Daily Manna · Day 263 · September 20
Light Breaking Forth
“Then shall thy light break forth as the morning, and thine health shall spring forth speedily: and thy righteousness shall go before thee; the glory of the LORD shall be thy rereward.”
You have read this verse and skipped its first word.
Then. Everything in the sentence hangs off it, and it points backwards. Two verses earlier God has described the fast he actually chooses: to loose the bands of wickedness, to undo the heavy burdens, to let the oppressed go free, to deal thy bread to the hungry, to bring the poor that are cast out to thy house, to cover the naked. Then, Isaiah says. Then the light. Then the four things: light breaking forth as the morning, health springing up speedily, righteousness going out in front of you, and the glory of the LORD as thy rereward, which is an old military word for the rearguard. Front and back. An escorted column, not a lonely walk.
The people this was written to had been fasting hard and complaining that God had not noticed. Wherefore have we fasted, they ask, and thou seest not. The answer is not that their prayers were badly phrased or that God was withholding a breakthrough for reasons of his own. The dawn they were waiting on was on the far side of somebody else's need.
So the question is not whether God is answering. It is whether the answer has been sitting on a road you have not taken. Who is the hungry person you already know about?
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 263 is Help Mine Unbelief (Mark 9:24).