Stronghold

You have a friend who says God is good, and you have watched what this year did to her.

Nahum said the same thing in worse times. He wrote to Judah about Nineveh, the capital of the empire that had driven the northern tribes of Israel off their land. Its kings bragged in their own palace carvings about skinning prisoners alive and piling up their heads at the city gates. Within living memory its army had camped outside the walls of Jerusalem. So Nahum was no man with an untested opinion about whether God is good. And notice where he puts his sentence about God's goodness: right in the middle of a prophecy of destruction. The verse before it asks, "Who can stand before his indignation?" The verse after it says, "he will make an utter end of the place thereof." The middle line is the one people skip: "he knoweth them that trust in him." God knows them personally, in a chapter about an empire being wiped out. It is the same fire with two outcomes, and trust is what stands between them.

Nahum's whole book is aimed at the kind of power that crushes people like your friend. Not one line of it is aimed at her.

So the hard year she has had does not mean God's goodness was a fair-weather promise. Her year came in a world where cruelty like Nineveh's is still at work, and God has not finished with it yet. Go to her. Take the meal, offer the afternoon with the kids, drive her to the appointment. You do not need to bring an explanation. The Lord "knoweth them that trust in him," and He knows her. He has never asked you to defend Him to her. Your part is to love her while He keeps His word.

Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 17 is A Brand From the Fire (Zechariah 3:2).

All 365 readings in Daily Manna