Daily Manna, Year Two · Day 324 · November 20
Clothed With Humility
“Likewise, ye younger, submit yourselves unto the elder. Yea, all of you be subject one to another, and be clothed with humility: for God resisteth the proud, and giveth grace to the humble.”
Yea, all of you be subject one to another, and be clothed with humility. Peter has finished with the elders and turned to everybody, and the word he reaches for is a clothing word.
Stay with clothed, because the verb behind it turns up nowhere else in the New Testament and it means knotting a garment on so it stays. The garment in the word is a servant's apron, the thing tied over your clothes when there is work to be done that would spoil them. Versions render it be clothed, clothe yourselves, gird yourselves, all of them after the same picture, which is somebody putting something on for a job. An apron goes on, comes off, and is visible to everyone in the house. Peter had watched it happen once: He riseth from supper, and laid aside his garments; and took a towel, and girded himself. The man who then objected, out of what he took for reverence, was Peter. Thou shalt never wash my feet.
The God of all grace, who hath called us unto his eternal glory by Christ Jesus, after that ye have suffered a while, make you perfect, stablish, strengthen, settle you. That is Peter's own blessing, five verses down from the apron, and every verb in it is something done to you by somebody else while you are wearing it.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 324 is Authority Over the Enemy (Luke 10:19).