Well, I wanna thank you for the warm welcome that you've given to me and to Dr. Renahan over the last few days. It's been a sweet time of study and fellowship together, and thrilled to be opening the word with you this morning. I'll ask you to turn in your Bibles to Psalm 90.
Psalm 90, the one Psalm of Moses that is in the Psalter, though not the only song that Moses wrote, nor the only one that you will ever sing, we're told that we will one day sing the song of Moses and the Lamb. And even here in this song of Moses, there's an anticipation of the Lamb. Psalm 90, we'll read the entirety of it and then ask the Lord to bless our consideration of this passage. This is the holy and the authoritative word of God.
So let us give it our careful attention. A prayer of Moses, the man of God. Lord, you have been our dwelling place in all generations. Before the mountains were brought forth or ever you had formed the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, you are God.
You turn man to destruction and say, return, O children of men, for a thousand years in your sight are like yesterday when it is past. And like a watch in the night, you carry them away like a flood. They are like sleep. In the morning, they are like grass, which grows up.
In the morning, it flourishes and grows up. In the evening, it is cut down and withers.
Death as Divine Judgment
For we have been consumed by your anger, and by your wrath we are terrified. You have set our iniquities before you, our secret sins in the light of your countenance. For all our days have passed away in your wrath. We finish our years like a sigh.
For the days of our lives are 70 years, and if by reason of strength, they are 80 years. Yet their boast is only labor and sorrow, for it is soon cut off and we fly away. Who knows the power of your anger? For as the fear of you, so is your wrath.
So teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom. Return, O Lord, how long? and have compassion on your servants. Oh, satisfy us early with your mercy, that we may rejoice and be glad all our days. Make us glad according to the days in which you have afflicted us, the years in which we have seen evil.
Let your work appear to your servants and your glory to their children. And let the beauty of the Lord our God be upon us and establish the work of our hands. Yes, establish the work of our hands. Let's ask the Lord to help us as we come to his word.
Opening Prayer
Our God in heaven, we do bless you and we thank you for this word and even this word of hope that you would return. Lord, we bless you that you indeed have returned to us in the very person of your son. As we look into these words this morning, we pray that you would give us eyes to see and ears to hear and hearts to receive all that your spirit is saying through your servant, Moses. Lord, that this word may not be a word of indictment against us, but it would be a word of life.
Lord, for any who are perishing, may this be the word of life that causes them to reach out and receive salvation today from Christ Jesus. Lord, for those of us who are in Christ Jesus, may this build up our faith in more and greater strength. Lord, attend the preaching of your word now by the illumination of your spirit, that we might behold wonderful things in your law, and that we might rejoice in the gospel of your son. We ask this in his strong and precious name, amen.
Introduction
You are just a vapor that appears for a little while and then vanishes away. These are the words of James 4, verse 14, and they're a sobering reminder of the brevity of life. And though we often marvel at how quickly time passes, we also sometimes live as if we had all the time in the world. We waste time, and then we mourn how quickly it passes by us.
We need frequent reminders of how quick and how fleeting life truly is. And this is not meant to discourage us. If we're wasting time, it might be an indictment against all of our indigents, perhaps, but it's not meant to discourage us, but to stir us up to lay hold of that which really lasts. It's true that life is passing, but that doesn't mean life doesn't have to matter. that it's so quickly passing by and so difficult to hold onto might make us think that it's all for naught, but it's not all for naught.
One day we will give an account of ourselves in this little brief breath or vapor of life and every vein and empty word we will be called account for. For every thought and word and deed, it will all be weighed in the scales and we will stand before the one with whom we have to do. And this life indeed matters, not just for the moment and the day, but for all of eternity. Though life is fleeting and our days are, as Job once said, few and full of trouble, It is not for that reason unconcerned with eternity.
