Daily Manna · Day 362 · December 28
Kings and Priests to God
“Unto him that loved us, and washed us from our sins in his own blood, And hath made us kings and priests unto God and his Father; to him be glory and dominion for ever and ever. Amen.”
What did this week actually consist of?
Invoices. Laundry. A commute. A shift nobody thanked you for. It is difficult to hold on to any sense of being called while you are wiping down a counter, and easy to conclude quietly that the significant lives are being lived somewhere else by other people.
John is writing to seven churches under real pressure, and the title he gives them arrives with a price attached in the same sentence. Unto him that loved us, and washed us from our sins in his own blood, and hath made us kings and priests unto God. The phrase reaches back to Sinai, where God told a nation of former slaves they would be to him a kingdom of priests, and it lands now on congregations of tradesmen and slaves and shopkeepers in Asia Minor.
And priest is not an ornamental word. Priests work. The job is standing between God and people, carrying names in, and it is done mostly out of sight; nobody watched the priest in the holy place either. It is unglamorous, repetitive labour, which is precisely why it fits into a week made of invoices.
Notice where the sentence ends up. To him be glory and dominion for ever and ever. The doxology does not go to the ones who were crowned. He hands out the crowns and keeps the glory, which is the only arrangement under which a title like this is safe to hold.
So the truth is plainer than the title sounds. Nobody watched the man in the holy place either, which is exactly why this letter could hand the title to shopkeepers and slaves in Asia Minor without any embarrassment. Whether it is seen has never once been what determined whether it counted.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 362 is The Bruised Reed (Isaiah 42:3).