We live in a world of constant change, but God has created us with a longing for permanence and stability. At the beginning of this series, I quoted from the book of Ecclesiastes, which describes the futility of life in this fallen world: “Smoke, nothing but smoke.... There’s nothing to anything–it’s all smoke. What’s there to show for a lifetime of work, a lifetime of working your fingers to the bone? One generation goes its way, the next one arrives, but nothing changes–it’s business as usual for old planet earth. The sun comes up and the sun goes down, then does it again, and again–the same old round.... Everything’s boring, utterly boring–no one can find any meaning in it. Boring to the eye, boring to the ear. What was will be again, what happened will happen again. There’s nothing new on this earth. Year after year it’s the same old thing” (1:2-5, 8, The Message). Generations come and go, people live and die, empires rise and fall. Later in the book, the author points to the hopelessness of living in a world where both good and evil people face death: “The same destiny ultimately awaits everyone, whether they are righteous or wicked, good or bad, ceremonially clean or unclean, religious or irreligious. Good people receive the same treatment as sinners, and people who take oaths are treated like people who don’t. It seems so tragic that one fate comes to all. That is why people are not more careful to do good. Instead, they choose their own mad course, for they have no hope. There is nothing ahead but death anyway” (9:2-3, NLT).
The author of this psalm is aware of the futility of life in this fallen world. We don’t know who he was. In most Bibles there’s a superscription at the beginning of many psalms. The superscription for Psalm 90 reads, “A prayer of Moses the man of God.” But these superscriptions were added hundreds of years after the text was written. They’re often helpful, but they are not part of the Scripture. This prayer could have come from Moses, or it could have been written by someone else with Moses in mind. Or the tradition tying this psalm to Moses could have developed long after the psalm was written. In any case, this prayer fits well with what we know about Moses.
He grew up as an adopted member of a royal family, then had to flee into the wilderness after he killed an Egyptian who was mistreating an Israelite. For the next 40 years, he lived in the desert as a shepherd, this man who had grown up in Pharaoh’s court. Moses was “educated in all the wisdom of the Egyptians and was powerful in speech and action,” (Acts 7:22), but as year after year went by in the desert, he must have wondered about the meaning of it all. He then served faithfully, leading God’s people out of Egypt, but he wasn’t allowed to enter the promised land because he lost his temper and dishonored God in front of the nation. In Deuteronomy 34, we see him at the very end of his life: “Then Moses went to Mount Nebo from the plains of Moab and climbed Pisgah Peak, which is across from Jericho. And the Lord showed him the whole land.... Then the Lord said to Moses, ‘This is the land I promised on oath to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and I told them I would give it to their descendants. I have now allowed you to see it, but you will not enter the land” (34:1-4). The people of Israel had been in captivity in Egypt for over 400 years, and Moses, at God’s direction, had led them out with the intention of bringing them into their own land. But now he himself was not permitted to enter. And immediately after seeing the land from the top of Mt. Pisgah, Moses died. God allowed him to be part of an amazing work of deliverance, but then he died before the work was finished. He spent 40 years as a member of the royal family in Egypt, 40 years as a shepherd in the desert, and 40 years leading God’s people around in the wilderness, dying just before they reached the promised land. He didn’t live to see the real fruit of his life work.
We were created in God’s image, with the ability to worship Him and have fellowship with Him, and part of what this means is that we are created with a desire for permanence and stability. I often speak positively about my experience with OM India. It was one of the real formative times in my Christian life. But it wasn’t always easy. When we first arrived in north India, in the fall of 1977, I was overwhelmed by the culture. I felt like I’d been dropped into a completely different world. Everything looked different; the food was different; I didn’t speak the local language; people thought and acted differently than I did. My main job was to drive a truck, transporting an evangelistic team, but I found driving there incredibly stressful. There were people, bicycles, and animals all over the road, and I’d heard stories about mobs killing truck drivers who hit someone–even when it wasn’t the driver’s fault. For the first few months, I was afraid every time I got behind the wheel. And on top of all that, everyone could tell, just by looking at me, that I didn’t belong in India. I was a foreigner, and people in the villages stared at me wherever I went. After a few months, it all got to me and I went off by myself to spend some time in prayer. And as I was singing a hymn I was gripped with a new realization that in the midst of all the changes I was experiencing, God was still the same. Every area of my life was in upheaval because of the sheer amount of cultural change I had experienced, but God was still there and I could find refuge and rest in Him. That realization was a turning point for me. That’s what the author of this psalm has found. In this world of constant change–where so much of our effort seems futile, where we don’t live to experience the fruit of our labor, where those we love are taken from us in death, where our bodies decline no matter how hard we work at physical fitness, and where we face the certainty of death in the end–we can find hope by taking refuge in our eternal, unchanging God.
