Daily Manna · Day 147 · May 27
God Sings Over You
“The LORD thy God in the midst of thee is mighty; he will save, he will rejoice over thee with joy; he will rest in his love, he will joy over thee with singing.”
The LORD thy God in the midst of thee is mighty; he will save, he will rejoice over thee with joy; he will rest in his love, he will joy over thee with singing.
Take the singing and let it be the only picture in front of you for a minute.
Zephaniah is a short and almost unbearable book. Its first chapter has God saying I will utterly consume all things from off the land. It uses the phrase the great day of the LORD and means every word of it. Three chapters of that, and then this. The order is the point. The singing is not naive and it is not uninformed. It comes after the accounting, from someone who has read the file and is not working from an edited copy of you.
Look at who is making the sound. Everywhere else the people sing and God listens. Here it is turned around: God has the voice. And the word is not humming. It is the loud ringing shout used at festivals, the noise a crowd makes when something has finally gone right. The line just before it is the opposite kind of sound, he will rest in his love, which can be rendered he will be silent in his love, the way a person stops explaining himself and simply stays in the room. Silence and shouting, from the same God, about the same person.
So the promise, plainly. He is in the midst of you and not observing from the edge. He is mighty, which means the gladness is not sentimentality from someone unable to help. And you are not being tolerated. You are being sung over, loudly, by God, who knows precisely what he is singing about.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 147 is Land Not Inhabited (Leviticus 16:22).