Ecclesiastes 3.11 says that God has placed eternity in the heart of every man, that everyone knows when honest with himself or herself, that indeed we were made for more than this, and that this is but a prelude to the reality that will follow hereafter. Man finds his true good in his abiding home in something other than this short-lived stint on earth. Jesus instructs us to store up for yourselves treasures in heaven where neither moth nor rust destroys, where thieves do not break in and steal. And in fact, we are seeking a true home and a lasting treasure even now.
In Psalm 90, we have the words of Moses, the only of his that are recorded in the Psalter for us, written to give counsel to a rootless and a ruined people. He writes to people who have never really had their own home, so to speak. The middle portion of the Psalm is severe. In fact, it is severe, beginning in verse three, all the way down through about the beginning of verse 12 are some of the grimmest passages in all of Scripture.
It's designed to heal those who will take it to heart. It's designed to warn those who are living frivolously. Death and judgment are neither the first word nor the last word in this Psalm. That's good news.
Rather, Moses begins by directing our attention toward the one that endures, namely God himself. He then considers how far man has fallen from his original dwelling place with God. He shows us through the middle portion of the Psalm what real spiritual homelessness and desperation and destitution looks like. Finally, he lights the way back home, if you will open your eyes to behold this light, that he shows a rootless and a ruin and a wandering people, indeed, what it is to dwell securely forever.
There's a series of hopeful petitions that end this Psalm, beginning in verse 12 and all the way through the end, hopeful petitions for which the answer has already been given. already been given. We'll come to that in time. Each of these petitions ultimately finds its definitive answer in the person and the work of Christ. So I want to take this psalm, the entirety of it, in four portions, as it were.
First, we'll consider an eternal dwelling, verses 1 and 2, an eternal dwelling. Secondly, we'll consider a brief journey, verses 3 to 6. Thirdly, a hard journey, verses seven through 11. And then finally, the way back home, verses 12 through 17.
An Eternal Dwelling (vv. 1–2)
Well, let's first begin in the first two verses, considering an eternal dwelling. Look with me at the text.
God as Dwelling Place
Moses begins with a prayer to God in which believers are reminded of the fact that they are sojourners and wanderers upon the earth. Lord, you have been our dwelling place in all generations. He talks to a people that by all accounts are homeless, and yet they aren't homeless because God is their stronghold, their refuge, the place where they live. In fact, this is a somewhat strange way to speak about a someone, a he, a him, a who.
It describes him as a somewhere. Lord, you have been our dwelling place or our refuge. And we tend to think, well, God's not a where, he's a who. It's a someone who is our dwelling place.
And even if you find that your foot, as it were, can't plant itself on this earth and really call a place home, and is any place ever really home? And even home doesn't stay home. Some of you have grown older and you've tried to go home. And it's not there.
Or it's there, but it's not home anymore. It's not what you remember. And perhaps you feel this. Some people say you never really do go home.
You leave and you return and the tree you climbed in as a kid has been cut down. Your room has been turned into your mother's sewing room. Things like that. Home is not home, as you recall it.
And as you grow older, there's a sense of fleetingness, there's a sense of temporariness, a sense of just stopping for a little while and then moving on. But he says to these people, the Israelites at the time of the Exodus, who had lived as strangers in a foreign land, a land not their own, the land of Goshen in Egypt, who now are wandering through a wilderness, who've never really had a place where they could say, this is really mine. He says to them, but they've not been without a home. God has been their dwelling and their strength in all generations.
If you're with God, if you're with God and he's with you, listen carefully, you are home. Nothing's gonna change it. It's not gonna be remodeled. It's not gonna be converted.
It's not gonna be torn down. It's not gonna be burned down. If you have God, you have home, and the home will always be there. These words then would have rung especially true for the faithful during the time of Moses.
Neither they nor their forebearers had ever really possessed a land of their own. And even Abraham, who did end up at the land of Canaan, dwelt in a tent as a sojourner, as a nomad, a kind of Bedouin, just passing through. In fact, we're told that when Abraham got to Canaan, that he was still looking for a city. This was the promised land.
