Daily Manna · Day 158 · June 7
New Every Morning
“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.”
These lines were written by a man standing in a burnt city with the bodies not yet buried.
That is not scene setting, it is the whole difficulty. Lamentations is five poems about Jerusalem after Babylon, and the third is the most personal and the most brutal: he hath led me, and brought me into darkness, but not into light. He is not describing an enemy there. He is describing God. And then, at the centre of the book, with nothing whatever having improved outside, 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 travels from the one sentence to the other inside a single poem, and the text is honest enough not to make it easy. He does not claim the ruin was overstated. He does not claim to understand it now. He counts what survived, and it is a short list: we are not consumed. Not we are comfortable, not we have been vindicated. Still here, and he credits that entirely to mercy rather than to the walls having held. New every morning means the supply is not carried over. Yesterday's did not have to be stretched to cover today.
The question does not close, and pretending it does would insult anyone reading this from inside an actual ruin. How does a man say great is thy faithfulness in a city that fell? The book never answers that in a form you could print on a card. It only records somebody doing it.
So do not 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.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 158 is Not Slack (2 Peter 3:9).