Daily Manna, Year Two · Day 187 · July 6
One Sentence, Two Verses
“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 published a Greek New Testament divided into numbered verses. His numbers are the ones still printed in the New Testament of your Bible. Most of his breaks fall in sensible places, but some land in the middle of a sentence, and this is one of them.
Verse 23 reads, "For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God," and the sentence does not stop there. In the Greek it runs straight on into verse 24: "Being justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus." So verse 23 is only half a thought. It gives the whole diagnosis with none of the cure, and a great many people have been handed it in exactly that state.
To come short is to arrive with less than you needed, like an arrow that drops before it reaches the target. And the target is named plainly: "the glory of God." There is no lower standard kept aside for better people. The verse before has already settled that: "for there is no difference."
Then comes the word "freely," and it is worth slowing down for. The Greek word behind it means as a gift, for nothing, without any cause. Jesus uses the same word when He quotes the Psalms about the hatred against Him: "They hated me without a cause." He was hated for no reason, and we are justified for no reason in ourselves. In the same breath Paul names how it was done, and he uses a word from the marketplace: "the redemption that is in Christ Jesus." To redeem is to buy someone out. It costs you nothing because Christ paid it all, and the next verse says so plainly: "a propitiation through faith in his blood."
So read the two verses aloud as the one sentence they are, and do not stop where the number sits. Ask yourself which half you have been living in. If it has been the first half, the second half is God's word to you as well: you are justified freely, by His grace, through what Christ has already done.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 187 is The LORD That Healeth (Exodus 15:26).