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 a story and has reached the part where he comes off badly. You can hear him deciding whether to keep going.
You have run that calculation. Whatever you would hand on to somebody younger, the honest version runs through years you would rather edit, and the instinct is to pass on the conclusion and leave out the road, because the road does not recommend you.
Psalm 78 is seventy-two verses long and states its purpose at the front. 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 the 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 it actually tells them. The very next line gives the goal in the negative, and it is about the teachers: And might not be as their fathers, a stubborn and rebellious generation. From verse 9 to the end, the psalm is mostly 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. They forgat his works.
So the curriculum for setting a child's hope in God turns out to be a long, unflattering account of people who did not. The psalm never files the edges off, and never suggests God's works were made smaller by the company they kept. The failures are how you can tell whose strength it was.
May you tell it with the road left in. May the parts you would edit turn out to be load-bearing. And may somebody younger set their hope in God because of what they heard about him, and never because of what they were told 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).