Everlasting Covenant Promise

Every promise you have made to God you have broken at least once, and you know your own record well enough that you have quietly stopped offering him new ones.

Here is where this covenant was made. Jeremiah is shut up in the court of the prison. The Babylonian army is around the walls, the city will not survive the siege, and God tells him to buy a field in Anathoth from his cousin, weigh out the silver, sign the deed, have it witnessed and sealed in a clay jar so it will keep. He does it. He buys real estate in a country that is about to cease existing, and then he prays a long bewildered prayer asking what on earth that was for. This promise is part of the answer.

And look at how the covenant is constructed, because it is unlike a contract in one specific way. God commits to his own half: I will not turn away from them, to do them good. Then, instead of asking for a matching commitment from a people who have just proved they cannot keep one, he takes up the other half himself. I will put my fear in their hearts, that they shall not depart from me. Both signatures on the page are his. Everlasting is not a description of how long they will hold on. It is a description of who is holding.

That is not a compliment to your loyalty. It is a rescue of it, and the two are easy to confuse when you are tired.

Which means the reason you are still here, after the version of you that made all those promises, is not that you turned out to be more constant than you feared. It is that the fear of God you keep failing to sustain was put there by somebody else, and he has not taken it back.

Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 346 is Cause Me to Hear (Psalm 143:8).

All 365 readings in Daily Manna