Daily Manna · Day 196 · July 15
Joy as Strength
“Then he said unto them, Go your way, eat the fat, and drink the sweet, and send portions unto them for whom nothing is prepared: for this day is holy unto our LORD: neither be ye sorry; for the joy of the LORD is your strength.”
Fat meat, sweet wine, and dishes going out of the door toward houses where nothing was cooking.
Hold the table, because the whole passage is a table. The crowd at the Water Gate had been standing since morning while the law was read aloud and explained, and they were weeping, having just heard how far off they were. And the instruction given to weeping people is not a doctrine. It is a menu. Go your way, eat the fat, and drink the sweet, and send portions unto them for whom nothing is prepared.
Eat the fat means the rich part of the meat, the portion nobody ate on an ordinary day. Drink the sweet is new wine. And send portions is not charity in the abstract; it is a plate leaving your table for a named household with nothing on theirs. Three instructions, every one of them physical, prescribed as the cure for grief over sin. Then the reason, which is the only line anybody remembers: for the joy of the LORD is your strength. It arrives attached to food and to a neighbour, and prising it off them is how it became a slogan.
Notice also whose joy it is. Not your joy about the LORD, which would put you back in charge of producing it. The joy of the LORD. His, lent as strength to people who at that moment had none of their own.
Which is the truth, and it runs against the order most of us assume. Gladness here is not the reward for having got right with God. It was the assignment given before anybody felt better, and it arrived as a meal you were told to eat and a plate you were told to send.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 196 is A Soft Answer (Proverbs 15:1).