Daily Manna · Day 215 · August 3
The LORD Shall Fight
“The LORD shall fight for you, and ye shall hold your peace.”
You have the reply drafted in your head and it is a good one. You have rehearsed the line that would land.
Now the scene. Six hundred chariots behind, water in front, and a nation that has been out of Egypt a matter of days doing what frightened people do, which is turning on the man who led them out. Because there were no graves in Egypt, hast thou taken us away to die in the wilderness? It is not a calm crowd and it is not an unreasonable panic. Moses answers with the line you have: The LORD shall fight for you, and ye shall hold your peace.
Read the next verse, which is what keeps this from becoming a devotional about passivity. God's reply to Moses is Wherefore criest thou unto me? speak unto the children of Israel, that they go forward. Holding your peace was never standing still. They walked down into a seabed with water either side, at night, with an army behind them. The silence commanded here is about your mouth and your weapons. It has nothing to do with your feet.
So the promise divides the labour precisely, and it is worth taking in exactly that shape. He does the fighting, which happens to include every part of this you could not affect anyway: the outcome, the verdict, what people finally decide about you. You do the walking, and you do it with your mouth shut. Both halves are in the sentence. Neither of them is the optional one.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 215 is Shall Not Make Haste (Isaiah 28:16).