Daily Manna · Day 306 · November 2
Mercy in the Heavens
“Thy mercy, O LORD, is in the heavens; and thy faithfulness reacheth unto the clouds.”
The objection to a verse like this is that it is too easy. Anybody can say God's mercy is enormous. It costs nothing to say and it changes nothing by Thursday, and most of us have heard it often enough that it has stopped landing anywhere.
So look at what it is answering, because the psalm does not open here. It opens inside a man's head. The transgression of the wicked saith within my heart, that there is no fear of God before his eyes. For he flattereth himself in his own eyes. That is the first picture: a person sealed inside his own commentary about himself, running his own assessment, believing it. Four verses of a closed room. Then, with no transition at all, the sky.
And we know that room better than we would like to admit. We keep a private number on our own forgiveness. We have all worked out roughly where the line sits, past which we assume God has heard this particular confession from us often enough. We call that realism. It is actually the same closed room the psalm has just described, with better manners.
What breaks it open is not a better estimate. It is a change of scale. Thy mercy, O LORD, is in the heavens; and thy faithfulness reacheth unto the clouds. The next verse keeps going: righteousness like the great mountains, judgments a great deep. He is not saying God is generous. He is saying you have been measuring in a room with a ceiling.
So bring him the same thing you brought last week. The same one, without the preamble about how you know you have been here before. Then get up and go and do the repair the confession was avoiding: the call, the apology, the sitting down with the person you have not looked at properly since it happened.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 306 is Once to Die (Hebrews 9:27).