Daily Manna · Day 186 · July 5
Never Cast Off
“For the LORD will not cast off his people, neither will he forsake his inheritance.”
Assyria in the eighth century, or Babylon in the sixth; the psalm does not date itself and does not need to. What it describes is any of the long stretches when the people breaking the rules were the people winning. They slay the widow and the stranger, and murder the fatherless. Yet they say, The LORD shall not see. That is the room this promise was spoken in.
The word to hold is inheritance. Nachalah is a property term, and specifically an inalienable one: the family land that could not be permanently sold, that returned at jubilee, that Naboth would not hand over to a king because it was his fathers' and not his to give. It is used again and again of Israel, and the direction of it is startling. Israel is not the one who inherits here. Israel is the inheritance, God's own allotted portion, taken for himself out of all the nations.
Which makes the promise more than reassurance. Casting them off would not be God changing his mind about some people he had grown tired of. It would be a man disposing of his own land. The psalm is not claiming the pressure stops; the wicked are still triumphing a few verses later. It claims the abandonment will not occur, and the reason is what they are to him.
So, a blessing over you, and especially 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 not a 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 certain 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).