Daily Manna · Day 146 · May 26
Great and Mighty Things
“Call unto me, and I will answer thee, and shew thee great and mighty things, which thou knowest not.”
Jeremiah was in prison when God said this to him.
That is the detail every poster of this verse leaves out. Call unto me, and I will answer thee is spoken to a man shut up in the court of the prison, in a city with siege ramps going up outside it, a city that is going to fall and that God has already said will fall. And the great and mighty things in view here are not an escape route. They are a purchase. God tells him to buy a field in a country about to be occupied, and Jeremiah counts out seventeen shekels of silver, signs the deed in front of witnesses, and files it in an earthen vessel, that they may continue many days. Houses and fields and vineyards shall be possessed again in this land.
Follow the idea through the rest of Scripture and it keeps that shape. Elisha's servant panics at an army ringing the city, and the prayer that gets answered is not the removal of the army but LORD, I pray thee, open his eyes, that he may see. Paul asks three times for the thorn to be taken away and is answered with something else entirely: My grace is sufficient for thee. Solomon asks for an understanding heart and is handed what he did not request on top of what he did. In every case God answered. In no case was the answer the shape the asker had drawn.
Which is exactly what the last clause of the verse says: things which thou knowest not. Your not knowing is not an obstacle to the promise, it is built into it.
So before you pray again, it is worth answering something honestly. When you say God has not answered, do you mean he has said nothing, or do you mean he has not yet said the sentence you wrote out for him?
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 146 is A Workman Unashamed (2 Timothy 2:15).