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 Foxe records it, and was strangled and burned at Vilvoorde in 1536 for going on with the work. What he wanted was never a Bible on a shelf in a language nobody in the field spoke.
The line he was arguing for is in Nehemiah. A crowd stands in the street before the water gate from the morning until midday while the law is read aloud, and thirteen men are named one after another as the ones working through that crowd. So they read in the book in the law of God distinctly, and gave the sense, and caused them to understand the reading. Three verbs. Read it, open it up, get it into people's heads.
Bibles differ over the first of the three, printing distinctly, or clearly, or translating, and they agree entirely about the rest. These were people back from Babylon whose daily speech had drifted, and the reading needed help to land.
Scripture keeps coming back to this job. Philip finds a man in a chariot reading Isaiah aloud and asks him, Understandest thou what thou readest? The answer is honest: How can I, except some man should guide me? On the Emmaus road Jesus does the work himself for two walkers who had the text and no sense of it, and what they remember afterwards is the effect: did not our heart burn within us, while he talked with us by the way?
So do the second verb for one person this week. Take a passage that cost you something to understand, go to whoever in your life is reading and not landing, and give them the sense of it. That office was held by thirteen men standing in a street. Never once has it been restricted to professionals.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 73 is The Promise (Hebrews 13:5).