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Verse of the day Thanksgiving

Early morning in a plain stone house, an older man sitting up on a sleeping mat after an illness while a woman beside him laughs with relief, a coarse dark garment dropped on the floor.
This image was made for EmberKeeper. It is an imagined scene, not a photograph of a biblical place, person or event.

For His anger is fleeting, but His favor lasts a lifetime. Weeping may stay the night, but joy comes in the morning.

Psalm 30:5 Berean Standard Bible

The verb makes weeping a guest who lodges for the night: let in, given a place to sleep, and gone by morning.

This line was first said out loud to a crowd. In verse 4 the psalmist stops speaking to God and turns to the people around him: Sing to the LORD, O you His saints. Verse 5 is the reason he gives them, and it comes from a man who has just been somewhere most of them have not.

He tells us where. You pulled me up from Sheol; You spared me from descending into the Pit. A little later he admits what he had been like before: In prosperity I said, “I will never be shaken.” Then God hid His face, and he was dismayed. So the night in this verse is not a low evening. It came close to being his last, and he does not pretend God had nothing to do with it. His anger is fleeting, he says. He does not say there was none.

The Hebrew verb behind “stay the night” is the everyday word for lodging somewhere overnight, what a traveller does when he comes in after dark and moves on in the morning. Weeping arrives as a guest. It is let in and given somewhere to sleep. Nobody in the verse is told to hide it or hurry it out of the house.

What the morning brings is a shout of joy, a sound other people can hear.

The line is often read as a timetable, as if every grief were guaranteed to be finished by breakfast. Anyone who has buried someone knows better, and the psalm never promises it. What it offers is a sense of proportion from a man who has felt both: anger for a moment, favor for a lifetime, and one of them far heavier than the other.

He spent that night himself. He still calls the weeping a lodger.

Why this passage

Context checked: Psalm 30 gives thanks for rescue from near death. The psalmist says "You healed me" (30:2) and that God pulled him up from Sheol (30:3). Verse 5 gives the reason for the call to the congregation in 30:4. The BSB heading reads "A song for the dedication of the temple. Of David"; the Hebrew word is "house," and which dedication is meant is debated. Hebrew Bibles count the heading as verse 1, so this line is 30:6 there; the BSB and the Bíblia Livre leave the heading unnumbered and give it as 30:5. The verb behind "stay the night" (lin) means to lodge overnight, and "joy" translates rinnah, a shout of joy. Verses 6-7 confess complacency before the crisis. Usually quoted as a promise that sorrow is always brief, with the line about God's anger left off.

Scripture in English is from the Berean Standard Bible, which its publisher placed in the public domain on 30 April 2023.