Daily Manna · Day 107 · April 17
Delivered from All
“The righteous cry, and the LORD heareth, and delivereth them out of all their troubles.”
You say fine before the question has finished. It is efficient, and it means nobody has heard an honest sentence out of you in weeks.
Set that down for a moment, because this psalm is not primarily about your honesty. It is a piece of praise, and what it is praising is a specific competence. The LORD heareth. That is the claim, and the psalm keeps circling back to it from different angles: his ears are open unto their cry, his standing close to people whose hearts have been broken, this poor man cried, and the LORD heard him. Four times, four different vantage points, the same fact. Hearing is being treated as a divine attribute in the same way that power or eternity is.
Which is not obvious and is worth stopping on. Plenty of gods have been credited with strength. Very few have been credited with attention. The gods of the surrounding nations were managed, fed, carried and placated; nobody expected them to listen to somebody with nothing to offer. And this psalm goes further, because it nowhere says the LORD hears the eloquent or the composed. It says he hears a cry, which is an undignified noise, and it says he is near to the broken-hearted, which includes people who cannot get a word out at all.
And the rescue is described as coming out of trouble rather than instead of it. Delivereth them out of all their troubles. Out of assumes in.
So the praise stands on its own without any help from you. He hears. He has always heard. He heard the ones who never managed a sentence.
Which leaves only one question, and it belongs to you rather than to him: what exactly have you been protecting by saying fine?
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 107 is If My People (2 Chronicles 7:14).