The psalmist begins, in verses 1&2, with a description of God. God is eternal. He is a constant, secure dwelling place for His people. The letter to the Hebrews was written to Christians who had suffered for their faith and were now ready to give up. The author of the letter urges them: “Remember those earlier days after you had received the light, when you stood your ground in a great contest in the face of suffering. Sometimes you were publicly exposed to insult and persecution; at other times you stood side by side with those who were so treated” (10:32-33). They had joyfully endured suffering for Christ, but now they were on the verge of turning away from the gospel. They’d become worn down by the pressure, so the author reminds them of the truth. In chapter 13, near the end of the letter, he says this: “Remember your leaders, who spoke the word of God to you. Consider the outcome of their way of life and imitate their faith. Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever” (13:7-8). These may have been leaders who died during a time of persecution. In any case, they were leaders who taught them at the beginning of their Christian lives, and whose lives had ended well. They hadn’t turned away. They had persevered faithfully to the end, and the author wants his readers to imitate their example: “Consider the outcome of their way of life.” So he reminds them: “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever.” In the midst of all the turmoil and pressure of enduring persecution, they can find rest and refuge in their unchanging God.
The psalmist isn’t just saying that he finds temporary refuge in God. He says God is the permanent dwelling place of His people. This implies two things: 1) We’re not homeless. We’re not adrift, on our own in this lost world. We may feel disconnected and alienated at times. But the reality is that God is our dwelling place. T.S. Eliot, before his conversion to Christianity, wrote a very pessimistic poem entitled “The Waste Land.” He says this, early in the poem (he’s looking at the world around him): “What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow/ Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,/ You cannot say, or guess, for you know only/ A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,/ And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,/ And the dry stone no sound of water.” His experience, looking at the world, is alienation. He can’t make sense of it, because there’s nothing solid to hold onto. He sees only “a heap of broken images,” fragments that make no sense by themselves. There’s no relief, no resting place in this dry, broken world. He’s experiencing the ultimate homelessness. He longs for permanence and wholeness, but he lives in a broken, fragmented world. But Eliot discovered, a few years later, that the eternal, unchanging God is the dwelling place of His people. 2) Our true home is not a place, but a person. Moses wasn’t allowed to enter the land. But his true dwelling place wasn’t the land anyway. The longing for a place where we belong is fulfilled in communion with the eternal God. “The thirst for place is resolved in the gift of communion” (Walter Brueggemann, The Message of the Psalms, pp. 111-112). The answer to our sense of alienation is not to build our dream house. Have you noticed the strong drive, in our society, to own a house? Why is owning a home so important to people? I believe part of the answer is that people hope to find some sense of permanence in owning a home. They hope to find some sense of relief from the alienation of living in this lost, fallen world. They hope to find some sense of belonging somewhere. But the answer is not to look for an ideal home, where we can live for the rest of our lives. The answer is to take refuge in God: “Lord, through all the generations you have been our home! Before the mountains were created, before you made the earth and the world, you are God, without beginning or end” (NLT).
That’s the first thing we need to know. We need to know who God is. But we also need a more accurate view of ourselves, so the psalmist gives us that in verses 3-11: “So don’t return us to mud, saying, ‘Back to where you came from!’ Patience! You’ve got all the time in the world–whether a thousand years or a day, it’s all the same to you. Are we no more to you than a wispy dream, no more than a blade of grass that springs up gloriously with the rising sun and is cut down without a second thought? Your anger is far and away too much for us; we’re at the end of our rope. You keep track of all our sins; every misdeed since we were children is entered in your books. All we can remember is that frown on your face. Is that all we’re ever going to get? We live for seventy years or so (with luck we might make it to eighty), and what do we have to show for it? Trouble. Toil and trouble and a marker in the graveyard” (The Message).
