Daily Manna · Day 292 · October 19
Everlasting Mercy
“But the mercy of the LORD is from everlasting to everlasting upon them that fear him, and his righteousness unto children's children;”
A young woman in the hill country of Judea, standing in her cousin's house, sings a song made almost entirely out of other people's lines. One of them is this one. His mercy is on them that fear him from generation to generation.
Mary was quoting because the promise was already old when she used it. At Sinai God had named himself as keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin. Moses puts a number on it in Deuteronomy: he keepeth covenant and mercy with them that love him to a thousand generations. The psalm here says from everlasting to everlasting, and adds the direction of travel, his righteousness unto children's children. Then Paul, writing to a young man from a mixed home, traces the thing in one family by name: the unfeigned faith that dwelt first in thy grandmother Lois, and thy mother Eunice. Sinai, the psalm, the song in the hill country, and then two women and a boy.
What runs down that line is not temperament and it is not luck. It is covenant, and the psalm keeps a condition attached to it in every place it appears, so the condition should stay attached: them that fear him. Nobody inherits this passively. It is handed over, and it is handed over by people who were themselves handed it.
You know the other line of descent in your family, the one nobody put in a will. The temper, the silence at the table, the particular way people leave. Both lines are running through you right now, and the psalm's claim is that only one of them has everlasting on either end of it.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 292 is Till He Was Strong (2 Chronicles 26:16).