Here we are, standing at the cusp of yet
another year. It’s an annual opportunity to stop and think for a moment about
the passage of time, and not just about time in general, but our time, the time
that has flown past (for many of us all too quickly and for some not quickly
enough) and the time that stretches ahead of us, for some filled with
opportunities and new adventures, for others perhaps bringing a sense of
apprehension about what may lie ahead. To help ourselves put all of that in
perspective, I don’t think there are many more appropriate passages of
Scripture than the psalm we have just read—Psalm 90.
We tend to think of the psalms as the work
of King David. In fact, of the one hundred fifty psalms in the Old Testament,
seventy-five are ascribed to him. However, the psalm we read together a few
moments ago is unique in all the Old Testament in that it is attributed not to
David but to Moses. If you turn to it in your Bible you will see it has the
superscription, “A prayer of Moses the man of God”.
Some scholars question this attribution,
but as I have read this psalm over and over and meditated upon it during the
last couple of weeks, it makes a lot of sense. “Lord, you have been our
dwelling place throughout all generations…” It is not difficult for me to
imagine that these are the words of a man who has spent the better part of
forty years wandering through the wilderness with his people, with no home to
call their own. Yet throughout that time the Lord has been with them, visibly
witnessed through the cloud that led them by day and the pillar of fire at
night. But he had been with them long before that, as they toiled as slaves
under the searing Egyptian sun, with Joseph and Jacob and Isaac, and going back
to Abraham as he answered the call to journey from the banks of the Euphrates
to the land that God had said would belong to him and his descendants.
So picture Moses, if you will, late one
night lying back and looking up into the clear desert sky. My son Simon and I
had the opportunity to do this in Libya on the edge of the Sahara several years
ago and it was a memorable experience. Gazing into a sky uncluttered by
pollution and the glow of city lights, he knew that behind all those innumerable stars that paraded
across night after night, mightier than the mountains that surrounded him,
reaching back past the ages beyond the dawn of time, there was God. “In the
beginning, God …” And in this morning’s psalm: “Before
the mountains were born or you brought forth the whole world, from everlasting
to everlasting you are God.”
God’s Eternity
If you take a few moments to go online and
visit the NASA website, you can see an amazing photograph
with Saturn’s rings in the foreground. Not far below them you can discern a
tiny, almost insignificant, softly glowing dot. That dot is our planet earth,
as seen from a distance of nearly one
and a half billion kilometers[1]. The image gives us a picture of the vastness
of our solar system, which itself is only a tiny dot within the Milky Way,
which in turn is another tiny dot in the seeming limitlessness of the created
order.
Moses certainly did
not have access to any of the kinds of sophisticated astronomical data that are
available to us today. But he didn’t need them in order to find himself
overwhelmed by the limitlessness of God. The Bible
tells us that “since the creation
of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have
been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made” (Romans 1:20). And
we could spend all morning just considering the wonder of God’s eternal nature.
We find it sprinkled throughout the Bible, in Psalm 104, for example:
Lord my God, you are very great;
you are clothed with splendour and majesty.
The Lord wraps himself in light as with a garment;
he stretches out the heavens like a tent…
He makes the clouds his chariot
and rides on the wings of the wind. (Psalm 104:1-3)
you are clothed with splendour and majesty.
The Lord wraps himself in light as with a garment;
he stretches out the heavens like a tent…
He makes the clouds his chariot
and rides on the wings of the wind. (Psalm 104:1-3)
Or again, in one of the most exalted pieces
of poetry in all of Scripture, from the prophet Isaiah:
Do you not know?
Have you not heard?
Has it not been told you from the beginning?
Have you not understood since the earth was founded?
He sits enthroned above the circle of the earth,
and its people are like grasshoppers.
He stretches out the heavens like a canopy,
and spreads them out like a tent to live in…
‘To whom will you compare me?
Or who is my equal?’ says the Holy One.
