Daily Manna · Day 209 · July 28
A Pillar in the Temple
“Him that overcometh will I make a pillar in the temple of my God, and he shall go no more out: and I will write upon him the name of my God, and the name of the city of my God, which is new Jerusalem, which cometh down out of heaven from my God: and I will write upon him my new name.”
You have moved four times in six years. New town, new congregation, boxes never entirely unpacked. Or nothing moved at all and the ground under you shifted anyway.
Take the promise back to the town it was posted to, because Philadelphia makes the image land. It sat in a volcanic region on a fault line, and in the year 17 an earthquake destroyed it along with eleven other cities of Asia. The aftershocks went on for years, and ancient writers record people living outside in the fields because the walls kept coming down. In a town like that, a pillar left standing in rubble is not a poetic flourish. It is the thing everyone had seen with their own eyes: columns still upright after everything around them collapsed.
Now read it to those people. Him that overcometh will I make a pillar in the temple of my God, and he shall go no more out. Going out is precisely what you did when the shaking started. And hold the condition, because it is the whole sentence; this is said to the one who overcomes, and Christ has just told this small church with little strength to hold fast that which thou hast. The permanence is offered to people who are still in the holding.
So the promise is exact, and worth not widening. Not that the ground stops moving; this church was never told that. That you are made part of the structure rather than a resident in it, that you will not be sent out again, and that three names get written on you: God's, the city's, and his own new one. Whatever you are holding this week, you are being made into something that stays.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 209 is Not Unto Us (Psalm 115:1).