Daily Manna · Day 34 · February 3
Before You Began
“Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee; and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee, and I ordained thee a prophet unto the nations.”
Around 627 BC, in a village a few miles north of Jerusalem, a priest's son is told he will spend his life saying things nobody wants to hear. He will do it for roughly forty years. He will be beaten, put in stocks, thrown into a cistern, and he will watch the city fall anyway.
Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee. Take the sentence apart, because each clause does separate work. Knew is covenant language, not information; God is not claiming to have foreseen Jeremiah, He is claiming a relationship that predates him. Sanctified means set apart, marked off for a use. Ordained is literally given, appointed. Three verbs, all past tense, all completed before Jeremiah had a personality, a resume or an opinion.
Jeremiah's objection was practical: I cannot speak, for I am a child. He got no encouragement about his potential. He got a redirection: say not, I am a child, for thou shalt go to all that I shall send thee. And in the same chapter, God tells him plainly that they shall fight against thee, adding immediately, but they shall not prevail against thee. Being known before birth was never a promise of a smooth road. It was the floor under a hard one.
The truth here is not that you have a hidden greatness waiting to be discovered. It is nearly the opposite, and it is better. What God knows about you was settled before you were in a position to contribute to it, which means it does not now rise and fall with your resume, your forties, or your usefulness this year.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 34 is God With Us (Matthew 1:23).