Daily Manna, Year Two · Day 203 · July 22
Into Darkness
“Lover and friend hast thou put far from me, and mine acquaintance into darkness.”
"God never gives you more than you can handle." Somebody said that to you and meant it kindly, and the man who wrote this psalm would have had no idea what to do with the sentence.
He is not writing from outside the faith. His first line is an address. O LORD God of my salvation, I have cried day and night before thee. And he does not describe an accident. Thou hast laid me in the lowest pit, in darkness, in the deeps. Thou hast put away mine acquaintance far from me. Every verb has a subject and he names it every time.
The middle of the psalm is a run of questions and none is answered. Wilt thou shew wonders to the dead? shall the dead arise and praise thee? Shall thy wonders be known in the dark? and thy righteousness in the land of forgetfulness? Then a report on how long this has gone on: I am afflicted and ready to die from my youth up. He has been in this since he was a young man, and it is the whole life he has had.
Then your verse, which is the last one. Lover and friend hast thou put far from me, and mine acquaintance into darkness. Nothing follows it. The psalm never lifts the way the others do, and nothing has been left out of your Bible; that is where it ends. It was written in that condition and handed to the chief Musician to be set and sung in that condition, on the understanding that somebody in the congregation would need it.
You will be handed the paragraph that fixes this. Do not take it, and do not go hunting for one yourself tonight. If you are in the dark, this psalm is yours and you may have all of it. Read the last verse once more, out loud if you can. Then stop, say nothing else, and stay where it leaves you.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 203 is Feet Like Hinds (Habakkuk 3:19).