Daily Manna · Day 68 · March 9
Christ Our Life
“When Christ, who is our life, shall appear, then shall ye also appear with him in glory.”
A seed in February, three inches down, doing nothing visible whatsoever.
Hiddenness runs all the way through Scripture as a stage rather than a verdict. Moses spends forty years on the back side of a desert before the bush. David is anointed king and then goes back to the sheep, and stays a fugitive for years with the oil already on his head. Jesus is thirty before anyone hears from him. Paul goes to Arabia and then home to Tarsus, and the record simply stops for the better part of a decade. And the pattern is stated outright in the line just before this verse: ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God.
Hid is a deliberate word. Not lost, not delayed, not overlooked. Placed somewhere on purpose, by somebody, for keeping. Which is what makes the verse work: when Christ, who is our life, shall appear, then shall ye also appear with him in glory. Your appearing is scheduled to His. The reason nobody sees it yet is that He has not appeared yet either.
And Paul does not let it stay comfortable. The very next line is mortify therefore your members which are upon the earth, and he names them: fornication, uncleanness, inordinate affection, evil concupiscence, and covetousness, which is idolatry. Therefore. Because you are hidden and will appear, kill the thing.
So: the seed in February. Nobody is watching it, and there is nothing to see, and the work it is doing is real and entirely underground. The patience at six in the evening, the bill you quietly covered, the sin you refused with the door shut and no witness. None of that is being wasted. It is being kept, which is a different thing, and February is not a permanent condition.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 68 is The Name He Gave (Exodus 3:14).