And yet when he got to the promised land, it wasn't it in some respect. He lived in the promised land as a sojourner. The place that was supposed to be his home never really was his home. He was looking for a city whose builder and maker is God. a city eternal in the heavens.
Canaan was a good place, a land flowing with milk and honey, but Canaan was like an oasis on your journey, but Canaan was not really his eternal home or habitation. Some might object and say, ah, but the psalm says God is our eternal dwelling place. But Hebrews 11 says that Abraham was looking for a city whose builder and maker is God, which is arguably heaven. And so Abraham was looking for a place, but Moses is talking about a person.
But I want to propose to you that in one respect, those two things coincide. They coalesce together. Heaven, indeed, is a created realm, and it's the dwelling place of God Most High, and it's the most sublime of all the created realms. It's the place where His glory shines most resplendently and where our hearts are most ravaged and glorified and made joyful. but there's a certain sense in which heaven is heaven because it's there that God places his most wonderful manifested presence.
Consider the words of John in his Apocalypse chapter 21, verse 22. John says, and I saw no temple in the city, listen to this carefully, for its temple is the Lord God, the Almighty and the Lamb. I think he gets at what Moses is getting at here. The dwelling place is God himself.
Not to say there isn't an actual place that is, you know, in time, space, so to speak, but the place is where God is. That's where home is. To call God our dwelling place here and now is to experience a foretaste of heaven on earth, a bit of permanence in the midst of impermanence, if God is your dwelling place.
The Eternity of God
Now in verse two, Moses enlarges on the glory of verse one by explaining just what sort of dwelling place God is. We might almost imagine verse two as a kind of home inspection. Think of it like a home inspection. You buy a new home and you have an inspector come.
We moved to a new home a couple of years ago and did our due diligence and had an inspector come and he told us, you know, you have new windows, they're efficient, the roof looks new, about three years old, it's going to last through several Pennsylvania winters and summers and the foundation looks solid and the It's an old stone heap. The stone looks, you know, the grouting has been redone and this is a solid home. And we do a home inspection because what we want to know is that the home is not gonna fall down on us and or cost us a lot of money to maintain. Listen carefully.
If God is your dwelling place, no maintenance required. If God is your dwelling place, the roof is not sagging and leaky. The windows are not inefficient. You don't shiver through the winter.
It's perfect. no repair needed, no maintenance needed, not even by God himself, because he's pure act, unchanging, unchangeable, glorious in his being, not wearing out or growing old. Look at what he says in verse two. or you had given birth, is actually how it says, you had given birth to the world. From everlasting to everlasting, you are God. There are places in the world today that are still standing and in constant use that are really very old structures.
I think that work began on the nave of Westminster Abbey in the year 1050. That's a long time ago, and they still have Evensong in that nave every day of the week. I've attended an even song in that nave in a building that began in 1050. The Pantheon in Rome is a domed, is one of the world's oldest domes.
The Pantheon has been in continuous use for nearly 2,000 years. I'm sure that they've already performed several Catholic masses in there this morning. I had to wait outside while the mass was being finished to go in and stand inside this ancient building, which was for a few hundred years, a pagan temple. And for about 1700 years has been a Roman church, Catholic for much of that, still in continuous use for nearly 2000 years.
There are people who live in Greece, old Macedonia that currently live in houses that are more than 500 years old. People live in houses in which the vast majority of the people who ever called that house home are long dead. The house I live in, in this continent, the vast majority of people who ever called that place home are long dead. It stood, it's been there for a while.
But listen to this language, even before the mountains were brought forth and you gave birth to earth or the world, the question is, you know, how sturdy is God? How about this, sturdier than the world, than the world, not just this or that structure, than the world itself. The reason he points to the mountains, especially the mountains, is because the mountains tend to be the most constant. I mean, if you're a native of the Fraser Valley, and you're of any length of age, you've probably seen several changes in the cities that you would call home.
