Daily Manna · Day 262 · September 19
Barns Filled with Plenty
“So shall thy barns be filled with plenty, and thy presses shall burst out with new wine.”
Whose verse is this: the man whose barn is full, or the man whose barn is empty?
Start a line earlier, because the sentence does. Honour the LORD with thy substance, and with the firstfruits of all thine increase. Firstfruits are the front of the harvest, handed over before anyone knows whether the rest of it is coming in. And notice the kind of book this is. Proverbs deals in the way things generally go, not in contracts, and it says elsewhere in its own voice that better is little with righteousness than great revenues without right. Read one verse past the barns and Solomon is straight into the chastening of the LORD, which is a strange direction to turn if he has just guaranteed anybody a full barn.
So the full barn does not get to be read backwards. It is not a receipt, and a man who treats it as one has quietly made his harvest the evidence of his own standing, which is the exact thing the next verses are written to prevent.
And the empty barn is not an accusation. The chastening clause is the guard against that reading too. A lean year is not proof that somebody held back.
What the proverb is actually asking about is order, not size. Whether God gets the front of what comes in, or whatever is still standing at the end of the month. That question has the same answer in a good year and a bad one, which is how you know it is the real one.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 262 is Whosoever Will (Revelation 22:17).