Daily Lesson for July 28, 2016

Today's Daily Lesson comes from Psalm 74 verses 16 and 17:

16 Yours is the day, yours also the night;
you have established the heavenly lights and the sun.
17 You have fixed all the boundaries of the earth;
you have made summer and winter.
Psalm 74 is a plea by someone who feels cast away, a people forgotten of God. The sanctuary has been destroyed, the nation in tumult, the city of God in ruins.

"How long, O God?" he asks.

And then the words from our lesson: "Yours is the day, yours also the night."

In the midst of his own fears and turmoil and the foreboding of what is to come, the psalmist holds fast to his faith -- that God is near and present and holding things fast, even in the darkness.

Many of us saw the movie "The King's Speech", based on the events leading up to the radio speech King George VI of England gave to his nation on Christmas Day 1939, in those bleak and terrifying days just at the break of WWII. In the speech he quoted from Minnie Louise Haskins's poem "God Knows":

And I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year:

“Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown.”

And he replied:

“Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the Hand of God.

That shall be to you better than light and safer than a known way.”

God knows; in day and night, summer and in winter, God knows and God will guide.