You've seen houses get paint jobs, and you've seen houses torn down, and you've seen new buildings go up and new roadways be paved, and you've seen lots of kind of infrastructural change go on around you. But the mountain peaks and the ridgelines, I would lay odds, are almost exactly, if not precisely, as you remember them from your youth. It's probably about right. And as the buildings of men, you know, come and go, we raise them up, we use them, we tear them down, we build better ones.
Or they crumble and they become haunts for jackals. Buildings come, buildings go, the landscape down here changes, but the mountains are fairly constant. The mountains, as it were, tower above us and they keep watch over the changing vicissitudes and affairs of humans. And yet he says, even before the mountains were brought forth or you gave birth to the earth and the world from everlasting to everlasting, you are God.
Here's his point. It's a kind of a strange statement. His point is this, how old is God? Wrong question.
God's not old. God's not young. He certainly doesn't wear out. He's actually not even of this world.
This world is from him, but he's not from it. He made it, but it didn't make him. In fact, watch this. You might even say, I ask about my house, who built this?
I actually know the name of the person who built the house. I have it on a record. Who built this in the other houses in the township that he built? If you ask of God who built this, the answer is no one built this.
He's not built. He's not that kind of dwelling. He has no builder. He has no maker.
He's not made to be. God just is. From everlasting to everlasting, you are God. God is being, not becoming.
God is fullness of being, the I am that I am. He, the Lord, does not change. Men turn, men change, but God does not. You have been our dwelling place in all generations.
And what better dwelling place than a dwelling place not even made without hands, watch this, not even made at all, just is. This is the glory of our dwelling place. And this is the one with whom for a short while, Adam and Eve lived in the garden until they themselves, as it were, disqualified themselves from that dwelling with God. Psalm 102 offers God's immutability as the only hope of those who would not be swept away by the world.
Of old you founded the earth, Psalm 102, 25, and the heavens are the work of your hands. Even they will perish, but you endure. All of them will wear out like a garment, like clothing. You will change them, and they will be changed.
But you are the same, and your years will not come to an end.
A Brief Journey (vv. 3–6)
Consider in the second place, a brief journey, verses three to six, a brief journey. If God's years will not come to an end, the same cannot be said for yours and for mine. Moses now challenges us with the reality that each human life is astonishingly short, all illusions to the contrary notwithstanding. From the perspective of eternity, our lives are an insignificant moment, a breath, a vapor.
Verse three, you turn man to destruction. Your translation might say you turn man or return man to the dust. The word there actually means crushings. And so destruction or fine dust particles would both kind of get the sense of it.
You turn man back into crushings. You turn him to destruction or to dust. And you say, Return Oh children of men now, here's the point. I want to make about this briefly I'll return to this in just a moment, but it's not the point here is not just the law of entropy, you know things break down Have you heard people say this about death the deaths just a part of life?
That's stupid It's exactly exactly not that Death is not a part of life. Death is the termination of life. Death is exactly what I'm trying to avoid as I try to, but death is the reason that I eat my broccoli and look both ways before I cross the street, because I prefer life to it. It's not a part of life.
It's not just the natural way of things. Death is not natural. We tend to think that because death is common, it must be natural. It's common, I grant, but not natural.
It's unnatural. you Death is actually the destruction of our nature, not the development and the flourishing of our nature. And the reason is because God himself says, return to dust. It's not just that, well, men naturally tend toward the grave. Humans don't naturally tend toward the grave.
They naturally are built for and tend toward life. And if they tend toward the grave, it's because of something unnatural that has intruded itself into our history that has brought about the consequence that God says, return to the dust. For you are dust and to dust you shall return, Genesis 319. Charles Spurgeon says, the frailty of man is thus forcibly set forth.
God creates him out of the dust and back to the dust he goes at the word of his creator. God resolves and man dissolves. A word created, a word destroys. Return, O children of men.
Verse four then colorfully amplifies this. And what we learn right away is it's not just the individual life of each one of us that is astonishingly short. It's actually the entire history of the world that is astonishingly short. Look at verse four.
