Your bars will be iron and brass. As your days, so your strength will be.
Deuteronomy 33:25 (WEB)
in its setting: Deuteronomy 33:24-27
1 Where we are
Hidayah is thirty-four and works a split shift at the outlet. At twenty past six on the first Monday of Term 4, her son's revision paper is open on the kitchen table, and three of the questions on it she cannot do. She has read the second one four times. The tuition centre two blocks down wants two hundred and forty a month. She makes his sandwich and writes across the top of the paper, ask your teacher. What frightens her is not the exam a fortnight away. It is the fear that her son's ceiling is whatever she can afford, and that she is the limit.
2 What the passage is doing
These are the last words Moses says. He is on a hill outside the land, and he will not cross over; the people who will cross are the children of those who died in the wilderness. Tribe by tribe he blesses them, and to Asher he says: your gates will hold, your shoes will be iron and brass for rough ground, and your strength will be measured to match your days. Not a stockpile for the years. Enough for the road under your feet.
יָמֶיךָ
yameykha · your days
The blessing is not measured in years or seasons but in days, one at a time, each with its own portion attached. Hebrew could have said your life, your future, your old age. It says your days, plural and small, and promises strength cut to fit each one as it comes. Which means the strength for next year has not failed to arrive. It is simply not today's.
3 Taking it with you
You may be the one standing beside her at the bar this afternoon, and you do your own version of her arithmetic. God has never measured a person by what they could provide. He gave his Son for people who had nothing to bring, and that is the ground you stand on before you have done one useful thing today. Your strength is not a savings account for next year. It is the portion for Monday, and Monday is what is in front of you. What she cannot teach her son, a teacher can. What you cannot cover, you were never asked to carry by yourself.
A prayer you can pray
Father, you know what I cannot afford and what I cannot do, and you have not held either against me. Thank you that you gave your Son before I had anything to bring. Give me strength for today only, and let me stop trying to carry a year I have not been handed yet. Keep the people I love in your care when my hands run out. Amen.
Soli Deo Gloria — to God alone be the glory.
