Daily Manna, Year Two · Day 73 · March 14
Gave the Sense
“So they read in the book in the law of God distinctly, and gave the sense, and caused them to understand the reading.”
"If God spare my life, ere many years I will cause a boy that driveth the plough shall know more of the Scripture than thou dost." William Tyndale said that to a clergyman around 1523, as John Foxe records it. ("Ere" means before.) In 1536 he was strangled and burned at Vilvoorde for that work. He never wanted a Bible that sat on a shelf in a language nobody in the fields could understand.
The work he gave his life for is described in Nehemiah. A great crowd stands in the street before the water gate "from the morning until midday" while the law is read aloud. Thirteen men are named, along with the Levites, as the ones who helped the people understand. "So they read in the book in the law of God distinctly, and gave the sense, and caused them to understand the reading." There are three steps there: read the words, explain what they mean, and make sure the people understand.
The Hebrew word behind the first of those three can mean reading clearly, section by section, or translating as one reads. The rest is not in doubt. These people had come back from Babylon, and many think their everyday speech had drifted away from the Hebrew of the law. Whatever the reason, the reading needed help to reach them.
Scripture keeps coming back to this work. Philip finds a man in a chariot reading Isaiah, and he asks him, "Understandest thou what thou readest?" The answer is honest: "How can I, except some man should guide me?" On the road to Emmaus, Jesus does the work Himself for two travellers who had the Scriptures but could not make sense of them. What they remember afterwards is how it felt: "Did not our heart burn within us, while he talked with us by the way, and while he opened to us the scriptures?"
So do the second step for one person this week. Choose a passage that took you real effort to understand, and go to someone in your life who is reading the Bible and not getting it. Give them the sense of it. You do not need a pulpit, since Philip did it sitting in a chariot. And the same Lord who opened the Scriptures on the Emmaus road can make a heart burn while you talk.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 73 is The Promise (Hebrews 13:5).