Daily Manna · Day 148 · May 28
Beyond Imagination
“Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him.”
Corinth, around the year 55. A city where a speaker was paid by the audience he could hold. Paul arrived there, by his own account, in weakness, and in fear, and in much trembling, and refused from the start to compete on the local terms.
That is the setting for a question he is genuinely asking: who gets access to what God is doing? In that city it was not rhetorical. Corinth was full of people selling hidden knowledge by subscription, and the church had begun arranging itself into ranks accordingly, this teacher's people over here, that teacher's people over there.
So Paul quotes Isaiah at them. Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him. And then, instead of leaving it hanging as mystery, he does the thing nobody in that market expects and closes the gap in the very next sentence: But God hath revealed them unto us by his Spirit. What no eye reached has been handed over. Not sold. Not awarded by rank. Handed over, and the address on the parcel is not the clever or the initiated. It is them that love him.
Some of the question stays open, and it should. Nothing you have seen or been told sets the ceiling on what God has prepared, which means every picture you hold of the future is provisional, including the shrunken one that grief leaves you with.
But the truth is in the address, and it is worth being exact about. This is not a promise floating in general over everybody. It is not qualified for by understanding it. It goes to those who love him, and love is where the letter gets delivered.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 148 is Word or Epistle (2 Thessalonians 2:15).