Daily Manna · Day 63 · March 4
Unmovable Kindness
“For the mountains shall depart, and the hills be removed; but my kindness shall not depart from thee, neither shall the covenant of my peace be removed, saith the LORD that hath mercy on thee.”
"It went, and I hadn't realised how much I was standing on it."
A woman is walking through a house she has to sell. She has done this room a hundred times in the dark. She keeps testing the floor with her foot before she puts her weight down, which she has never done before in her life, and she cannot stop.
Isaiah 54 is spoken to a people who lost a country. What makes the chapter unusual is that God does not pretend about how it felt from their side. For a small moment have I forsaken thee. In a little wrath I hid my face from thee for a moment. That is God's own summary, and He does not soften it into a misunderstanding. Then He does something startling: He swears an oath, and He picks the precedent deliberately. This is as the waters of Noah unto me: as I have sworn that the waters of Noah should no more go over the earth, so have I sworn that I would not be wroth with thee. He is putting His kindness in the same category as the promise the whole world is standing on right now.
And then the measurement in verse 10, which is geological. The mountains shall depart, and the hills be removed. Those are the things that do not move. His kindness outlasts them.
Lord, the ground moved this year and we are not going to pretend otherwise, since you did not. It felt like being left. You have said what it was and how long it lasted, and you have sworn about what comes next, and we would rather have the oath than an explanation. Hold us while we learn to put our weight down again on floors we used to trust. And where we can be steady for somebody else this week, in something small, make us steady. Amen.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 63 is The Night Ride (Nehemiah 2:18).