Daily Manna · Day 273 · September 30
Fully Persuaded
“He staggered not at the promise of God through unbelief; but was strong in faith, giving glory to God; And being fully persuaded that, what he had promised, he was able also to perform.”
An old man comes out of his tent at night because he cannot sleep, and is told to count stars. He is seventy-five when the promise first comes. Then he is eighty-five. Then he is ninety-nine, and the tent behind him still has no child in it.
Paul says he staggered not at the promise of God through unbelief, and read quickly that sounds like a claim Genesis will not support. The man laughed on his face. Sarah laughed behind the tent door. There was the whole miserable business with Hagar in between. Paul's word is about the promise, not about the mood: he did not walk away from it. And Romans is blunt about what he was looking at while he did not walk away, a body now dead, and the deadness of Sarah's womb. Fully persuaded, Paul says, of the one who had promised. Not of the arithmetic.
Then the two things Paul sets side by side as though they were a single motion: he was strong in faith, giving glory to God. The strength and the praise are the same act. He thanked the God who had said it, with nothing whatever to show anybody.
May you be strong the way he was strong, which is to say not certain, and not gone. May the numbers stay exactly as bad as they are. And may they stop being the last word spoken in the room.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 273 is Within My House (Psalm 101:2).