Daily Manna, Year Two · Day 48 · February 17
What Jabez Asked
“And Jabez called on the God of Israel, saying, Oh that thou wouldest bless me indeed, and enlarge my coast, and that thine hand might be with me, and that thou wouldest keep me from evil, that it may not grieve me! And God granted him that which he requested.”
"Oh that thou wouldest bless me indeed, and enlarge my coast, and that thine hand might be with me, and that thou wouldest keep me from evil, that it may not grieve me! And God granted him that which he requested."
Then the list picks up right where it left off: "And Chelub the brother of Shuah begat Mehir." That is all we have of Jabez. He gets two verses in a chapter of names that most readers skim, and then he is gone.
Before you take up the promise, be careful what you build on it. The passage never calls these words a formula. They appear nowhere else in Scripture, and nobody in the Bible is told to pray them. We are left to guess what Jabez wanted the larger coast for and what he did with it, and money is not mentioned at all. "Coast" in the King James Version means border, or territory. The chapter is a family record of the tribe of Judah, clan by clan, and it mentions towns and land along the way. So a prayer about borders fits naturally on this page.
What the passage does tell us is easy to walk past. "His mother called his name Jabez, saying, Because I bare him with sorrow." She named her son after her own pain, and he carried that name all his life. Then the last thing he asks God for is to be kept from evil, "that it may not grieve me." He is asking that his life would not be marked by the sorrow his name spoke of.
The answer Jabez received is no rule for everyone. Paul asked the Lord three times to take one thing away from him, and it stayed. What came back instead was "My grace is sufficient for thee," and that made nobody's coast any bigger.
So the truth to carry is smaller than what people usually build on these two verses, and it is better. Here is a man with no great deeds on record, only the note that he "was more honourable than his brethren," and a name that reminded everyone of his mother's hardest days. He prayed from the middle of all that, and "God granted him that which he requested." The text tells us no more than that, and it is enough: the God of Israel listens when a person with a painful start calls on Him.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 48 is The Heart Doctor (Psalm 147:3).