Daily Manna, Year Two · Day 144 · May 24
I Found None
“And I sought for a man among them, that should make up the hedge, and stand in the gap before me for the land, that I should not destroy it: but I found none.”
In a hotel meeting room, one verse is up on the screen. The speaker asks who will stand in the gap, and hands go up all around the tables.
The last words of the verse rarely make it onto the slide: "but I found none." The next verse goes on, "Therefore have I poured out mine indignation upon them; I have consumed them with the fire of my wrath." By the time Ezekiel recorded it, God's search was over, and no one had been found.
Read the list that comes just before it, because the search covered everyone. There was "a conspiracy of her prophets," who were "like a roaring lion ravening the prey." Her priests "have put no difference between the holy and profane." Her princes were "like wolves ravening the prey, to shed blood, and to destroy souls, to get dishonest gain." Then come the ordinary people: "The people of the land have used oppression, and exercised robbery, and have vexed the poor and needy."
The gap is a hole in a city wall. Ezekiel had used the picture before, speaking to the prophets: "Ye have not gone up into the gaps, neither made up the hedge for the house of Israel to stand in the battle in the day of the LORD." So the man God looked for is like a soldier standing in the broken place in the wall while the enemy pushes through. Israel remembered one time when that place was filled, and a psalm names the man: "had not Moses his chosen stood before him in the breach, to turn away his wrath." In Ezekiel's day nobody stood there, and Jerusalem's walls came down within his own lifetime.
Jeremiah was sent on the same search through the same streets, and he came back with the same finding. If that search came down your street this week, it would be looking for a life given over to God, and that asks far more than a raised hand. Yet notice why God searched at all: He wanted someone to stand in the gap "that I should not destroy it." Jeremiah was told the same, to look "if ye can find a man," with the promise, "I will pardon it." God searched because He wanted to spare, and He still welcomes anyone who will stand before Him and pray for the place where they live.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 144 is Joy Comes in the Morning (Psalm 30:5).