New Every Morning

These lines were written by a man standing in a burned city, with the dead still lying in its streets.

That is more than background, because it is the whole difficulty. Lamentations is five poems about Jerusalem after Babylon destroyed it. The third poem is the most personal and the hardest to read: "He hath led me, and brought me into darkness, but not into light." The man is describing God there, and no enemy. And then, near the middle of the book, with nothing outside any better, he writes: "It is of the LORD's mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not." "They are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness."

So the question is how a man gets from the first sentence to the second inside a single poem. The text is honest enough not to make it easy. He does not claim the ruin was not so bad, and he does not claim to understand it now. He counts what survived, and it is a short list: "we are not consumed." He never claims they are comfortable, or that they have been proved right. He says they are still here, and he gives all the credit for that to God's mercy, since the walls certainly did not hold. "New every morning" means the supply is not carried over from one day to the next. Yesterday's mercy never had to be stretched to cover today.

The question does not close, and pretending it does would insult anyone reading this from inside a real ruin. How does a man say "great is thy faithfulness" in a city that fell? The book never answers that in a way you could print on a card. It only records somebody doing it.

So you do not need to answer it now either. Sit still for two minutes and say nothing, not even the verse. Some things have to be waited through before they can be said honestly. The same poem tells you that the mercy will be new again tomorrow morning, whether or not you have found the words by then.

Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 158 is Not Slack (2 Peter 3:9).

All 365 readings in Daily Manna