Daily Manna · Day 260 · September 17
Angels Charged Over You
“For he shall give his angels charge over thee, to keep thee in all thy ways.”
This verse has a clause in it that the devil kept cutting out.
The psalm posts a guard and says precisely where the guard stands: to keep thee in all thy ways. That is the promise and its boundary in a single breath. Ways, meaning the roads you actually have to walk. Both times the verse turns up in the Gospels it is quoted on a temple ledge by the tempter, and both times the clause goes missing. Luke stops at to keep thee. Matthew drops the keeping altogether. Jesus answers neither by arguing the exegesis but by quoting Deuteronomy: thou shalt not tempt the LORD thy God.
The promise is older and broader than that one psalm. Jacob at Bethel sees them going up and down a ladder over a fugitive sleeping on a stone. Elisha's servant wakes to a hillside full of them at Dothan when he had counted only enemies. Hebrews puts the whole thing plainly: are they not all ministering spirits, sent forth to minister for them who shall be heirs of salvation? Sent forth. On assignment. For ordinary heirs, not for heroes.
There is a road in front of you, unremarkable, with a guard already posted on it. The errand you have been putting off is on that road. You are welcome to walk it.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 260 is I Cannot Come Down (Nehemiah 6:3).