Daily Manna · Day 268 · September 25
The Father of Comfort
“Blessed be God, even the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies, and the God of all comfort; Who comforteth us in all our tribulation, that we may be able to comfort them which are in any trouble, by the comfort wherewith we ourselves are comforted of God.”
We are bad at this and we do it to each other constantly. Someone is bereaved, and we arrive with a tidy sentence because the silence is unbearable to us, and they are further off when we leave than they were when we came.
So read the passage for what it declines to claim. It does not say the comfort makes the trouble worth it. It does not say God arranged the tribulation in order to train you up as a helper, which is what this text is most often made to say. It does not promise that the comfort arrives in proportion to the suffering, or on time, or in a form you would have chosen. And it never once says you will understand.
What it says is that God comforteth us in all our tribulation, and that the comfort has a direction built into it: that we may be able to comfort them which are in any trouble. Then look at the currency, because Paul is specific about it. By the comfort wherewith we ourselves are comforted of God. Not advice. Not a lesson you extracted afterwards. The actual thing you were handed, handed on. And notice the widening between the two halves of the sentence: all tribulation on the receiving side, any trouble on the giving side. He does not require the two to match.
Which means the qualification is not that you made sense of what happened to you. It is only that you were comforted in it. That is the entire credential, and most of the people who hold it have no idea they do.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 268 is Hope Deferred (Proverbs 13:12).