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?”
A Victorian undergraduate who had never been there wrote of a ruined city cut into red sandstone, in country that had been Edom's, that it was a rose-red city half as old as time. The line stuck, and so did the impression it left: somewhere up in the rock, out of reach, out of the world's way.
Sit on one word in this verse. Deceived. The pride of thine heart hath deceived thee. Pride is described here as a confidence trick worked on its own owner, and the mark never files a complaint, because the entire product is a feeling of safety.
Watch the trick working inside a single sentence. Thou that dwellest in the clefts of the rock, whose habitation is high. That part is true. Edom's ground was defensible and everybody in the region knew it. Then comes the lie, and it is only a small extension of the fact: that saith in his heart, Who shall bring me down to the ground? A real advantage, carried one step too far, and asked as though it had no answer.
Jeremiah delivers nearly the same oracle about 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, one finding.
And verse eleven says 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. They watched their relations get taken and stayed where they were. Safety had made spectators of them.
Their question does get answered. 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.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 61 is Inseparable (Romans 8:38-39).