Daily Manna · Day 173 · June 22
Grace and Peace
“Grace be unto you, and peace, from God our Father, and from the Lord Jesus Christ.”
You unlock the phone and something in it has already taken a swing at you.
Consider where the greeting was written. Philippians comes out of custody; the letter mentions the palace guard and sends greetings from those of Caesar's household, and Paul is chained to a rotation of soldiers as he dictates it. He is writing to a Roman colony full of retired soldiers, a town where he and Silas had once been beaten with rods and put in the stocks. Both ends of this letter know what a bad morning is.
And the greeting is not filler. Paul takes the standard opening of a Greek letter, chairein, swaps it for charis, grace, and lays the Hebrew shalom on top of it. The order never reverses anywhere in his letters: grace, then peace. Unearned favour arrives first and the quiet follows it.
That is the promise, and it does not depend on the kind of day your phone has planned. Grace has already come from the Father toward you. Peace is what it leaves behind. Neither is manufactured at your end, and a man in chains sent it out as an ordinary greeting.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 173 is Not Many Noble (1 Corinthians 1:27).