Daily Manna, Year Two · Day 90 · March 31
The Letter He Meant
“Beloved, when I gave all diligence to write unto you of the common salvation, it was needful for me to write unto you, and exhort you that ye should earnestly contend for the faith which was once delivered unto the saints.”
Jude sat down to write one letter and posted a different one.
He says so in the same breath as his subject. Beloved, when I gave all diligence to write unto you of the common salvation, it was needful for me to write unto you, and exhort you that ye should earnestly contend for the faith which was once delivered unto the saints. He had wanted to write about what everyone in the room already held between them. Something arrived before the ink did, and he names it in the next line: certain men crept in unawares, ungodly men, turning the grace of our God into lasciviousness. The trouble had a seat inside the room.
Earnestly contend is a wrestling word in Greek, from the family that gave the language its word for a contest and gave us agony. Then the phrase that says what the wrestling is for: the faith which was once delivered unto the saints. Once here carries the sense of once for all, and Bibles print it that way; a single completed handing over, with no second edition promised. Delivered is the ordinary word for passing something to somebody to keep. Paul writes the same idea to Timothy from a prison cell: That good thing which was committed unto thee keep by the Holy Ghost which dwelleth in us.
So the thing you have been asked to hold was in existence before you were, it did not come out of you, and the only reason it can be defended at all is that it arrived finished. Whatever this week asks you to stand up for, nobody is asking you to invent the house you are standing in.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 90 is Merciful and Faithful (Deuteronomy 4:31).