Daily Manna, Year Two · Day 61 · March 2
Pride Deceived Thee
“The pride of thine heart hath deceived thee, thou that dwellest in the clefts of the rock, whose habitation is high; that saith in his heart, Who shall bring me down to the ground?”
In Victorian times a university student wrote a poem about a ruined city carved into red sandstone, in land that once belonged to Edom. He had never been there, but he called it "a rose-red city half as old as time." The picture stuck: a city high in the rock, out of everyone's reach.
Today's verse turns on one word: deceived. "The pride of thine heart hath deceived thee." Pride is pictured as a con trick a person plays on himself, and the victim never complains, because the trick hands him a feeling of being safe.
Watch it work inside one sentence. "Thou that dwellest in the clefts of the rock, whose habitation is high." That part is true. Edom's land was hard to attack, and everyone in the region knew it. Then comes the lie, only one small step past the fact: "that saith in his heart, Who shall bring me down to the ground?" A real advantage has been pushed too far.
Jeremiah brings almost the same message to the same people: "Thy terribleness hath deceived thee, and the pride of thine heart, O thou that dwellest in the clefts of the rock." Two prophets looked at Edom and found the same thing.
Verse eleven shows what Edom did with all that height. "In the day that thou stoodest on the other side, in the day that the strangers carried away captive his forces." While their own relatives in Judah were carried off, Edom stood back, and God says, "even thou wast as one of them." The next verses add that they gloated, took the goods, and caught those who escaped. Feeling safe had turned them from watchers into people who joined in.
Their question does get an answer, and God gives it Himself: "Though thou exalt thyself as the eagle, and though thou set thy nest among the stars, thence will I bring thee down, saith the LORD." No height is out of His reach, and that is good news as well as a warning. The book ends with a promise for the people Edom abandoned: "the kingdom shall be the LORD's." The safety pride only pretends to give is real in God's hands, for everyone who stops trusting their own high rock and trusts Him.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 61 is Inseparable (Romans 8:38-39).