Daily Manna, Year Two · Day 187 · July 6
The Comma
“For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God; Being justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus:”
In 1551 a printer named Robert Estienne brought out a Greek New Testament cut into numbered verses, and those are the numbers still printed in your Bible. Most of the cuts are sensible. Some land inside a sentence, and this is one.
For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God ends on a semicolon and runs straight on: Being justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus. Verse 23 is half a thought, the whole diagnosis with none of the treatment attached, and a great many people have been handed it in exactly that condition.
Come short carries the sense of arriving with less than was needed, of falling behind a mark. And what is fallen short of is named without softening: the glory of God. There is no reduced standard held in reserve for the better cases, which is what the verse before has just settled. For there is no difference.
Then freely, and this is the word to slow down for. The Greek behind it means for nothing, without cause, gratis. It is the same word Jesus uses of the hatred against him when he quotes the Psalm: They hated me without a cause. Hated for no reason; justified for no reason. And the mechanism named in the same breath is a purchase word: the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, a buying out. It cost nothing at your end because it was paid at his, which the next verse says plainly, a propitiation through faith in his blood.
Read the two verses aloud tonight as the one sentence they are, with no pause where the number sits. Notice which half of that sentence you have been living in.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 187 is The LORD That Healeth (Exodus 15:26).