Life in this world is full of difficulty and sorrow and loss. And each sorrow, each loss, is a reminder of our mortality. Paul says, in 2 Corinthians 4:16: “outwardly we are wasting away.” That’s our condition in this fallen world; we are steadily wasting away. We tend to forget that. We have an innate longing for eternity. When things are going well, we can sometimes almost forget the uncertainty and instability of this life. Much of the frenzy of our society is an attempt to evade the truth about who we are. But no matter what we do, things happen to shatter our sense of comfort, and we are again reminded that we are mortal, and that we live in a fallen world, a world that can never provide the sense of permanence we long for. The author of Hebrews says it in this way: “For here we do not have an enduring city, but we are looking for the city that is to come” (Heb. 13:14).
We too easily seek relief in the wrong things. In one of Francis Schaeffer’s printed sermons, he describes the excitement he felt at buying a new car, the first new car he had ever owned. He says he couldn’t keep his eyes off it, and he wanted to keep it looking shiny and new. He was obsessed with it, initially. Have you ever had that experience? There’s a sense of exhilaration that goes with buying something new, but that exhilaration quickly fades. So we find ourselves wanting to buy something else. And the process goes on and on. The poet Kathleen Norris says “Consumerism is fed by a desire to forget our mortality” (Dakota, p. 120). Schaeffer’s main point, in his sermon, is this: “We all tend to live ‘ash heap lives’; we spend most of our time and money on things that will end up in the city dump.” He was thrilled with his new car, but after a couple of days someone bumped into it and made a fairly large scratch on the side. He said that scratch completely changed his attitude about the car. He suddenly realized how fragile and unstable it was; it wasn’t going to last. Someday it was going to end up in the junk yard, as scrap metal. This fallen world has been “subjected to frustration, and decay” as Paul says in Romans 8.
Our lives in this world are uncertain and unstable. We’re experiencing the effects of the Fall. We feel lost and alienated in this world because things are not what they were meant to be. We’re living in a world that is under God’s wrath, a world that is alienated from its Creator. The psalmist doesn’t want to bury his sense of alienation and despair by trying a new hobby or buying a new toy. So he begins by speaking the truth in God’s presence. That’s what he’s been doing for the first 11 verses of this psalm. He begins with the truth about God, in verses 1&2, and then with the truth about us, as people living in this world, in verses 3-11. And then, having begun in this way, he cries out to God and asks for grace to live wisely in the light of the truth.
A large part of our problem is that we so easily live in unreality. We forget who we are and try to live as if we were immortal. But the truth is that our lives in this world are uncertain and unstable. Our earthly possessions may very well outlast us, and we’ll leave behind these things that have gripped our hearts, the things we’ve accumulated in our attempt to drown out the realization of our mortality. “A voice says ‘Cry out.’ And I said, ‘What shall I cry?’ ‘All people are like grass, and all their glory is like the flowers of the field. The grass withers and the flowers fall, because the breath of the Lord blows on them. Surely the people are grass” (Isa. 40:6-7).
Life in this world is uncertain. If we listen regularly to the news, we hear every day stories of unbearable grief and sorrow. And every one of these stories reminds us, if we’re paying attention, that we live in a fallen world, a world that is alienated from the life of God. We live in a world where sorrow and death are always there, waiting right around the corner. Reminders of our mortality are all around us, if we’re paying attention. We need to pay attention and face the truth about ourselves. It’s wise to be intentional in cultivating this awareness. That’s what the psalmist is doing when he cries out, in verse 12: “Teach us to number our days aright, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.” Here’s the same idea, in Psalm 39:4: “Show me, O Lord, my life’s end and the number of my days; let me know how fleeting is my life.” The order for night prayer that I use closes every night with these words: “May the all-powerful Lord grant us a restful night and a peaceful death.” Because we’re so prone to illusions of immortality, and because our culture is so absorbed with living for the present moment, we need to be intentional in cultivating an awareness that we will not be here forever. Someday each of us is going to die, and part of our calling in life is to prepare ourselves for that day when we will stand before God. The psalmist begins by speaking the truth in God’s presence, and then he cries out for grace to live in the light of that truth.
