Daily Manna, Year Two · Day 151 · May 31
Open Thy Mouth
“I am the LORD thy God, which brought thee out of the land of Egypt: open thy mouth wide, and I will fill it.”
In the temple at Jerusalem the Levites sang a set psalm on each day of the week, and the rabbis' record of the temple service gives Psalm 81 to the fifth day. So once every seven days, the traders, pilgrims and priests in the courts heard the same line sung from the steps: "open thy mouth wide, and I will fill it."
The psalm was written for a festival: "Blow up the trumpet in the new moon, in the time appointed, on our solemn feast day." It opens with harps and timbrels and a joyful noise. Then the singing gives way to God's own voice, and the festival turns into something like a court hearing: "Hear, O my people, and I will testify unto thee."
The line everyone quotes has neighbours on both sides. Just before it God says, "There shall no strange god be in thee; neither shalt thou worship any strange god." Just after it He says, "But my people would not hearken to my voice; and Israel would none of me." The sentence itself opens with words that echo the start of the Ten Commandments: "I am the LORD thy God, which brought thee out of the land of Egypt." In the Ten Commandments those words lead straight into a command. Here they lead into an offer of food.
The people hearing this had been fed by God before, in the desert. He filled their mouths there with bread nobody could explain and with water out of a rock. Yet those same mouths kept opening for something else: "We remember the fish, which we did eat in Egypt freely; the cucumbers, and the melons, and the leeks, and the onions, and the garlick." Their mouths were never empty. They were already full of longing for what they had left behind.
The psalm ends with what might have been: "He should have fed them also with the finest of the wheat: and with honey out of the rock should I have satisfied thee." God states His promise plainly and leaves it standing, and the grief in those last verses is as big as the meal that was waiting on the table. So come to Him with your mouth open, and let go of whatever you have been filling it with. The God who brought His people out of Egypt still means what He says: "I will fill it."
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 151 is Weeping and Shouting (Ezra 3:12).