Everlasting Mercy

A young woman named Mary stands in her cousin Elisabeth's house in the hill country of Judea. She sings a song made almost entirely of older lines from Scripture, and this is one of them: "And his mercy is on them that fear him from generation to generation."

Mary was quoting, because the promise was already old when she sang it. At Sinai, God described Himself as "Keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin." Moses put a number on it in Deuteronomy: God "keepeth covenant and mercy with them that love him and keep his commandments to a thousand generations." Today's psalm says this mercy is "from everlasting to everlasting," and it adds which way it travels: "and his righteousness unto children’s children." Later, Paul wrote to Timothy, a young man whose father was Greek and whose mother was Jewish. He traced the same thing through one family, by name: "the unfeigned faith that is in thee, which dwelt first in thy grandmother Lois, and thy mother Eunice." So the line runs from Sinai, to the psalm, to Mary's song, and then to two women and a boy.

What runs down that line is not personality, and it is not luck. It is covenant, which means God's binding promise. Everywhere the psalm states it, a condition is attached, so we should keep it attached: "them that fear him." Nobody receives this automatically just because of the family they were born into. Still, it is handed down, and it is handed down by people who received it themselves.

You know the other line in your family too, the one nobody wrote into a will: the temper, the silence at the dinner table, the particular way people leave. Both lines are running through you right now. The psalm's claim is that only one of them is "from everlasting to everlasting." That is the one God holds out to you today, and you can hand it on to the people who come after you.

Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 292 is Till He Was Strong (2 Chronicles 26:16).

All 365 readings in Daily Manna