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 arrives, and the hollow spot comes with it into the nicer room.
So the objection: if God satisfies the longing soul, why do believers report the same restlessness as everyone else, and why is this verse so often quoted by people who look no less hungry than the rest of us?
Read where it sits, because Psalm 107 is not a general statement. It is a refrain. The psalm tells four stories: wanderers lost in a desert with no city to dwell in, prisoners sitting in darkness and the shadow of death, fools afflicted because of their own transgression whose soul abhorreth all manner of meat, and sailors at their wits' end in a storm. And every one of the four turns on the identical sentence: Then they cried unto the LORD in their trouble, and he delivered them out of their distresses. Four times, in almost the same words. So the satisfied soul in verse nine is not a soul that waited quietly and got lucky. It is a soul that hit a wall and called out.
Which is where the warning is, and it should not be softened. Three of those four groups were in trouble they had made themselves, and the psalm says so about the fools without any embarrassment. What it never shows is a fifth group who were filled without ever crying out. Distraction is available at all hours, and it is a different substance entirely; a man can go a very long way on it. The risk was never that God turns the hungry away. It is that you can keep your mouth full for forty years and never once get hungry enough to call.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 216 is One Thing I Know (John 9:25).