Daily Manna, Year Two · Day 348 · December 14
Fire in the Bones
“Then I said, I will not make mention of him, nor speak any more in his name. But his word was in mine heart as a burning fire shut up in my bones, and I was weary with forbearing, and I could not stay.”
The high gate of Benjamin, up against the temple in Jerusalem, some time before the city fell. Pashur, a priest and chief officer of the temple, has had Jeremiah beaten and left overnight in the stocks, in the busiest doorway in the city, which is the point of stocks. Jeremiah comes out in the morning and renames him on the spot: The LORD hath not called thy name Pashur, but Magormissabib. The new name means terror on every side.
Then comes the passage this verse sits in, and it is nothing like a testimony. O LORD, thou hast deceived me, and I was deceived: thou art stronger than I, and hast prevailed. Bibles handle that verb differently, deceived, misled, induced, persuaded, and none of them make it polite. The job has made him a laughing stock and he says God overpowered him into it.
So he resigns. I will not make mention of him, nor speak any more in his name. The resignation lasts one sentence. What follows is not a fresh sense of calling; it is a physical description of not being able to keep his mouth shut. A burning fire shut up in my bones, and I was weary with forbearing, and I could not stay. Weary with holding it in. The fire is what stopped him quitting, and he does not sound glad of it.
Then read where the chapter goes, because people quoting verse nine stop before the end of the page. Four verses on he is singing: Sing unto the LORD, praise ye the LORD: for he hath delivered the soul of the poor from the hand of evildoers. In the very next verse: Cursed be the day wherein I was born. The chapter ends four lines later and never comes back up. If praise and curse have turned up in the same week of your life and you have concluded one of them must be fake, there is room here to keep both, in that order, on one page. Whoever compiled the book saw no need to fix it.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 348 is Hiding Place and Songs (Psalm 32:7).