No Good Thing Lacking

Some of us asked God plainly for something and waited, and what came was not what we asked for. The silence since then has been slowly wearing down our trust, and most of us have not told anyone.

Set two pictures side by side. In the first, a man is running for his life. A king is hunting him, and he has just escaped a foreign court by pretending to be insane; soon he will be hiding in a cave. Psalm 34 comes from that time, and it says flatly, "Many are the afflictions of the righteous." In the second picture, somebody sits in a kitchen with a phone face down on the table, working out how to explain to a friend why a prayer that mattered went unanswered.

The distance between those two is real. The man in the cave was in danger of his life, and most of us are not. Yet the psalm's argument works in both places, and it is a real argument. David points to the young lions, the strongest hunters in that land, animals that fear nothing and take what they want, and he notes that they go hungry anyway: "The young lions do lack, and suffer hunger." Being strong and capable does not keep you fed. Then comes the other side: "but they that seek the LORD shall not want any good thing."

The word that carries the weight is "good," and God is the One who decides what it means. Some of what we ask for would cost us more than we know. Some of it we would never ask for a second time if we could see the bill.

So here is the promise as it stands, with nothing added. It does not promise that you will get the thing you asked for, and it does not promise that strength will keep you fed. It promises that a person who truly seeks God will never, when the accounts are settled, turn out to have been short of anything good. The same psalm finishes the thought: "the LORD delivereth him out of them all."

Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 60 is After the Angel Left (Luke 1:38).

All 365 readings in Daily Manna