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.”
It is midnight, and you are in the kitchen with the lights off. You are tired, alone and a little bored, which is exactly the mix that trips you. The thing you swore you were finished with is already in the room, and it never announced itself.
Then comes the grief afterward, which nobody writes about because it has no tidy ending. It feels less like guilt and more like mourning over yourself. The eleventh time is worse than the first. You have run out of promises to make, and you have stopped telling anybody, because you have already told them and telling them again has started to feel like a show.
John's sentence has a hinge in the middle, and most of us quote around it. The first part, "whosoever is born of God sinneth not," does not claim that believers never fail. In its first chapter the same letter says, "If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves." The verb here points to an ongoing habit, so John means that a person born of God does not go on living in sin as a settled way of life. Then comes the hinge: "but he that is begotten of God keepeth himself, and that wicked one toucheth him not." Some ancient copies of the letter read this a little differently, saying that the One who was begotten of God keeps him. On that reading, Christ is the one doing the keeping. The old manuscripts do not agree here, and it is worth knowing, because for a worn-out person the whole weight of the verse rests on who is holding on.
Either way, what the verse denies is the touching. The enemy may still come near, and the pressure may still come at midnight, but he does not get his grip on you.
So there is no plan for tonight, only a quieter question, and it will wait for you. Where exactly is the door you keep leaving open? And what is it about that door that you cannot bear to shut? You can bring both answers to the God who has made you His child.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 237 is Thy Great Mercies (Daniel 9:18).