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.”
Today's verse ends with a picture worth holding in front of you for a minute: "he will joy over thee with singing."
Zephaniah is a short book, and most of it is very hard to read. In its first chapter God says, "I will utterly consume all things from off the land." The book warns that "The great day of the LORD is near," and it means every word. Only near the end of the book does this verse come, and the order matters. This singing comes after the full accounting, from Someone who has read the whole file on you. He is not working from an edited copy.
Look at who is making the sound. Three verses earlier, God's people are told, "Sing, O daughter of Zion." Usually it is the people who sing and God who listens, but here God is the one singing. The Hebrew word means a loud, ringing shout of joy, the kind of noise a crowd makes at a festival when something has finally gone right. The line just before it is the opposite kind of sound: "he will rest in his love." Word for word, the Hebrew says "he will be silent in his love," the way a person stops explaining himself and simply stays in the room with someone he loves. So the silence and the shouting both come from the same God, about the same person.
Here is the promise in plain words. God is "in the midst of thee," right in the middle of your life, close enough to touch. He "is mighty," so His gladness has strength behind it, and He acts on it: "he will save." And you are not just being put up with. You are being sung over, loudly, by God, and He knows exactly 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).