Daily Manna · Day 343 · December 9
The Keeper Who Never Sleeps
“He will not suffer thy foot to be moved: he that keepeth thee will not slumber.”
Psalm 121 promises, "He will not suffer thy foot to be moved," and many people have a fair objection to that. People who sang this psalm still broke their legs. Believers still get sunstroke, and cancer, and worse. A verse that seems to promise otherwise can do real harm to someone standing at a graveside.
So be careful about what the psalm actually says. It never promises a smooth road, or that you will never be hurt. The word "moved" here means to slip and lose your footing, the kind of fall that ends a journey on a mountain path at night. The psalm does not promise you will not get tired, and it does not even promise the sun will be gentle. "The sun shall not smite thee by day" is a blessing spoken over travellers, and the whole psalm reads that way because that is what it is. Its heading calls it "A Song of degrees," one of the songs pilgrims sang on the climb up to Jerusalem, and it ends with "thy going out and thy coming in." It is a blessing for a journey, and it was never meant as an insurance policy on the body.
Notice where the psalm finally puts the weight: "he shall preserve thy soul." Your soul is what is being guarded. Everything else is the road.
What the psalm does say, plainly and twice, is that the One watching over you does not sleep. First it says, "he that keepeth thee will not slumber," and then, "he that keepeth Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep." Human guards work in shifts, and trouble slips in between the shifts. God needs no second shift.
So if you are lying awake tonight, use the hour well. Hand Him one worry from your list, and do not run through the whole list a fourth time. Then put the phone face down and go back to sleep on purpose. You can afford to sleep, because Someone else is on watch, and He has been all week.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 343 is Brass on a Pole (Numbers 21:9).