Daily Manna, Year Two · Day 226 · August 14
Blessed Are the Dead
“And I heard a voice from heaven saying unto me, Write, Blessed are the dead which die in the Lord from henceforth: Yea, saith the Spirit, that they may rest from their labours; and their works do follow them.”
Somebody will read this line over a coffin this year, and half the room will be quietly wondering whether it was written about the person in it. At a graveside it sounds like a blanket over everybody present. Where it sits in the book, a voice is saying it to a particular set of people who are about to be killed.
Four verses above: If any man worship the beast and his image, and receive his mark in his forehead, or in his hand, followed by the smoke of their torment, and they have no rest day nor night. Then verse twelve names the audience. Here is the patience of the saints: here are they that keep the commandments of God, and the faith of Jesus. Then the voice from heaven, and what it gives them is rest from their labours. No rest day nor night, and rest from their labours, two verses apart, with a refusal standing between them.
So the sentence does not say blessed are the dead. Four words do the limiting, which die in the Lord, and no version this app carries softens them. It does not say the works bought the blessing; they do follow them, walking behind, and every English Bible here keeps them behind. And from henceforth is genuinely awkward, since readers have argued for centuries over whether it attaches to the dying or to the blessing.
What it hands over is rest, aimed at people whose complaint was that they had none. Straight after it comes the harvest, one sat like unto the Son of man, a golden crown on his head and in his hand a sharp sickle, and the earth was reaped. The blessing sits between the mark and the sickle, in the narrowest gap in the book.
None of this is aimed at the grieving. Taken as a decoration handed out on a battlefield, this verse will hold anyone who died holding on, and hold them completely. Used as a general anaesthetic it stops meaning anything, including at the funeral where you most need it to. Notice where the qualifier spends itself. It gets settled long before the funeral, by the person in the coffin, while they still have a say.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 226 is Inherit the Earth (Psalm 37:9).