Daily Manna, Year Two · Day 291 · October 18
Abundantly Pardon
“For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the LORD. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.”
Which question did somebody close down on you with this verse? It usually comes from a kind person in a hard week. My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, delivered as a door swinging shut. There is a purpose in it, you will not understand it, and the asking is the part that has to stop.
Read the two verses in front of it. Seek ye the LORD while he may be found, call ye upon him while he is near. Then: Let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts: and let him return unto the LORD, and he will have mercy upon him; and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon. Straight on from that: For my thoughts are not your thoughts. That word for is joinery. The higher thought under discussion has just been named, and it is the pardon.
Nobody ever needed telling that God's mind is out of reach in general. What is genuinely out of reach is the size of the welcome given a man who has turned round after a long run the wrong way. We would have him back on terms, and keep the file. Isaiah goes straight on into weather: rain and snow come down and do not return until the ground has done something, and so shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth: it shall not return unto me void. Higher, in this passage, means further than you would go, in the one direction you were not braced for. What towers over you here is his mercy, and it is over you the way weather is over a field.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 291 is Mighty Spiritual Weapons (2 Corinthians 10:4-5).