Daily Manna · Day 226 · August 14
Inherit the Earth
“Those that wait upon the LORD, they shall inherit the earth.”
An old man is speaking in Psalm 37. He tells you so himself, partway through the psalm: "I have been young, and now am old; yet have I not seen the righteous forsaken." Whatever you make of that claim, it tells you where he is standing. He has lived a long life, and he has watched people cheat their way to the front and get away with it.
The psalm answers what he has seen with a list of commands. It is worth walking through them one at a time, because the list itself is the argument.
It begins with "Fret not thyself because of evildoers," and that command comes three times in the first eight verses. The Hebrew word for fret means to get heated, to burn up inside. Then come the others: "Trust in the LORD, and do good." "Delight thyself also in the LORD." "Commit thy way unto the LORD." "Rest in the LORD, and wait patiently for him." "Cease from anger, and forsake wrath."
That makes six commands, and not one of them is a plan for winning. They tell you what to do with your hands and your temper while somebody else is rewarded for bending the rules you kept.
Then comes today's verse, and it is longer than the half people usually quote: "For evildoers shall be cut off: but those that wait upon the LORD, they shall inherit the earth." The psalm never suggests that you imagined the injustice. The first half is a hard sentence about the wicked, and it is the reason the second half is not naive.
So this promise is honest with you. It never promises things will go your way soon. God is asking you to wait, and waiting is different from being told no. The land goes to the people who were willing to wait for it to be handed to them, and the ones who grabbed it do not keep it. Waiting like that can look exactly like losing, from the outside and often from the inside too. The old man has lived long enough to see how it ends, and the Lord he waited for is the same Lord you can wait for today.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 226 is Blessed Are the Dead (Revelation 14:13).