Daily Manna, Year Two · Day 64 · March 5
The Old Paths
“Thus saith the LORD, Stand ye in the ways, and see, and ask for the old paths, where is the good way, and walk therein, and ye shall find rest for your souls. But they said, We will not walk therein.”
Ask for the old paths gets read out whenever a hymn book is replaced or a service time moves, which makes Jeremiah the patron of everybody's favourite decade and hands the verse to whoever wants nothing to change.
Take the sentence apart, then, and see what it does not say.
It does not say the old paths are good. Ask for the old paths, where is the good way, and walk therein: there are several old paths, the good way is one of them, and it has to be asked after. The instruction is to stand at a junction and enquire, and Israel's own past was full of roads God had spent centuries warning them off.
It does not mean old in the sense of living memory. Jeremiah is standing in a country whose religion was ancient and busy and wrong, and two verses earlier he reports what the respected voices were saying: They have healed also the hurt of the daughter of my people slightly, saying, Peace, peace; when there is no peace. The traditional men in that room were the problem.
And it does not stop where the posters stop it. The verse has one more clause. But they said, We will not walk therein. The rest was real and it was declined, by people who had the directions. Verse seventeen repeats the shape: watchmen set, a trumpet sounded, and they said, We will not hearken. Any use of this verse that stops before the refusal has cut the sentence in half.
One more thing, which changes the address. Ye shall find rest for your souls turns up again in the mouth of Jesus, attached to a yoke: Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls. Jeremiah's phrase gets a person and a piece of farm equipment attached to it.
When did you last stand still at a junction and ask, with a road already picked out? And if the answer came back, which half of verse sixteen would you be saying?
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 64 is Chosen Generation (1 Peter 2:9).