Daily Manna · Day 295 · October 22
Grace and Glory Given
“The LORD will give grace and glory: no good thing will he withhold from them that walk uprightly.”
For the LORD God is a sun and shield: the LORD will give grace and glory: no good thing will he withhold from them that walk uprightly.
Two objects in one breath, and they do opposite jobs. A sun pours out. Standing under it you receive without doing anything, and it reaches you whether or not you asked. A shield holds back. Standing behind it you are kept from receiving something, and if the shield is doing its work you will mostly not know what it stopped.
The psalmist puts both in the same sentence about the same God, and then makes his promise. No good thing will he withhold. Read it under the sun and it is the promise everybody wants. Read it with the shield still in the sentence, one clause earlier, and it says something harder. Withholding is shield work. It is not the opposite of his goodness; it is one of the two things he is described as being. And it is his judgment about what is good, not yours, which is the part that stings and also the only version worth having, since a God obliged to hand over whatever you had classified as good would be a dangerous thing to worship.
The last clause guards it from the other misreading. Them that walk uprightly is not them that never stumble. It is a direction of travel. A person going the right way, badly, is still going the right way.
So take the request you retired and pray it again, in words, today. Then add the sentence you have been avoiding: if this is not good, tell me what is. Grace now, glory later, and a shield you will not get an itemised account of on this side.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 295 is The Second Week (John 20:29).