Daily Manna, Year Two · Day 292 · October 19
Till He Was Strong
“But when he was strong, his heart was lifted up to his destruction: for he transgressed against the LORD his God, and went into the temple of the LORD to burn incense upon the altar of incense.”
"It appertaineth not unto thee, Uzziah, to burn incense unto the LORD." Azariah the priest and eighty other priests said that to their king inside the temple, while he stood there with a censer in his hand.
Uzziah was sixteen when the people made him king, and he reigned "fifty and two years." "He sought God in the days of Zechariah," and "as long as he sought the LORD, God made him to prosper." Then comes a long list of what he achieved. He built towers at the corner gate in Jerusalem and towers out in the desert. He dug many wells and kept farmers and vine dressers in the hills, "for he loved husbandry," which means he loved working the land. He even had "engines, invented by cunning men, to be on the towers and upon the bulwarks, to shoot arrows and great stones withal." Then: "And his name spread far abroad; for he was marvellously helped, till he was strong." The next sentence picks up that last word and shows where it led: "But when he was strong, his heart was lifted up to his destruction." Six chapters later, three generations on, Chronicles says the same about King Hezekiah: "for his heart was lifted up." Hezekiah humbled himself afterwards, but Chronicles tells of no such turning for Uzziah. He lived out his days in "a several house," a house set apart, "being a leper; for he was cut off from the house of the LORD."
God, we have asked You for the first half of that story and never thought about the second. We ask You to make us prosper, and we mean the towers and the wells. We ask You to help us marvellously, yet we have never once asked what will happen inside us on the day the help arrives. Keep someone beside us who is allowed to say "it appertaineth not unto thee," and let it be a person we did not choose and cannot send away.
So ask yourself plainly: what have you become so good at that nobody corrects you in it any more? If that question stings, take heart from Hezekiah. When he "humbled himself for the pride of his heart," the wrath of the LORD "came not upon them in the days of Hezekiah." The God who sends correction is the same God who receives a humbled heart, and He still receives one today.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 292 is Everlasting Mercy (Psalm 103:17).