Daily Manna, Year Two · Day 87 · March 28
The Day Is Thine
“The day is thine, the night also is thine: thou hast prepared the light and the sun.”
Axes and hammers going into carved cedar, and smoke standing over the temple mount. Above all of it, entirely unbothered, the sun comes up on time.
Psalm 74 is written by somebody standing in that. They break down the carved work thereof at once with axes and hammers. They have cast fire into thy sanctuary. Then the line that measures the whole disaster: We see not our signs: there is no more any prophet: neither is there among us any that knoweth how long. No temple, no word, no timescale.
So the psalmist goes looking for evidence that has not been burned, and that is where the creation lines come in. Thou didst divide the sea by thy strength. Thou hast set all the borders of the earth: thou hast made summer and winter. And in the middle of them: The day is thine, the night also is thine: thou hast prepared the light and the sun.
Lifted out on its own that reads like a pleasant thought about sunrises. Where it sits it is an argument, and it is made in fury. He is reciting to God what God still owns, in a city where God's own house has just been proved burnable. The day and the night are still on the inventory. Summer and winter are still turning. The army in the sanctuary could not reach either of them.
The psalm never says the temple will be rebuilt. It ends unresolved, still demanding that God remember. Whatever was taken from you this year, the light and the sun were prepared by the same hands, and the morning is still his to send. He will send it tomorrow whether or not anything else has been answered.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 87 is The Finish Line (2 Timothy 4:7-8).