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. Eighty priests said that to their king in the temple, with a censer in his hand.
He was sixteen when they 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 the list. Towers at the corner gate and in the desert, wells dug, vine dressers in the hills, because he loved husbandry. Engines invented by cunning men, to be on the towers and upon the bulwarks, to shoot arrows and great stones withal. And his name spread far abroad; for he was marvellously helped, till he was strong. The next sentence picks that last word up and turns it over: But when he was strong, his heart was lifted up to his destruction. Chronicles says the same of Hezekiah, six chapters and a century on: But Hezekiah rendered not again according to the benefit done unto him; for his heart was lifted up. He humbled himself afterwards. Uzziah never did.
God, we have asked you for the first half of that and never for the second. Make us prosper, we say, and we mean it as far as the towers. Help us marvellously. We have never once thought to ask what will be going on in us on the day the help lands. Keep somebody beside us who is allowed to say it appertaineth not unto thee, and let it be a person we did not appoint and cannot dismiss.
Uzziah finished in a several house, a leper, cut off from the house of the LORD. So what have you got good enough at that nobody corrects you in it any more, and when did you last treat that as a danger?
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 292 is Everlasting Mercy (Psalm 103:17).