Try My Reins

Examine me, O LORD, and prove me; try my reins and my heart.

The verse before it is one most of us could not say aloud in company. Judge me, O LORD; for I have walked in mine integrity. Reins are the kidneys, which in Hebrew reckoning sit at the deepest interior of a person, and paired with the heart they cover everything a man cannot see about himself. Try comes from the assayer's bench, the word for refining a metal you suspect; prove is the plainer test beside it.

Jeremiah gives both halves of the transaction in two lines. The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it? Then the answer, in the first person: I the LORD search the heart, I try the reins. David asks the same in another psalm and adds a clause showing he expects to be told something: And see if there be any wicked way in me. Paul, who had every reason for confidence about his own conduct, will not run the assay himself. I know nothing by myself; yet am I not hereby justified: but he that judgeth me is the Lord.

Where he leaves it is a promise, and it is worth the whole sentence. Judge nothing before the time, until the Lord come, who both will bring to light the hidden things of darkness, and will make manifest the counsels of the hearts: and then shall every man have praise of God. That examination is coming to everyone, requested or not. Those last four words are the promise.

Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 126 is As Your Soul Prospers (3 John 1:2).

All 365 readings in Daily Manna, Year Two