Daily Manna · Day 161 · June 10
Salvation and Strength
“But the salvation of the righteous is of the LORD: he is their strength in the time of trouble.”
You wake before the alarm and the arithmetic starts. What you can cover, who you could call, how many weeks before it breaks.
There is a line people have been singing for two hundred and fifty years that is really about this. Augustus Toplady published Rock of Ages in 1776, and the verse everybody remembers is the one that empties your hands: Nothing in my hand I bring, simply to thy cross I cling. That is not a line about feeling peaceful. It is a line about having no assets.
Psalm 37 says the same thing in Hebrew. But the salvation of the righteous is of the LORD: he is their strength in the time of trouble. Of the LORD, meaning from him, his to give. The psalm has spent thirty-eight verses telling people not to fret because of evildoers, and its argument is never that the trouble is imaginary or small; it is that rescue is not an engineering problem you have been failing to solve. And notice where the strength is posted. In the time of trouble. Not before it, when you would much rather have it in hand and verified. In it. The next verse says it twice more: he shall deliver them, he shall save them, because they trust in him.
So the question worth holding is not whether God is able. It is this. What are you still gripping in the hand the hymn says should be empty, and what would it cost you to open it now, while the trouble is still going, rather than afterward when it is safe?
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 161 is Eaten Up (Psalm 69:9).