Daily Manna · Day 186 · July 5
Never Cast Off
“For the LORD will not cast off his people, neither will he forsake his inheritance.”
Nobody knows when this psalm was written; it gives no date. It could fit the days of Assyria in the eighth century before Christ, or Babylon in the sixth, or any of the long stretches when the people breaking God's law were the people winning. The psalmist describes them plainly: "They slay the widow and the stranger, and murder the fatherless." Then he adds, "Yet they say, The LORD shall not see." That is the setting in which this promise was spoken.
The word to hold on to is "inheritance." In Hebrew it is nachalah, a property word. It meant family land that could never be sold for good, and even if it was sold, it came back to the family in the year of jubilee. It is the kind of land Naboth would not hand over to King Ahab, because it was "the inheritance of my fathers" and not his to give away. The Bible uses this word again and again for Israel, and the direction of it is startling. Israel is not the one inheriting here. Israel is the inheritance, God's own share, which He took for Himself out of all the nations.
That makes the promise more than comfort. If God cast off His people, it would not be like Him changing His mind about some people He had grown tired of. It would be like a man throwing away his own family land. The psalm does not claim the pressure stops, and a few verses later the wicked still "gather themselves together against the soul of the righteous." What it claims is that God will not abandon His people, and the reason is what they are to Him.
So here is a blessing over you. It is especially for you if somebody has dropped you before, and you have quietly assumed God works the same way. May you learn from Him, and not only from a page, that you are no tenant here. May the ground you stand on turn out to be the ground He kept for Himself. And on the night you are most sure He has finally had enough of you, may you find that He has not moved.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 186 is Under the Altar (Revelation 6:10).