The Strong Tower

Panic has a direction, and it moves before you have decided anything.

The word to hold here is name. In Hebrew a name is not a label, it is what a thing is, and God's name is the disclosure of his character. That is why, when Moses asks to see his glory, what he is given is a name read aloud in his hearing: The LORD, The LORD God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abundant in goodness and truth. That is the tower. Not the syllables. The proverb is not describing a formula that works when pronounced correctly; it says that what God has shown himself to be is a fortified structure a person can be inside.

The two verbs are the whole picture. The righteous runneth into it, and is safe. Runneth is what you do when you have stopped calculating, the last move of somebody out of other moves. And safe is literally set on high, lifted out of reach. A tower never made the attackers go away. It put the townspeople above them.

Notice who runs, though. The righteous. This is not a charm that works for anyone who shouts the right syllables, and the very next verse in the chapter is its shadow: The rich man's wealth is his strong city, and as an high wall in his own conceit. Two towers, and one of them is imaginary.

So pray it now, before the fear arrives, so the words are already in your mouth when it does. Lord, when the call comes, let my first move be toward you and not toward the search bar. I do not know yet what your name will mean in that hour. Let me find out from inside the tower rather than from the field. Amen.

Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 176 is Hid In A Field (Matthew 13:44).

All 365 readings in Daily Manna