Daily Manna, Year Two · Day 82 · March 23
Two Kinds of Speech
“The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork.”
"The Hand that made us is Divine." Joseph Addison printed that in The Spectator in 1712, at the end of a paraphrase of this psalm still sung as The Spacious Firmament on High. The verses in front of it have the sun and the moon and the planets going round in silence, and Addison's word for what they are doing is publish.
That is the psalm's own claim and it is a strange one. The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork. Then: There is no speech nor language, where their voice is not heard. A testimony with no words in it, reaching everybody, needing no translation. Nobody has ever had to learn a language to be stopped in the street by a sky.
Then the psalm turns at verse seven, and the turn is why this is one poem and not two. The law of the LORD is perfect, converting the soul: the testimony of the LORD is sure, making wise the simple. Words now, doing work the sky cannot do. The sun told David that somebody made all this. It never told him one thing about himself, and by verse twelve he is asking a question the stars have no answer for: Who can understand his errors? cleanse thou me from secret faults.
The sky is out there tonight doing the job it was hung to do, and it will get your attention this week if you give it any chance at all, on a walk, or out of a window at four in the morning. Let it stop you where you stand, and take that as a kindness done to you. Then go and open the part of the book that can tell you your own faults. No amount of looking up will ever say them.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 82 is Under His Wings (Psalm 91:4).