We tend to gravitate toward one extreme or the other. Either we hide our heads in the sand and refuse to face the fact that we’re going to die one day, or we become morbid and obsessed with the certainty of death. Some monks, in the past, have slept in their casket, to remind themselves each night that their business in life is to prepare for death. I think that’s going too far. I had a friend in his late 30's who bought a newspaper every day, and the first thing he read each day was the obituary page. He was morbid, obsessed with the idea of dying. The psalmist isn’t morbid, nor is he living in unreality. He’s faced the truth, but he’s facing it in the light of his relationship with God.
In verse 1, he addresses God as “Lord,” Adonai, the Sovereign Lord. The sovereign, eternal God is the focus in the early part of the psalm, when he’s drawing a contrast between God’s eternity and our frailty. But in verse 13, when he begins crying for help, he uses the covenant name, Yahweh. The One he’s praying to is not only the eternal, unchanging God; He’s a God who has entered into a covenant relationship with His people. God is exalted beyond our comprehension, but He is not detached from us. He’s not indifferent to our situation. He is not only God the Creator. He is our God. In relationship with Him, our brief lives in this world have meaning and purpose.
Our lives here are uncertain, but our God is eternal. Living wisely means walking with Him in the light of our own mortality. In July of 2001, my 38-year-old niece got up in the morning, like she might have done any other day of her life. She was in good health. There was every reason to expect that she’d live a long, full life. But that afternoon she was killed in a boating accident. She woke up in the morning, not knowing that it would be the last day of her life. Living wisely means ordering our lives in the light of the fact that we don’t know when our lives are going to end. And, above all, it means living in a growing relationship with the eternal God. “ Now this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent” (John 17:3).
If this is the last week of your life, will you be ashamed when you’re standing in the Lord’s presence? What about 10 years from now? Will you be ordering your life differently then? Are you living for yourself, straining for something to relieve the tedium and futility of life in this fallen world? Are you seeking relief in all the wrong things? If you’re living for yourself now, if you’re not seeking God’s will in every area of your life, what makes you think things will be any different in 10 or 20 years?
“We all tend to live ‘ash heap lives; we spend most of our time and money on things that will end up in the city dump.” Does that describe your life? In the light of eternity, are you throwing your life away? Meditate on the shortness and uncertainty of your life. Find ways to remind yourself, to bring yourself back to reality. Try this: before bed each night, pray the Lord’s Prayer. Pray it meditatively, paying attention to what you’re saying. In this prayer, you’re involving God in every area of your life. And then close with these words, from the order for Night Prayer that I use: “May the All-Powerful Lord grant us a restful night and a peaceful death.” By doing this, you’re inviting God into every area of your life, and you’re also looking forward, in His presence, to the certainty of your own death, and you’re asking Him to be with you until the end. It doesn’t demand much time, and you can do it after the lights are out, before you fall asleep.
This psalm reminds us of who God is, who we are, and then it guides us in responding to God. Knowing that our lives are quickly passing by, and that God is eternal, how do we pray? What should we pray for? Listen to verses 12-17 in The Message: “Oh! Teach us to live well! Teach us to live wisely and well! Come back, Yahweh–how long do we have to wait?–and treat your servants with kindness for a change. Surprise us with love at daybreak; then we’ll skip and dance all the day long. Make up for the bad times with some good times; we’ve seen enough evil to last a lifetime. Let your servants see what you’re best at–the ways you rule and bless your children. And let the loveliness of our Lord, our God, rest on us, confirming the work that we do. Oh, yes. Affirm the work that we do!” A good way to pray this psalm is by using Isaac Watts’ paraphrase, “O God, Our Help in Ages Past.”
No comments:
Post a Comment