Lift up your eyes and look to the heavens:
who created all these?
He who brings out the starry host one by one
and calls forth each of them by name.
Because of his great power and mighty strength,
not one of them is missing. (Isaiah 40:21-22,25-26)
Have you not heard?
Has it not been told you from the beginning?
Have you not understood since the earth was founded?
He sits enthroned above the circle of the earth,
and its people are like grasshoppers.
He stretches out the heavens like a canopy,
and spreads them out like a tent to live in…
‘To whom will you compare me?
Or who is my equal?’ says the Holy One.
Lift up your eyes and look to the heavens:
who created all these?
He who brings out the starry host one by one
and calls forth each of them by name.
Because of his great power and mighty strength,
not one of them is missing. (Isaiah 40:21-22,25-26)
And how about that unforgettable catalogue
of questions with which the Lord peppered poor Job?
Where were you when I laid the earth’s
foundation?
Tell me, if you understand.
Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know!
Who stretched a measuring line across it?
On what were its footings set,
or who laid its cornerstone –
while the morning stars sang together
and all the angels shouted for joy?
Who shut up the sea behind doors
when it burst forth from the womb, …
when I said, “This far you may come and no farther;
here is where your proud waves halt”?
Have you ever given orders to the morning,
or shown the dawn its place … ?
Have you journeyed to the springs of the sea
or walked in the recesses of the deep?
Have the gates of death been shown to you?
Have you seen the gates of the deepest darkness?
Have you comprehended the vast expanses of the earth?
Tell me, if you know all this. (Job 38:4-18)
Tell me, if you understand.
Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know!
Who stretched a measuring line across it?
On what were its footings set,
or who laid its cornerstone –
while the morning stars sang together
and all the angels shouted for joy?
Who shut up the sea behind doors
when it burst forth from the womb, …
when I said, “This far you may come and no farther;
here is where your proud waves halt”?
Have you ever given orders to the morning,
or shown the dawn its place … ?
Have you journeyed to the springs of the sea
or walked in the recesses of the deep?
Have the gates of death been shown to you?
Have you seen the gates of the deepest darkness?
Have you comprehended the vast expanses of the earth?
Tell me, if you know all this. (Job 38:4-18)
In Psalm 8 his consideration of God’s
creative power and eternal majesty leads the psalmist to ask a question:
Lord, our Lord,
how majestic is your name in all the earth! …
When I consider your heavens,
the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars,
which you have set in place,
what is mankind that you are mindful of them,
human beings that you care for them? (Psalm 8:1,3-4)
how majestic is your name in all the earth! …
When I consider your heavens,
the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars,
which you have set in place,
what is mankind that you are mindful of them,
human beings that you care for them? (Psalm 8:1,3-4)
And that is precisely the question that
burns through the middle section of our psalm this morning.
Human Mortality
The main preoccupation of the psalm is not
much with God’s eternal nature as it is with its contrast to our human
mortality.
A thousand years in your sight
are like a day that has just gone by,
or like a watch in the night.
Yet you sweep people away in the sleep of death—
they are like the new grass of the morning:
In the morning it springs up new,
but by evening it is dry and withered.
are like a day that has just gone by,
or like a watch in the night.
Yet you sweep people away in the sleep of death—
they are like the new grass of the morning:
In the morning it springs up new,
but by evening it is dry and withered.
But Moses was not the only one to recognize
this. Poor old Job cried aloud to his friends,
My days are swifter
than a weaver’s shuttle,
and they come to an end without hope.
Remember, O God, that my life is but a breath… (Job 7:6-7)
and they come to an end without hope.
Remember, O God, that my life is but a breath… (Job 7:6-7)
And Solomon mused,
Everyone comes naked
from their mother’s womb,
and as everyone comes, so they depart.
They take nothing from their toil
that they can carry in their hands. (Ecclesiastes 5:15)
and as everyone comes, so they depart.
