Daily Manna · Day 216 · August 4
Filled with Goodness
“For he satisfieth the longing soul, and filleth the hungry soul with goodness.”
The thing you wanted finally arrives, the new job or the bigger house, and the empty feeling inside simply moves in with you.
So here is a fair question. If God "satisfieth the longing soul," why do believers feel the same restlessness as everyone else? And why do people who quote this verse often look just as hungry as the rest of us?
Look at where the verse sits, because Psalm 107 is not making a general statement. The psalm tells four stories. Wanderers are lost in the desert and find "no city to dwell in." Prisoners "sit in darkness and in the shadow of death." Fools suffer because of their own sins, until "their soul abhorreth all manner of meat," which means they cannot stand the sight of food. Sailors in a storm reel and stagger and are at their wits' end. Every one of the four stories turns on the same sentence: "Then they cried unto the LORD in their trouble, and he delivered them out of their distresses." It comes four times, in almost the same words. So the satisfied soul in verse nine is not someone who waited quietly and got lucky. It is someone who hit a wall and called out to God.
That is where the warning lies, and it should not be softened. Two of those four groups were in trouble they had made themselves. The prisoners had "rebelled against the words of God," and the fools were suffering "because of their transgression." What it never shows is a fifth group who were filled without ever crying out. Distraction is available at all hours, and a person can go a very long way on it, yet it never fills a hungry soul. The real danger is that you keep your mouth full for forty years and never get hungry enough to call.
So let the hunger do its work. Name the empty place honestly and call out to Him today. Four times the psalm shows God answering people who cried to Him, even the ones who had caused their own trouble, and the verse still stands: "he satisfieth the longing soul, and filleth the hungry soul with goodness."
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 216 is One Thing I Know (John 9:25).