Daily Manna · Day 246 · September 3
Blessed for Trusting
“Blessed is the man that trusteth in the LORD, and whose hope the LORD is.”
In the years before Babylon besieged Jerusalem, the little kingdom of Judah sat between two great powers, with Egypt on one side and Babylon on the other. Its kings kept trying to guess which way to lean.
Into that worry Jeremiah speaks a blessing, and the next verse gives a picture of it with every part listed. The man who trusts in the LORD "shall be as a tree planted by the waters." It "spreadeth out her roots by the river," and it "shall not see when heat cometh, but her leaf shall be green." It "shall not be careful in the year of drought," where "careful" means worried, "neither shall cease from yielding fruit." That is six lines, and not one of them promises that the heat will stay away.
This list only makes sense next to the one before it. Two verses earlier stands the man who "maketh flesh his arm," the man who leans on human strength. He gets his own picture: "he shall be like the heath in the desert," a small, dry bush "in a salt land and not inhabited," and he "shall not see when good cometh." It is the same drought in the same country. The whole difference between the two men is underground, in where their roots go.
In the end Judah's last king leaned on Egypt. Pharaoh's army came out, then went home again, and Babylon came back and burned the city. The heat was always going to come. The passage never asks whether you can avoid the year of drought. It asks what your roots are in when it comes, and it promises that roots sunk in the LORD keep the leaves green.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 246 is The Barrel and the Boy (1 Kings 17:16).