Daily Manna, Year Two · Day 15 · January 15
A Ready Writer
“My heart is inditing a good matter: I speak of the things which I have made touching the king: my tongue is the pen of a ready writer.”
You can hold the floor for forty minutes on a bad referee, a builder who did not turn up, the thing your brother said at Christmas. Asked in a small group what God has been to you this month, you produce four sentences and they are the same four sentences you produced in June.
The psalm opens on a man with the opposite problem. My heart is inditing a good matter, and inditing is a word that has aged badly; the Hebrew is a pot at the boil, a stirring that has to go somewhere. What follows is the consequence: my tongue is the pen of a ready writer. A ready writer is a professional scribe with a fast hand, and the boast is not about the hand. The hand is only keeping up.
Look at what he is full of, because it is a person. Thou art fairer than the children of men: grace is poured into thy lips. He has been staring at a king. Jesus states the mechanism: out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh. There is no route from an empty heart to a full mouth, which is why the small group question keeps producing the June answer.
Hebrews then takes verse six of this wedding song and hands it to the Son: Thy throne, O God, is for ever and ever. The king the poem was overflowing about is still on the throne, still anointed with the oil of gladness above his fellows, and the grace poured into his lips has not run dry between that morning and this one. The four sentences are downstream of something. Go and look at the king.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 15 is Near to All (Psalm 145:18).