Daily Manna · Day 77 · March 18
The Secret Place
“He that dwelleth in the secret place of the most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty.”
Many of us treat prayer the way we treat the fire extinguisher under the sink. We know where it is, and we hope we will not need it.
This psalm is not mainly about how to get into God's shelter. It is mostly a long description of who God is, and the sheer number of names is the point. He is "the most High," which tells you His rank: He is above every other power. He is "the Almighty." In Hebrew that is Shaddai, the name God used with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. In the next verse He is "my refuge and my fortress." A refuge is a place you run to, and a fortress is a place built to be defended. A little further on He covers you "with his feathers," and "his truth shall be thy shield and buckler." A mother bird and a soldier's shield are a strange pair of pictures, but the psalm holds them together. Then come angels given "charge over thee," the lion and the adder under your feet, long life, and at the end, "shew him my salvation."
All of that describes what God is like, and that is why the verb in the first line matters so much: "He that dwelleth in the secret place of the most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty." The word is "dwelleth," which means to live there and stay. The shade belongs to whoever stays under the tree. A person who comes in only when the weather turns bad has been living somewhere else the rest of the time.
So think about where you spend the ordinary hours of your day, the ones when nothing is going wrong. God is not asking you to wait for an emergency before you come near. He is inviting you to move in. The secret place is open now, and the God described in this psalm is the One waiting in it.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 77 is Two Days or a Year (Numbers 9:17).