Settled on Their Lees

The LORD will not do good, neither will he do evil. That is a quotation, and Zephaniah tells us where he got it: that say in their heart. Nobody in Jerusalem said it out loud. It was the working assumption underneath a comfortable decade.

Lees are the sediment at the bottom of a wine jar. Left standing on it, the wine thickens and takes the taste of its own sludge, and the remedy was to pour it off into another vessel and leave the sediment behind. These men are settled on their lees. Undisturbed for years, and the settling has done something to them they cannot taste from the inside.

Jeremiah uses the identical picture of a nation that never had a bad century. Moab hath been at ease from his youth, and he hath settled on his lees, and hath not been emptied from vessel to vessel: therefore his taste remained in him, and his scent is not changed. Never poured, therefore never altered. In that sentence, unchanged is the accusation.

Then the search. I will search Jerusalem with candles. You light a candle for corners and behind the jars, for what daylight in the middle of the room will not show. The people hunted are the settled, and their creed is not that God does not exist; it is that he is real and inert, that nothing arrives from that direction either way. You reach it by comfort rather than by argument.

The invitation in the same small book comes with no guarantee attached, which is why it can be trusted. Seek ye the LORD, all ye meek of the earth; seek righteousness, seek meekness: it may be ye shall be hid in the day of the LORD's anger. It may be. The pouring from vessel to vessel is open to anyone who asks. Asked for, it is kinder than done to you.

Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 138 is Work Remembered (Hebrews 6:10).

All 365 readings in Daily Manna, Year Two