Daily Manna · Day 208 · July 27
Better Than the Birds
“Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they?”
Jesus asks a question here and then declines to answer it.
Behold the fowls of the air. He is not praising idleness; a bird works hard for every seed and is busy from first light. He names three specific activities: they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns. Sowing and reaping are farming. Gathering into barns is storing, and that is the one aimed at the people in front of him, because the whole paragraph is about laying up treasure. A barn is a picture of a future you are trying to secure ahead of time. Yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. The feeding still comes through the work; food does not appear in a nest. What is missing from the picture is the storehouse.
Then: Are ye not much better than they? And he leaves it there. He does not supply the yes, which is unusual in an argument, and the effect is that the sentence cannot be finished except by you, in a car park, over your own numbers.
That is the truth of it, and it is less comfortable than the pleasant reading. Your worth is not being asserted here. It is being put to you as a question, and the test is whether you can answer yes and then act as though it were true before the money comes in.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 208 is Even as Ye Do (1 Thessalonians 5:11).