My Rock and Fortress

The objection is that seven titles are not an answer. Rock, fortress, deliverer, strength, buckler, horn of salvation, high tower: it reads like praise language, and praise language is easy to write when nothing is on fire.

So read the heading the psalm gives itself, because it is not decoration. The words of this song were spoken in the day that the LORD delivered him from the hand of all his enemies, and from the hand of Saul. Every title on the list was purchased. Rock and fortress and high tower are not flourishes from a man in a study; they are the actual furniture of the years he spent in the wilderness of Judah, where staying alive meant knowing which crags could not be climbed and which caves had a second way out. He is naming God after the terrain that kept him breathing.

Look at the possessive, repeated to the point of insistence. My rock, my fortress, my God, my strength, my buckler, my high tower. And at the hinge of the list he stops describing and commits: in whom I will trust. That is the only verb in the verse that belongs to him. Everything else is what God is; that one clause is what he does about it.

So pray the list rather than reading it, and stop after each name long enough to attach it to something real.

You are my rock in the decision I have to make this week. My fortress for this family. My deliverer from the thing I keep going back to. My strength today, because I have none. My high tower when they are talking about me and I cannot answer.

And where a name will not attach to anything, stay there. That is the place to pray longest. Amen.

Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 200 is Not a Word (1 Kings 18:21).

All 365 readings in Daily Manna