Daily Manna · Day 40 · February 9
Continual Guide
“And the LORD shall guide thee continually, and satisfy thy soul in drought, and make fat thy bones: and thou shalt be like a watered garden, and like a spring of water, whose waters fail not.”
Sometime after the exile, people are back in the land, the temple is functioning, the fasts are being kept, and God tells them through Isaiah that He is not interested in any of it. Chapter 58 is the rebuke: ye fast for strife and debate, He says, while the hungry stay hungry.
Out of that rebuke comes the promise, and the word to sit with is continually. The Hebrew is tamid, and it is a technical word in Israel's worship. The lamp in the sanctuary was a tamid lamp. The bread on the table was tamid bread. The morning and evening offering was the tamid, the standing sacrifice, the one that never lapsed. Tamid means the thing that is always there, the thing that is not an event. So when God says He will guide thee continually, He is not promising more of what you have been asking for. You have been asking for six months of clear signals and getting silence. He is promising something closer to the lamp: constant, unremarkable, on whether or not anyone is looking at it.
And notice where it sits in the chapter. If thou draw out thy soul to the hungry, and satisfy the afflicted soul, then shall thy light rise in obscurity. Then. The watered garden, the bones made fat, the spring whose waters fail not, all of it is promised on the far side of somebody spending themselves on another person's need.
The truth, then, is not that God has stopped guiding you. It is that in this chapter guidance runs downhill from mercy, and a person standing still, waiting for direction before doing anything for anyone, has positioned himself uphill of the water.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 40 is No Overseer (Proverbs 6:6).