Daily Manna · Day 30 · January 30
Shine Forth
“Then shall the righteous shine forth as the sun in the kingdom of their Father. Who hath ears to hear, let him hear.”
A man you know to be dishonest takes the promotion, shakes hands, and gets applauded. You file it with the rest of the evidence, and the evidence has been accumulating for years. The conclusion under a lot of tired faith is not that God is cruel. It is that nobody is keeping score.
Jesus is explaining the wheat and the weeds when He says this, and He does not open with shining. He opens with angels sent to gather out of his kingdom all things that offend, and them which do iniquity, and a furnace, and wailing. Only then: the righteous shine forth as the sun. The shining happens on the far side of a separation, not instead of one. Which raises a question the parable itself raises and refuses to answer for the servants: the servants wanted to pull the weeds early, and the answer was no: lest while ye gather up the tares, ye root up also the wheat with them. They could not reliably tell the difference. That is the honest problem. If they could not, on what basis do you think you can?
I am not going to close that for you, because Jesus did not. He ended with who hath ears to hear, let him hear, which is not a summary. It is a door left ajar.
So the man got the promotion, and the score is being kept, and the sorting is real and coming and not yours to run. Whether he is wheat is a question with an answer, and the answer is not available to you today. Stop the tally anyway. It was never your case.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 30 is Profess and Deny (Titus 1:16).