Daily Manna, Year Two · Day 335 · December 1
There I Will Meet
“And there I will meet with thee, and I will commune with thee from above the mercy seat, from between the two cherubims which are upon the ark of the testimony, of all things which I will give thee in commandment unto the children of Israel.”
You pray in a car, or with the kettle on, or in a room where you also pay the bills, and some part of you suspects that this is why it feels thin. Somewhere there ought to be a place kept for it.
Israel was given one, down to the measurements. The English name came in through William Tyndale, who by the usual account was reaching after Luther's German when he wrote mercy seat, and the King James kept his word. What it names is a lid. Pure gold, two cubits and a half by a cubit and a half, with two cherubims of gold, of beaten work at the ends of it, wings up, faces turned in toward each other, looking at what lay between them.
Underneath the lid were the commandments. On top of it, once a year, blood. Aaron was warned not to come at all times into the holy place within the vail, that he die not. In the middle of the joinery God gives the reason for the whole arrangement: And there I will meet with thee, and I will commune with thee from above the mercy seat. Numbers reports it happening in the flattest way imaginable, that Moses heard the voice of one speaking unto him from off the mercy seat that was upon the ark of testimony, from between the two cherubims. A voice, from a lid, over a broken law, with blood on the gold.
Where do you meet people now? The gold is gone, the house that held it was burned down, and the word Greek uses for that lid was picked up and set on your Son, a propitiation through faith in his blood. So I am not asking for a better room. Meet me over the thing I have broken, and let me be as unhurried about it as a man who knows there is blood on the gold. Amen.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 335 is Slow to Anger (Psalm 103:8).