Daily Manna, Year Two · Day 66 · March 7
Foundation and Fire
“For other foundation can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ.”
Except the LORD build the house, they labour in vain that build it. Psalm 127 opens there, and every building text in Scripture runs downstream of it. Isaiah gets a specific promise. Behold, I lay in Zion for a foundation a stone, a tried stone, a precious corner stone, a sure foundation. Tried means tested, a stone taken out of the quarry and proved before anything was set on it. Jesus turns the same idea into a weather report: two houses, the same rain, the same floods, the same winds, and one of them founded upon a rock. By the time Paul reaches Corinth the matter is closed. For other foundation can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ.
Read the next verses, because they do something the famous line on its own does not. Paul separates the foundation from what goes on top of it: gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, stubble. Six materials, and every one of them is something a builder chose on purpose. Then the fire shall try every man's work of what sort it is. The fire goes after the load. Verse eleven has already settled what is underneath, and Paul is blunt about how the trial ends for some of the stacking: If any man's work shall be burned, he shall suffer loss: but he himself shall be saved; yet so as by fire. Saved, and standing in the smoke of everything he built.
Which sharpens the question this verse usually gets asked. The foundation under you was laid before you arrived and cannot be relaid by anybody. The material is yours. Take the largest thing you are building at present, the ministry or the reputation or the family project with your evenings in it, and work out honestly which of the six it is made of. Do that before the fire does it for you.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 66 is Come as You Are (Matthew 11:28).