Everlasting Kingdom

A grandmother and a boy of about nine are washing up together, and the news is on in the next room.

The boy: Is it going to be all right?

The grandmother: Which part?

The boy: All of it. They keep saying it is the worst it has ever been.

The grandmother: They said that when I was your age. I remember exactly where I was standing.

The boy: And was it?

The grandmother: It was very bad. And I am still here washing up, and so is the world, and the man who said it is dead now.

That conversation is closer to what this psalm is doing than most people notice, because the psalm is explicitly about handoff between generations. One generation shall praise thy works to another, it says nine verses earlier, and shall declare thy mighty acts. Then here: thy dominion endureth throughout all generations, which in the Hebrew is literally in every generation and generation, one after another, named twice as though counting them off.

Which is the comparison being offered. Governments get their generation. They get their turn, they get the font on the front page, and then they hand it to somebody else, and the psalm is not sneering at them; it is simply putting a longer clock in the room. God's rule hands on to nobody. It has already covered every era anybody alive has been frightened by, including the ones that genuinely were the end of the world for the people in them.

So the doom loop is available all night and nobody is going to take it off you. There is also a stopping point, and it is less a discipline than a door: twenty minutes, then closed, and one sentence said over it, that his dominion outlasts this. And your own generation is the only one you were given, so there is something small inside it with your name on. Ring your representative or ring your mother. The offer stands either way, and it will still be standing tomorrow.

Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 337 is Except the LORD (Psalm 127:1).

All 365 readings in Daily Manna