Eaten Up

David is up to his neck in water, and hoarse from calling for help: "I am weary of my crying: my throat is dried: mine eyes fail while I wait for my God." He has fasted, and people mocked him for it. He has worn sackcloth, and they turned him into a joke. The men who sit in the town gate talk about him, and the drunkards make songs about him. Even his own family has stopped claiming him: "I am become a stranger unto my brethren."

It is from that place that he writes this line: "For the zeal of thine house hath eaten me up; and the reproaches of them that reproached thee are fallen upon me." Zeal is a burning kind of care. David cared so much about God's house that the caring was costing him, and the insults people aimed at God kept landing on him instead. The zeal had eaten him up, the way hard work wears a person down. Yet four verses earlier he says something no tidy reading of this psalm should leave out: "O God, thou knowest my foolishness; and my sins are not hid from thee." He makes no claim to be innocent. He is a sinful man worn out by his love for God's house.

Both halves of the line were taken up later and applied to Jesus. When the disciples watched Him clear the temple, they "remembered that it was written, The zeal of thine house hath eaten me up." Paul quotes the other half about Christ: "The reproaches of them that reproached thee fell on me." So the cost of caring about God's honour is known and counted by the One who went all the way through this psalm ahead of you. May you know that He saw every insult you carried for His sake. May your foolishness, which He already knows, never keep you away from Him, because it has been in front of Him from the beginning and He still welcomes you. And may you hold on to the promise David reaches near the end of his psalm: "For the LORD heareth the poor, and despiseth not his prisoners."

Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 161 is Salvation and Strength (Psalm 37:39).

All 365 readings in Daily Manna, Year Two