Daily Manna · Day 237 · August 25
The Wicked One Cannot Touch
“We know that whosoever is born of God sinneth not; but he that is begotten of God keepeth himself, and that wicked one toucheth him not.”
A kitchen at midnight with the lights off. Tired, alone, a little bored, which is the exact combination, and the thing you swore you were finished with is already in the room and never announced itself.
Then the grief afterward, which nobody writes about because it has no tidy end. Not guilt exactly. More a kind of mourning over yourself. The eleventh time is worse than the first. You have run out of resolutions to make, and you have stopped telling anybody, because you have already told them, and the telling has begun to feel like a performance you cannot keep giving.
John's sentence has a hinge in the middle of it and most of us quote around the hinge. Whosoever is born of God sinneth not is not a claim that believers never fail; the same letter says in its first chapter that if we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves. The sense is continuous: a person born of God does not go on living in sin as a settled trade. Then the hinge: but he that is begotten of God keepeth himself, and that wicked one toucheth him not. Some ancient copies read that he who was begotten of God, meaning Christ, keeps him; the manuscripts do not agree here, and it is worth knowing, because for an exhausted person the entire weight of the verse rests on that one question.
Either way, what is denied is the touching. Not the approach. Not the pressure at midnight. The grip.
So there is no plan tonight, and the question is quieter than a plan, and it will wait for you. Where exactly is the door you keep leaving open, and what is it about it that you cannot bear to shut?
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 237 is Thy Great Mercies (Daniel 9:18).