Daily Manna · Day 251 · September 8
Rich in Mercy
“But God, who is rich in mercy, for his great love wherewith he loved us, Even when we were dead in sins, hath quickened us together with Christ, (by grace ye are saved.)”
You keep a running total on yourself. You may not call it that, but you know the number and you know which side it comes out on when the house is quiet.
The man who wrote this verse was under guard. He calls himself the prisoner of Jesus Christ in the next chapter, and he is writing to believers in a city whose whole civic identity ran through the temple of Diana, people who had been raised inside a religion of appeasement, of giving the god something so the god would give something back.
Into that he drops a sentence with no transaction in it anywhere. He does not say you were struggling. He says dead in sins, and a dead man contributes nothing to his own rescue, which is exactly why Paul chose the word. Then the hinge the whole letter turns on: But God. Rich in mercy. For his great love wherewith he loved us. And he cannot even finish the sentence before the reason breaks in sideways, in brackets, three verses ahead of where he plans to explain it: by grace ye are saved.
Rich in mercy, great love, even when we were dead. That is the order of the sentence, and none of it waits on your total.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 251 is Great Babylon (Daniel 4:35).