Daily Manna · Day 232 · August 20
Not by Might
“Then he answered and spake unto me, saying, This is the word of the LORD unto Zerubbabel, saying, Not by might, nor by power, but by my spirit, saith the LORD of hosts.”
"Who hath despised the day of small things?"
That question is asked four verses after the one in front of you, and it tells you what kind of room this was. Now meet the man being addressed.
Zerubbabel was the grandson of a king who had been carried off in chains. He was born in Babylon and sent back by a Persian administration to govern a province that was a fraction of what his family had once ruled. He had laid the foundation of a temple sixteen years earlier and then stopped, because of local opposition, and a stop-work order, and one suspects because the old men who remembered Solomon's house had wept aloud when they saw the size of the floor. He had a small, tired, discouraged crew, no money, and the rubble of the first temple still lying in front of him.
To that man comes a vision of a lampstand fed by two olive trees, oil running into it continuously with nobody carrying a jar. And the interpretation is one sentence. Not by might, nor by power, but by my spirit, saith the LORD of hosts.
Notice what it does not claim. It does not tell him to stop working, and he does not stop; the same chapter says his hands laid the foundation and his hands shall also finish it. Might there is the word for an army, and power is personal strength. This is not a rebuke of effort. It is an answer to the question of supply.
The truth in it is no licence to sit down. The work still happened, with the same small crew, in the same ruined city, over four more years of ordinary labour. What changed was where the oil came from, and it was never coming from the size of the crew.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 232 is How Shall They Hear (Romans 10:17).