Daily Manna · Day 248 · September 5
Written Before Birth
“Thine eyes did see my substance, yet being unperfect; and in thy book all my members were written, which in continuance were fashioned, when as yet there was none of them.”
At the end of the day, a potter leaves a lump of clay on the bench under a damp cloth. It has no shape yet, nothing you could put a name to. Pinned to the wall above it is a drawing of what it will become.
The word David uses for himself in this verse is the Hebrew word golem, which is found nowhere else in the Old Testament. Our English Bible translates it "my substance, yet being unperfect." It describes something rolled up and unfinished, not yet anything you could recognize. That is what God's eyes were on. Then David gives the order of things, and the order is the whole point: "in thy book all my members were written, which in continuance were fashioned, when as yet there was none of them." The Hebrew of that line is compressed, and most other Bibles read it as his days: every day of his life was written down before the first one came. Read either way, the writing came first. The drawing was pinned up before there was clay on the bench.
Notice also what the unfinished state did not do. It did not embarrass God, and it did not make Him look away: "Thine eyes did see." He was watching you at a stage nobody would take a picture of.
Lord, You looked at me when there was nothing of me to look at. Part of me is still under the cloth, half made and behind where I hoped to be, and I have been showing You the tidy version instead. Look at the unfinished part. You have been looking at it far longer than I have. Amen.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 248 is Entangled Again (Galatians 5:1).