Seedtime and Harvest

While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease. It is said over an altar, with the water barely off the ground, to a family who have just watched the world drown.

The reason God gives is the strangest sentence in the chapter, said to himself. And the LORD said in his heart, I will not again curse the ground any more for man's sake; for the imagination of man's heart is evil from his youth.

Go back two chapters for the grounds of the flood. And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. The same fact, in nearly the same words, doing opposite work. Noah's family walk off the ark carrying what they carried on. What changed is what God decided to do about it, and he anchors the change in the one thing that is not going to be fixed.

So the promise is about regularity: four pairs, the plainest description of an ordinary year anybody ever wrote. Jeremiah later calls it a covenant, my covenant of the day, and my covenant of the night, and stakes the throne of David on its being unbreakable. Jesus points at the same machinery and names who runs it: he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.

Nobody thanks anybody for the sun coming up. You have had tens of thousands of mornings and have never been asked to account for the year keeping its shape. What do you call a promise kept every day you have been alive, without your once noticing it was one?

Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 284 is A Pleasant Land (Jeremiah 3:19).

All 365 readings in Daily Manna, Year Two