Daily Manna, Year Two · Day 58 · February 27
Until the Day Dawn
“We have also a more sure word of prophecy; whereunto ye do well that ye take heed, as unto a light that shineth in a dark place, until the day dawn, and the day star arise in your hearts:”
In 1740 Charles Wesley published a morning hymn. Its first verse ends with a line taken straight from today's passage: "Day-star, in my heart appear." The next verse begins, "Dark and cheerless is the morn, unaccompanied by thee."
Peter is writing near the end of his life, and he knows it: "Knowing that shortly I must put off this my tabernacle." A tabernacle is a tent, and Peter means his body, which he will soon lay aside. He wants his readers to have something solid after he is gone, so he tells them what he saw. They had not followed "cunningly devised fables," because he and the others were "eyewitnesses of his majesty." He means the mountain where Jesus shone with glory, and the voice from heaven: "This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased." Peter was standing there when it happened.
Then he sets the written word of the prophets beside that memory: "We have also a more sure word of prophecy." The Greek is compressed, and readers differ over what "more sure" means. Some read it as more certain even than the voice he heard, while others read it as the prophets' word made surer by what happened on the mountain. Either way, what he tells them to do next is the same, and it is the part to hold on to: "whereunto ye do well that ye take heed, as unto a light that shineth in a dark place."
A lamp in a dark room does not pretend to be the sun. It simply gives you enough light to cross the floor.
Peter means this arrangement to last only for a while: "until the day dawn, and the day star arise in your hearts." He is describing the in-between time you are living in now, between the lamp you carry in your hand and a morning that has not yet come.
So may God's word be your lamp today, giving you enough light for the next step, even on the days when the morning feels far away. And may the day star rise in your heart from the inside, just as Peter promised. When that morning comes, nobody will need to tell you it has.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 58 is Seated on the Throne (Revelation 3:21).