They take nothing from their toil
that they can carry in their hands. (Ecclesiastes 5:15)
Nearing the end of his life, the apostle
Paul wrote to his young friend Timothy, “We brought nothing into the world, and
we can take nothing out of it” (1 Timothy
6:7). And Jesus exemplified that truth in his parable of the rich fool.
Many of you will remember his story of the man who kept having to build bigger
barns to store his surplus grain. But
God said to him, “You fool! This very night your life will be demanded from
you” (Luke 12:13-21).
Isaac Watts put poetic expression to this
morning’s psalm in the hymn we’ll be singing in a few minutes’ time:
Time,
like an ever-rolling stream,
Bears all its sons away;
They fly, forgotten, as a dream
Dies at the opening day.
Bears all its sons away;
They fly, forgotten, as a dream
Dies at the opening day.
Now isn’t all this a
cheerful way to look ahead to the New Year? I hope I haven’t thoroughly demoralized
you! But before you sink too far into depression, there’s something else we
need to see in this psalm—and that is that it recognizes, indeed it laments,
that none of this is the way things should be. You know those puzzles that ask
you to spot what’s wrong with this picture? This psalm has something like that
in it. The hints come out in verses like these: “You turn people back to dust…” “You
sweep people away in the sleep of death…” “We are consumed by your anger…” “All our days pass under your wrath…”
The psalmist is
painfully aware that things don’t have to be the way they are—that the power of
life and death lies in God’s hands. All of this leads to the desperate cry in
verse 13: “Relent, Lord, how long will it be?” The verb in Hebrew is shub. It means to turn around. It is as
though God has his back towards us.
So you see there is
something deep within the psalmist’s heart—something in all our hearts—that protests,
that cries out this is not the way it’s supposed to be. As we read in
Ecclesiastes, “He has set eternity in the human heart” (Ecclesiastes 3:11). So it is that C.S. Lewis reflected,
We are so little
reconciled to time that we are even astonished at it. “How he’s grown!” we
exclaim, “How time flies!” as though the universal form of our experience were
again and again a novelty. It is as strange as if a fish were repeatedly
surprised at the very wetness of water. And that would be strange indeed:
unless of course the fish were destined to become, one day, a land animal…[2]
Eternal Habitations
Turn with me now to the second-last chapter
of the Bible, where the seer John gives us a picture that is so breathtaking
that it cannot be compared with the sky even on the most glorious starlit night.
There, John is given a vision of the new heaven and the new earth. He looks on
with awe as the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, descends from the skies,
“prepared,” as he describes it, “like a bride beautifully dressed for her
husband”. Then a loud voice booms from God’s throne with the words, “Look! God’s dwelling place is now among the
people, and he will dwell with them. They will be his people, and God himself
will be with them and be their God. He will wipe every tear from their eyes.
There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of
things has passed away” (Revelation
21:1-4).
Now shift the scene to
the night before his crucifixion, as Jesus gathered with his disciples in the
upper room. There he gave them the promise, “In my Father’s house there are
many dwelling-places. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to
prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come
again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also” (John 14:2-3).
And now in this Christmas season we
remember how the Lord of time and eternity, he who has been our dwelling place
throughout all generations, the eternal Word, became flesh and made his dwelling among us. “We have seen his glory,”
John declares, “the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father,
full of grace and truth” (John 1:14). It is in Jesus that we see
life as God truly intends it to be. It is in Jesus that we find our eternal
dwelling place in the heart of God.
Welcome, all wonders
in one sight!
Eternity shut in a span;
Summer in winter; day in night;
Heaven in earth, and God in man.
Great little one, whose all-embracing birth
Lifts earth to heav’n, stoops heav’n to earth…[3]
Eternity shut in a span;
Summer in winter; day in night;
Heaven in earth, and God in man.
Great little one, whose all-embracing birth
Lifts earth to heav’n, stoops heav’n to earth…[3]
