Daily Manna, Year Two · Day 177 · June 26
Until I Have Shewed
“Now also when I am old and greyheaded, O God, forsake me not; until I have shewed thy strength unto this generation, and thy power to every one that is to come.”
Your name is on fewer lists than it was five years ago.
Psalm 71 is written from further along that road, and it is not a serene place. Cast me not off in the time of old age; forsake me not when my strength faileth. There are people around him who have already filed him: God hath forsaken him: persecute and take him; for there is none to deliver him.
Read what he asks for, because it is narrower than you would expect. He does not ask for strength returned, or the enemies removed, or the years given back. He asks for time and an audience: until I have shewed thy strength unto this generation, and thy power to every one that is to come. Two audiences, and he will never meet the second.
Now read what the verse does not promise. It does not say the generation listened. It does not say he was spared anything, and verse 20 says the opposite in the plainest terms available: Thou, which hast shewed me great and sore troubles, shalt quicken me again. The psalm never records an answer to the request. It ends with him still asking and still singing.
That is the whole of it. A man past his usefulness by everybody's reckoning, asking God for permission to keep talking.
The warning has nothing to do with dying. Nobody is going to ask you. There is no point at which a generation turns round and requests the account of God's strength you have been carrying since you were thirty. Psalm 71 is a man who has noticed the room moving on and has opened his mouth anyway. Wait to be asked and you will simply go quiet, and nobody will notice that either.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 177 is To Live Is Christ (Philippians 1:21).