Daily Manna · Day 277 · October 4
Never Confounded
“Wherefore also it is contained in the scripture, Behold, I lay in Sion a chief corner stone, elect, precious: and he that believeth on him shall not be confounded.”
It usually comes at you sideways. A raised eyebrow at work. A relative who says you will grow out of it. An article that treats your faith as a coping mechanism wearing the costume of a conviction. And it lands, because some quiet part of you wonders whether you have staked one life on a story.
Peter answers by quoting Isaiah, and the striking thing about the quotation is that it is not about you at all. Behold, I lay in Sion a chief corner stone, elect, precious. Laid, by God, deliberately, at a chosen place. Elect, meaning chosen out from everything else. Precious, meaning of great worth, and Peter thinks so highly of the word that he uses it again in the very next verse: unto you therefore which believe he is precious. Every clause in the quotation is a fact about the stone, true whether anyone ever stands on it or not.
And Peter does not stop where the comfort is. He runs straight on into the other half of Isaiah, that the same stone becomes a stone of stumbling and a rock of offence. There is no neutral posture available toward a cornerstone. You build on it or you trip over it. That is what keeps the promise from turning sentimental: he that believeth on him shall not be confounded, and confounded is a word about the moment when everything is finally seen for what it was.
So take the promise at the width it was actually written. Not that the eyebrow stops, not that the article gets answered, not that you win the exchange in the corridor. The stone was laid, and chosen, and called precious before anybody asked you to put your weight on it, and it is the one thing in the sentence that was never going to be moved by what a room thinks of you.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 277 is Another Spirit (Numbers 14:24).