Daily Manna · Day 360 · December 26
He Will Not Fail You
“And David said to Solomon his son, Be strong and of good courage, and do it: fear not, nor be dismayed: for the LORD God, even my God, will be with thee; he will not fail thee, nor forsake thee, until thou hast finished all the work for the service of the house of the LORD.”
How long have you been waiting to feel qualified?
The work in front of you was not chosen by you. Caring for a parent who is going. Raising a child you were handed. Holding together a job somebody else broke. And the sense of being equal to it keeps not arriving.
David is handing his son a construction project of terrifying scale, and the language he reaches for is borrowed on purpose. Be strong and of good courage is the exact charge God gave Joshua at the Jordan, and everybody in that room would have heard it. He is putting his son into a line of people who were commissioned rather than volunteers.
And here is what gives the sentence its weight. David wanted this job and was refused it. He says so earlier in the same chapter: thou shalt not build an house for my name, because thou hast been a man of war. The man encouraging Solomon is a man who was told no about the same building, and he is not bitter about it in the text; he spends the chapter handing over the plans he had already drawn.
Read the promise for its shape. He will not fail thee, nor forsake thee, until thou hast finished all the work. The guarantee is not that you are adequate. It is a companion, and it is bounded by the job rather than by your performance in it. He stays until it is done.
May you be given what David actually promised his son, which was never that you would turn out equal to it. May he not fail you nor forsake you until the work is finished, and may finished be measured by him rather than by you. And may the next hour of it be enough to be going on with today.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 360 is If This Life Only (1 Corinthians 15:19).