Daily Manna · Day 52 · February 21
Known and Trusted
“And they that know thy name will put their trust in thee: for thou, LORD, hast not forsaken them that seek thee.”
On Sinai, with two blank stone tablets in his hands and a nation at the bottom of the mountain that has just made a calf, Moses asks to see God's glory. What he gets instead is a name, read aloud as God passes by: The LORD, The LORD God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abundant in goodness and truth, keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, and that will by no means clear the guilty.
That is the fullest self-description in the Old Testament, and everything else about the name is built on it. Proverbs turns it into architecture, calling the name a strong tower the righteous run into for safety. Joel promises that whosoever shall call on the name of the LORD shall be delivered, and Peter quotes the line at Pentecost as shall be saved. And the New Testament puts a person in the position: he shall save his people from their sins, and that is what the name Jesus means.
Which is what makes the order in this verse worth noticing. They that know thy name will put their trust in thee. Knowing comes first, and trust follows it, and never the other way around. The psalm is not asking you to summon confidence. It is telling you where confidence comes from.
And look where the line sits. Psalm 9 is a courtroom. David is praising God for judging rightly; a few verses on, the wicked are turned into hell, and the needy shall not alway be forgotten. This is a promise made by a man watching accounts get settled.
So the truth is this, and there is no technique in it. Trust is downstream of knowledge. You have not been failing at trusting; you have been trying to lean your weight on a character you never studied. Nobody can do that, and nobody was ever asked to.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 52 is Job's Wife (Job 2:10).