Scripture Daily

Context No. 583 of 4322 · Tobit

Context · Reflection

Tobit 6:6-12: in context

6The young man said to the angel, “Brother Azarias, of what use is the heart, the liver, and the bile of the fish?” 7He said to him, “About the heart and the liver: If a demon or an evil spirit troubles anyone, we must burn those and make smoke of them before the man or the woman, and the affliction will flee. 8But as for the bile, it is good to anoint a man that has white films in his eyes, and he will be healed.” 9But when they drew near to Rages, 10the angel said to the young man, “Brother, today we will lodge with Raguel. He is your kinsman. He has an only daughter named Sarah. I will speak about her, that she should be given to you for a wife. 11For her inheritance belongs to you, and you only are of her kindred. 12The maid is fair and wise. And now hear me, and I will speak to her father. When we return from Rages we will celebrate the marriage; for I know that Raguel may in no way marry her to another according to the law of Moses, or else he would be liable to death, because it belongs to you to take the inheritance, rather than any other.”

In the book of Tobit, a young man named Tobias is on a journey, guided by a companion he does not yet know is the angel Raphael in disguise. Earlier a great fish had lunged at Tobias in the river, and the angel had told him to catch it and keep its heart, liver, and gall, which seemed like odd advice at the time. Now Tobias asks the obvious question: what are these fish parts actually for? And the angel explains. The heart and liver, burned as incense, will drive off the demon that has tormented a woman named Sarah, killing every man she married; and the gall will heal the white films of blindness, the very affliction that has blinded Tobias's own father back home. The strange keepsakes from the river turn out to be exactly the remedies for two troubles Tobias is walking straight toward.

That is the quiet wonder of the story. At the moment Tobias pulled that fish from the water, he had no idea he would need any of it. He did not know he was about to marry Sarah and face the demon, or that his father's blindness would be healed by what he was carrying. God, through the angel, had him gather the remedy before he ever met the trouble. The provision ran ahead of the need. What looked at the time like a random encounter with a fish was actually God equipping him, in advance, for challenges that had not yet arrived and that he could not have anticipated.

That is a comforting pattern to trust, because my life works more like this than I usually notice. The lesson learned in one season, the relationship formed for no obvious reason, the strange detour, the capacity built through an old hardship, so often turn out to be exactly what a later trial requires, provision God laid up before I knew I would need it. Can I trust that God is already equipping me, in ways I do not yet understand, for troubles I have not yet met, and that what seems incidental in my path now may be the very remedy he has prepared for what lies ahead?

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