Read: Exodus 16:1-4, 13-18

A day’s portion every day. (v. 4)

Alongside yesterday’s theme, the “bliss” of knowing that there is not a single thing we cannot bring to God in prayer, the reference to “manna” in the next line of the poem gives us the confidence that there will not be a single day when he will fail to meet our needs. Throughout the forty years of Israel’s travels in Sinai the nation was physically nourished by that remarkable “bread from heaven.” This too is a lesson in praying, as morning by morning we can say to our heavenly Father, “Here is yet another day in which you will be working out your plans for me, and I know that in the process you will be supplying all I need.”

And why is prayer here described as “exalted” manna? Surely this has to do with the relationship between the Old Testament and the New. So much of what God taught his people in that earlier time was a preview of much greater things yet to come, a series of models or patterns of the realities that were to be unveiled in the Christian era. Manna, that curious edible substance settling like frost during the night all around the encampments of the travelling Israelites, could feed people’s bodies. But the corresponding gift from God to us is his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord, the true Bread from heaven that nourishes hearts and minds as well as bodies. Our prayer must be the response of his hearers in John 6:34: “Lord, give us this bread always.”

 

Here is the poem in its entirety:

Prayer (I)

BY GEORGE HERBERT

Prayer the Church’s banquet, Angels’ age,

God’s breath in man returning to his birth,

The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,

The Christian plummet sounding heav’n and earth;

Engine against th’ Almighty, sinner’s tower,

Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,

The six-days-world transposing in an hour,

A kind of tune, which all things hear and fear;

Softness, and peace, and joy, and love, and bliss,

Exalted Manna, gladness of the best,

Heaven in ordinary, man well drest,

The milky way, the bird of Paradise,

Church-bells beyond the stars heard, the soul’s blood.

The land of spices; something understood.

Prayer:

Prayer: Lord, give us this bread always.

Author: Michael Wilcock

 

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