Daily Manna · Day 166 · June 15
The Secret of the Lord
“The secret of the LORD is with them that fear him; and he will shew them his covenant.”
Most of us want to know what God is doing. If we are honest, we often want the information more than we want Him. If someone offered us the trade, many of us would take a reliable forecast over a real friendship with God.
So look closely at the word this verse turns on. The Hebrew word translated "secret" is sod. It does not mean a hidden fact. It means a council, a small circle of people sitting close enough to talk quietly, and it also means what gets said in that circle. The Bible uses it for a group of friends, and it uses it for God's own council. Amos uses it in just that way: "Surely the Lord GOD will do nothing, but he revealeth his secret unto his servants the prophets." So the picture here is a room with chairs in it, where God talks quietly with His friends. Nobody gets in by cracking a code.
The verse also tells you who is let into that room: "them that fear him." It does not name the clever, or the well read, or the people with the sharpest questions. It names those who take God seriously. Then the second half tells you what is shared in that room, and it has nothing to do with tomorrow's news: "he will shew them his covenant." A covenant is a binding promise. What God shares with His friends is what He is like and what He has bound Himself to do, and that matters far more than a schedule of coming events.
That is the truth to carry today. The people who come to know the mind of God are not the ones who searched hardest. They are the ones who took Him seriously enough to be trusted in the room. And when they got there, they found that what He shared with them was Himself.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 166 is It Is Finished (John 19:30).