Daily Manna · Day 218 · August 6
Our Eyes Are Upon Thee
“O our God, wilt thou not judge them? for we have no might against this great company that cometh against us; neither know we what to do: but our eyes are upon thee.”
O our God, wilt thou not judge them? for we have no might against this great company that cometh against us; neither know we what to do: but our eyes are upon thee.
Look at the country he was standing in, because the geography is doing work here. Judah's eastern edge falls away toward the Dead Sea through a wilderness of chalk ridges and dry wadis, and the armies were coming up through it by the cliff of Ziz. It is a landscape with no cover and no water, where a dust cloud is visible a long way off and there is nothing whatever to be done about it for hours. That is the setting for a sentence about having no strength and no plan: a place where the ground itself declines to offer you an option.
And it is a king saying it aloud in front of the whole nation, with the little ones and the wives standing there. He does not talk himself up. He does not produce a strategy nobody asked for. He states two facts and then finishes the sentence somewhere else entirely: but our eyes are upon thee. Admitting he had nothing was not the collapse of his leadership. It was the first competent thing he did that day.
You know the hour this describes. Eleven at night in a kitchen, the calls made, the pages read, the people who usually know already asked.
So the question is worth putting plainly, and not answering too fast. When you run out of plan, where do your eyes actually go? Not what you believe about God. Where do they go, at that hour, in that kitchen. Not knowing what to do is a position a person can pray from. It has never been a position anybody had to hide.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 218 is Make Thy Name Great (Genesis 12:2).