“Oh, give thanks to the Lord,
for He is good! Because His mercy
endures forever.” –Psalm 118:1 (NKJV).
“Then God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good, and
God divided the light from the darkness.
God called the light Day, and the darkness He called Night. So the evening and the morning were the first
day.” –Genesis 1:3-5 (NKJV). “This is
the day which the Lord has made; we will rejoice and be glad in it.” – Psalm
118:24 (NKJV).
Do you ever
try to stretch your imagination and think how it was before God spoke and
created day and night, light and darkness, the world and everything in it, the
sky, the seas, the firmament, the animals, the birds, the creatures
everywhere—and then man and woman?
From
nothing he created the world and its order!
With the power of His word He created! And God has been very good at
making days from that time henceforth.
At first, calendars were not like we know them now, with 365 days per
year except for leap year. But back then,
man with his ingenuity, and no doubt inspired by God, wrapped the days in
countable time. Seven is known to be a
‘perfect number,’ and so seven days were contained in a week of time. Weeks were enumerated into four (and a few
days more) for months. Twelve months
were designated in a year. Ten years
became a decade and 100 years a century.
Even the
light and darkness—day and night—were combined in a period of twenty-four hours
for a day. That day counted out as 1,440
minutes or 84,400 seconds. Perhaps we
might overlook the significance of this time and how counted, but note how it
has order and sequence.
Rev. Robert
J. Morgan wrote: “God is in the day-making business.
The Ancient of Days is the Manufacturer of Days…One new day rolls off
God’s assembly line every twenty-four hours right on schedule, each one unique (100
Bible Verses Everyone Should Know by Heart. Nashville, TN: B&H Publishing Group,
2010, p. 165). Just to consider
receiving a new day every twenty-four hours is phenomenal!
Then the
question comes: How shall we use the new
day allotted to us? How shall we fill
the gift of today that God is so good at making and giving to us?
I heard of
a widow who was feeling somewhat sorry for herself and her plight as she faced
the prospect of days alone after her husband died. As she was reading her Bible, Psalm 118:24
seemed to leap out at her. She decided
she would use a glass-carving instrument and carve the verse into the panes of
the window at which she stood every morning immediately after arising. Seeing the words carved into the glass became
a good reminder to her that each day was a brand new gift from God . Why should she feel such self-pity when God
had provided so bountifully for her?
With the Psalmist, she resolved to be glad and rejoice with each new
day.
A Bible
dictionary indicates that rejoice means to feel gladness, to exult, to be
jubilant, to have a heart that sings.
Vivian Green gave us these classic lines about how to rejoice: “Life isn’t about waiting for the story to
pass. It’s learning how to dance in the
rain.”
Here’s a
little quatrain from my pen, a song of praise for today that can be sung to the
hymn tune “The Old 100th”—“The Doxology”:
O Lord, I
thank You for today;
Praise for
Your guidance on my way.
When
nighttime falls may all be well”
At last in
Heaven may I dwell. Amen.
-Ethelene Dyer Jones 04.06.2014
-Ethelene Dyer Jones 04.06.2014
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