Daily Manna · Day 222 · August 10
Strong Confidence
“In the fear of the LORD is strong confidence: and his children shall have a place of refuge.”
Two men in Proverbs 14 look identical from the outside, and the chapter sets them ten verses apart.
The first is in verse sixteen: the fool rageth, and is confident. That word is from the same root as the strong confidence in your verse. He has nerve. He is afraid of nothing, and Proverbs treats that as a symptom rather than a virtue; he is the man described a verse earlier who believeth every word, and the man in verse twelve walking a way which seemeth right unto a man. He is steady the way somebody is steady who has not yet noticed the drop.
The second man is in the same sentence: a wise man feareth, and departeth from evil. He is afraid of the right thing, and that is what makes him unafraid of most other things. Which is the logic of your verse exactly. In the fear of the LORD is strong confidence. Reverence, the kind that takes God seriously enough to obey when obeying costs, is what grows nerve in a person. And the shelter runs further than the man himself: his children shall have a place of refuge. What holds him up holds up the people who belong to him.
Here is the warning. In a good year the two men are indistinguishable, and both of them feel steady. Money in the account, a five-year plan, a skill nobody can take from you: these produce the same sensation as the fear of the LORD right up to the moment the ground moves, and only then does anybody find out which one he had. So the test is not how confident you feel this morning. It is what you do this week in the place where obeying God would cost you something you would rather keep.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 222 is Stirreth Up Her Nest (Deuteronomy 32:11).