Daily Manna · Day 258 · September 15
Singing of Mercies Forever
“I will sing of the mercies of the LORD for ever: with my mouth will I make known thy faithfulness to all generations.”
A man named Ethan the Ezrahite put his name at the top of this psalm, and then wrote the most confident opening line in the psalter.
It does not stay confident. Read to the end and the psalm falls apart in his hands. From verse thirty-eight on: thou hast cast off and abhorred, thou hast been wroth with thine anointed. Thou hast profaned his crown by casting it to the ground. The psalm that begins with mercies for ever comes to how long, LORD? Ethan sang the faithfulness of God to all generations while watching the promise to David come apart in his own lifetime. That is the setting of the sentence. It is not a sentence written on a good day.
Your family knows the story of the layoff, or the scan, or the year you do not talk about. What they generally do not know is the part where God was in it, because that part sounds strange said at a table and it stays filed under things too private to mention. So the chain breaks at you, and it breaks quietly, and nobody notices for twenty years.
Ethan had every reason to keep quiet. He aimed the song at people who were not born yet, from inside a generation that had watched the crown roll in the dust. That is the only reason the psalm exists to be read by you this morning.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 258 is As It Hath Pleased Him (1 Corinthians 12:18).