Daily Manna · Day 90 · March 31
Merciful and Faithful
“(For the LORD thy God is a merciful God;) he will not forsake thee, neither destroy thee, nor forget the covenant of thy fathers which he sware unto them.”
Most of us have known a time when going back through the door felt harder than anything that happened while we were away. Each step of leaving seemed reasonable at the time. It is the coming back, with people knowing where we have been, that we cannot make ourselves do.
Trees are not embarrassed by this. An oak drops every leaf it has. It stands bare through the winter, and from the outside it looks dead. Then spring comes, and the tree does not have to explain itself. Nobody asks the oak where it has been. The sap rises again because the root never left the ground. The new leaves simply come when the root is still alive and the light comes back.
Moses speaks this verse right after a grim warning. He has just told Israel exactly what their idols would cost them. They would be scattered among the nations and "left few in number," and there they would serve gods of "wood and stone, which neither see, nor hear, nor eat, nor smell." Then, from that place of scattering, comes the offer: "But if from thence thou shalt seek the LORD thy God, thou shalt find him, if thou seek him with all thy heart and with all thy soul." Notice the words "from thence." God does not wait until they find their own way home. He meets them wherever the scattering has left them. Then come the words the KJV prints in brackets, as if Moses could not leave them unsaid: "For the LORD thy God is a merciful God." And He "will not forsake thee, neither destroy thee, nor forget the covenant of thy fathers." The promise is tied to seeking, and what it asks for is the whole heart. Half a heart is not a smaller version of that seeking; it is something else.
God, many of us did not stop believing. We stopped talking to You, and the silence became comfortable faster than we expected. Now the door feels heavier than the leaving ever did. You said "from thence," so we are speaking to You from here, from where we really are and not where we would like to be found. Take the part of our hearts we have been holding back. We are not asking You to make the walk back easy. We are asking You to be at the other end of it, and You have promised that You will be. Amen.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 90 is The Letter He Meant (Jude 1:3).