Daily Manna · Day 23 · January 23
The Way Out
“There hath no temptation taken you but such as is common to man: but God is faithful, who will not suffer you to be tempted above that ye are able; but will with the temptation also make a way to escape, that ye may be able to bear it.”
You know your own pattern well enough to predict it. Same hour, same argument, same click, and the predicting is its own humiliation.
In a garden in Milan, in the summer of 386, a thirty-one-year-old professor of rhetoric threw himself down under a fig tree and wept, because he had been asking God for years to make him chaste and adding, in his own words, not yet. Augustine had a mistress, a career, a fully worked-out theory of why he could not change, and a habit that had outlasted every resolution he had made. He heard a child's voice from a nearby house chanting take it up and read. He went back to where he had left Paul's letters, opened at Romans 13, and read the line about making no provision for the flesh. He wrote later that he did not need to read further.
Which is worth setting beside what Paul says here. Nothing has taken you that is not common to man: your pattern is not exotic, and the shame of it being predictable is the shame of being a human being. God is faithful, and the escape is made rather than applied. It is built, and somebody still has to walk through it. Notice the sentences on either side, because the promise is wrapped in a warning: let him that thinketh he standeth take heed lest he fall, then flee from idolatry. Fleeing is a physical verb. Augustine's escape came through a wall, a voice, and a book he had already owned for months.
So the pattern is predictable, and that is the good news you were not looking for. A thing you can predict is a thing you can meet in advance. The hour is known to you. Put the escape there before you arrive.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 23 is Too Many (Judges 7:2).