Daily Manna, Year Two · Day 231 · August 19
Prepared His Heart
“For Ezra had prepared his heart to seek the law of the LORD, and to do it, and to teach in Israel statutes and judgments.”
For Ezra had prepared his heart to seek the law of the LORD, and to do it, and to teach in Israel statutes and judgments. Four items, in that order, and the order is the verse.
Prepared comes first and it is not a mood. The same verb turns up saying the opposite about a king, he did evil, because he prepared not his heart to seek the LORD, and again as the one good thing found in Jehoshaphat, thou hast prepared thine heart to seek God. It means fixed, set, decided well before the day that will test it.
Then seek, then do, then teach, and teach is last. Ezra is introduced two verses earlier as a ready scribe in the law of Moses, which is to say a professional, and he had every reason to put teaching first, since teaching was the job. Chapter seven keeps saying something else about him. According to the good hand of his God upon him. He arrives carrying a letter from Artaxerxes giving him authority to appoint magistrates and judges and to punish unto death, or to banishment, or to confiscation of goods, and the sentence that explains the man mentions none of it.
Four items, short enough to hold against your own week. Most of us have the order inverted somewhere: teaching what we have not done, doing what we never went looking for, looking with a heart that was never settled before the search began. Start at whichever of the four went missing. The end you are already good at can wait. Nothing suggests Ezra got through it quickly. The chapter gives him four months on the road.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 231 is Flourishing Like Palm Trees (Psalm 92:12-14).