Daily Manna · Day 175 · June 24
Righteousness and Judgment
“The LORD executeth righteousness and judgment for all that are oppressed.”
Pithom and Raamses, in the Nile delta. Two store cities built by people who did not want to build them, under officers with quotas, in a season when the straw was cut off and the tally of bricks was not.
Picture the day the tally comes up short. The Hebrew foremen are beaten for it. They take a reasonable case to Pharaoh and are told they are idle, ye are idle, that is why you have time to think about worship. Then they come out and meet Moses in the road and turn on him, because that is what happens to worn-down people: the anger goes to whoever is nearest and safest to shout at. Nobody in that scene has a way to make it right. Every legal avenue in the country leads back to the man who profits from the arrangement.
That is the memory Psalm 103 is working from two lines later, when it says he made known his ways unto Moses, his acts unto the children of Israel. Your verse is the summary of what he did there. The LORD executeth righteousness and judgment for all that are oppressed. Executeth is not sympathy at a distance; it is the ordinary verb for doing, carrying out, making happen. And the reach is stated: all that are oppressed. Not a shortlist of the deserving, not the ones who prayed correctly first.
Somebody with more power than you got their way again last week and you swallowed it, because arguing would have cost more than the loss did. So do the part that is still yours. If it is safe, do the concrete thing today: send the account, file the report, tell the person who ought to know. If it is not safe yet, then hold, and stop calling it fine when you pray. Waiting is not the same as pretending. You are not the one who has to make it right. You are the one who has to stop describing it as acceptable.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 175 is Write The Vision (Habakkuk 2:4).