Daily Manna, Year Two · Day 315 · November 11
The Place He Slept
“And Jacob awaked out of his sleep, and he said, Surely the LORD is in this place; and I knew it not.”
Nearer, my God, to thee. Sarah Flower Adams published that in 1841, and the verse people remember takes Jacob's night for its picture: though like the wanderer, the sun gone down, darkness be over me, my rest a stone. Sung slowly it sounds like a man who picked the stone on purpose.
He picked nothing. Jacob went out from Beersheba, and went toward Haran, which means he is leaving fast, with a brother who has said in his heart then will I slay my brother Jacob. He lighted upon a certain place, and tarried there all night, because the sun was set. The stone was what was lying about.
Then the ladder, the angels of God ascending and descending on it, and above it a voice: I am with thee, and will keep thee in all places whither thou goest. He wakes and says your verse, then a second thing nobody prints on anything. And he was afraid, and said, How dreadful is this place! The recognition arrives as fright. By morning he has the stone upright and a vow going with a hinge in it: If God will be with me, and will keep me in this way that I go, and will give me bread to eat, and raiment to put on. Four conditions there, a fifth in the next line, so that I come again to my father's house in peace, and only then the outcome, then shall the LORD be my God. Every clause of that had already been given to him in the dark, unasked, while he slept on a rock.
Surely the LORD is in this place, and I knew it not: I could say that about most of the last ten years. You were in the room I walked out of. You were in the week I have written off. I have been asking you to come to places you were already standing in, and calling them ordinary because there was nothing to see. Keep me the way you kept him, before he asked and while he was running. And when I do wake to it, let the fear come with it, because he was right to be afraid, and I have got used to speaking to you as though this were a small thing. Amen.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 315 is Boldly to the Throne (Hebrews 4:16).