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 gets the promotion. He shakes hands, and people clap. You file it away with the rest of the evidence, which has been piling up for years. Underneath a lot of tired faith lies this conclusion: nobody is keeping score.
Jesus says today's verse while explaining the parable of the wheat and the weeds, and He does not start with shining. He starts with angels sent to "gather out of his kingdom all things that offend, and them which do iniquity." He speaks of a furnace and of wailing. Only after that does He say, "Then shall the righteous shine forth as the sun in the kingdom of their Father." The shining comes on the far side of a separation. And the parable raises a question that the servants in it had to face. They wanted to pull up the weeds early, and the master said no: "lest while ye gather up the tares, ye root up also the wheat with them." The sorting was not theirs to do. That is the honest problem for you too. If those servants were told to keep their hands off, what makes you think the sorting is yours?
Jesus did not close that question with an easy answer, and I am not going to close it for you. He ended with "Who hath ears to hear, let him hear," which leaves the door open for you to think it through.
So the man got the promotion, but the score is being kept. The sorting is real, it is coming, and it is not yours to run. Whether he is wheat is a question with an answer, and that answer is not yours to give today. So you can stop keeping the tally. It was never your case to judge, and the One who will judge it has promised that on that day the righteous will "shine forth as the sun."
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 30 is Profess and Deny (Titus 1:16).