lived surrounded by wickedness they could not fix. Our verse is how that long sentence ends: "The Lord knoweth how to deliver the godly out of temptations, and to reserve the unjust unto the day of judgment to be punished." Peter keeps the two halves together, so nobody can take only the first half. Lot was pulled out by the hand, but the city was not spared. God really does know how to rescue. Usually His rescue does not look like a miracle. It looks more like a door standing open a few seconds before you had decided to stop looking for one.
Peter will not soften the other half, though. Those teachers made sin look harmless, and Peter had once sat at a table with a man who sold Christ for money. A person can be completely sure that God is able to rescue him and still walk into the room anyway. So do not test the warning. Look for the door instead, because the promise is just as true as the warning. Tonight, in the very moment of the pull, the Lord knows how to get you out. He did it for Lot, who was living in Sodom itself.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 143 is Two Are Better (Ecclesiastes 4:9-10).