Daily Manna · Day 244 · September 1
The Lord is Faithful
“But the Lord is faithful, who shall stablish you, and keep you from evil.”
The objection is fair. The Lord is faithful is exactly the sentence people reach for when a person has just proved not to be, and it can sound like a change of subject rather than an answer.
But look where Paul puts it. He has just written that all men have not faith. He is not pretending people are reliable; he says out of his own experience that they are not. Against that flat admission he sets the Lord, and he gives the faithfulness two jobs. It stablishes you, which is a word for putting something on a footing so it can bear weight. And it keeps you from evil, which his Greek reads just as naturally as the evil one. Not from every hardship. From the one who intends to finish what your disappointment started.
The Thessalonians were being leaned on from outside and worn down from inside by members who had quit working and taken up meddling. Your version is smaller and it has a face and a name and it hurt more than theirs would look on paper. The two situations do not match and there is no point pretending they do. What carries across the distance is not the size of the injury. It is the sentence Paul reached for when he had run out of dependable people.
A person can fail you and God still be what he is. Those are two separate facts, and the second one took no damage from the first.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 244 is They Soon Forgat (Psalm 106:13).