Daily Manna, Year Two · Day 188 · July 7
Tell The Children
“That they might set their hope in God, and not forget the works of God, but keep his commandments:”
A grandfather is halfway through telling a story to his grandchildren. He has reached the part where he does not come off well, and you can almost hear him deciding whether to keep going.
You have faced that same choice. Think of what you would like to pass on to someone younger. The honest version runs through years you would rather leave out. So you are tempted to tell them how things turned out and skip the hard road that got you there, because the road does not make you look good.
Psalm 78 is seventy-two verses long, and it states its purpose at the start: "We will not hide them from their children, shewing to the generation to come the praises of the LORD, and his strength, and his wonderful works that he hath done." Verse 7 names three aims: "That they might set their hope in God, and not forget the works of God, but keep his commandments."
Then look at what the psalm actually tells the children. The very next line states the aim the other way round, and it is about the parents: "And might not be as their fathers, a stubborn and rebellious generation." From verse 9 on, much of the psalm is the record of those fathers going wrong. "The children of Ephraim, being armed, and carrying bows, turned back in the day of battle." "They kept not the covenant of God," and they "forgat his works."
So the lesson for setting a child's hope in God turns out to be a long, honest story about people who failed to do it. The psalm never smooths over the rough parts, and it never suggests that God's works were made smaller by the people who forgot them. In fact the failures are how the children could tell whose strength it was, because God kept His people even when they did not keep His covenant.
May you tell your story with the hard road left in. May the parts you would rather edit out turn out to be the parts that show God's faithfulness most clearly. And may someone younger set their hope in God because of what they heard about Him, far more than anything they heard about you.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 188 is Soul Waiting on God (Psalm 62:1).