Daily Manna · Day 190 · July 9
The Same Forever
“Jesus Christ the same yesterday, and to day, and for ever.”
Think of a stone doorstep worn into a curve by the feet of everyone who has crossed it. The people change from year to year, and the stone stays where it is.
Almost everything else you lean on changes. The phone updates overnight, and the buttons move. The clinic changes owners. A friend answers differently than she used to.
In the year 252, a plague swept through Carthage in North Africa. The sick were put out into the streets, and the dead were left unburied. Many in the city blamed the Christians, whom they had spent the years before persecuting. Cyprian, the bishop of the church there, told his people to bury the dead and nurse the sick, and not only their own. What is worth noticing is how he argued for it. He did not invent a new teaching for the crisis. He pointed his people to what Christ had always taught, and from that he worked out what they should do that very day, in a street full of the dying.
That is what this sentence in Hebrews is for. It sits between two other lines. Just before it is a command: "Remember them which have the rule over you, who have spoken unto you the word of God." Just after it is a warning: "Be not carried about with divers and strange doctrines." Because Jesus stays the same, the faith of believers who died long ago is still useful to you, and a new teaching that contradicts it is worth nothing.
This truth cuts both ways, and both sides of it are for you. What Jesus was to Peter after the denial, He is to you today. And what He said about greed and about pride, He is still saying to you, in the same words.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 190 is Purer Eyes (Habakkuk 1:13).