Two Kinds of Speech

"The Hand that made us is Divine." Joseph Addison printed that line in The Spectator in 1712. It is the last line of his poem on this psalm, which is still sung as the hymn The Spacious Firmament on High. In the verses before it, the sun, the moon and the planets move round in silence, and Addison's word for what the sun is doing is "publishes." It publishes the work of God's hand to every land.

That is the psalm's own claim, and it is a surprising one. "The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork." The firmament is the sky. "Day unto day uttereth speech," and yet the sky never uses a word. Even so, "their line is gone out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world." The sky's message reaches everyone, and nobody needs it translated. You do not have to learn a language to be stopped in your tracks by a sunset.

Then at verse seven the psalm turns, and that turn is why it is one poem rather than two. "The law of the LORD is perfect, converting the soul: the testimony of the LORD is sure, making wise the simple." Now there are words, and they do work the sky cannot do. The sun told David that Someone made all this, but it never told him one thing about himself. By verse twelve he is asking a question no star can answer: "Who can understand his errors? cleanse thou me from secret faults."

So may the sky stop you this week, on a walk or through a window at four in the morning, and may you take that moment as a kindness from the God who hung it there. Then may you open the part of His book that can show you your own heart, because no amount of looking up will tell you that. And may you end where David ends, praying to the Lord who is "my strength, and my redeemer."

Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 82 is Under His Wings (Psalm 91:4).

All 365 readings in Daily Manna, Year Two