For a thousand years in your sight are like yesterday when it is past, like a watch in the night. To God, the world is not old. To God, the world is not old. The entire history of from the beginning and in the beginning until this moment is but a vapor and a breath.
A thousand years is something that just occurred, a day that just passed. Of course, with God being eternal, there is no past and future, properly speaking, but the Psalm speaks this way probably because to us, the moments that are past seem much shorter than the moments that are yet to come. Again, look at this. A thousand years in your sight are like yesterday when it is past.
If you think about tomorrow, I would lay odds that in your imagination or anticipation, tomorrow seems longer than your memory of yesterday seems to you. Maybe I could illustrate this by stretching it out a little bit. You plan a one-week vacation, and there's a lot of fun in the planning. You plan the activities and what you're going to see and what you're going to do.
And as you're planning that vacation, anticipating that week, it feels like that week is just gonna be long and full and rich. Then you go on the vacation, you enjoy it. And then you're driving home at the end of the week. And it feels as if you just blinked and all of your planning and all of your anticipation that looked like it was stretched out for miles in front of you is now just but a already fading memory.
The world seems short. Your life seems brief to you in retrospect. In fact, the older you get, the shorter your life seems to have been to you. This seems to be the common experience of most people.
He then says, it's like a watch in the night. A watch in the night is something like three to four hours. That would be a night watch. Most of us sleep through watches in the night.
And the watch in the night, for those of us that are sleeping at any rate, goes by very quickly. If you can't sleep, it tends to drag on for hours. But if you can sleep, it goes by quickly. I woke up this morning, I'm still on East Coast time and a little discombobulated, but I woke up this morning and I was sort of rested, but I thought I could really use some more sleep.
But there was a, felt like maybe it was getting light and I wasn't sure. And I turned over and I looked at my and it said 3.30. It's just great. I love that.
It's always when it's 12 minutes before your alarm goes off that it's just, you know, 3.30. Perfect. Rolled over and closed my eyes, opened them, felt like three seconds, 6.30. That's a watch in the night.
You ready for this? That's not just happening in the nighttime. That's how your whole life is going by. It's like you blink and 20 years are gone or 70 or 80.
This is your life. God says your life is going by at blinding speed like a watch in the night. It passes you by. The point here of a thousand years to a day is not meant to be an exact ratio.
It's not a kind of God years to human years kind of measurement or ratio. Listen to Matthew Henry. He says, betwixt a minute and a million of years, there is some proportion, but betwixt time and eternity, there is none. The long lives of the patriarchs were nothing to God, so much as the life of a child that is born and dies the same day is to theirs.
In verse 5 and then to verse 6, verse 5, he says, you carry them away like a flood. They are like sleep. Time picks us up and carries us off. I don't know if you've ever watched those videos on YouTube of a flash flood where somebody's looking out their own office building and then suddenly a river just turns the corner, picks up all the cars in the parking lot and takes them away.
You just think, this is a car, this is 2,000 pounds. And a river, a flood just comes and picks it up and carries it away. Once upon a time, a flood came and carried away the entire human race in a moment, except for eight souls saved alive in an arc. Time is doing this.
Time is like a flood that picks you up and carries you away, and you can fight the flood, but you won't prevail. He says they're like sleep, like a sleep. A couple thoughts here. Your life is like a flood and it's just picking up everything and carrying it on to its destination at a blinding and alarming speed.
Strange if you would sleep through the flood. Some of you are sleeping through the flood and you don't even realize it is a flood. Your life is few of days and full of trouble and you need to wake up. You need to wake up.
People sleep through a life that's just flying by. This is what sin does. It stupefies us. It dulls us.
It makes us unaware of actually how quickly life is fleeing by. He then changes the imagery once again, end of verse five into six. In the morning, they're like grass, which grows up. In the morning, it flourishes and grows up.
In the evening, it's cut down and it withers. Charles Spurgeon unpacks this little section with very memorable words. He says, blooming with abounding beauty, till the meadows are all bespent with gems, the grass has a golden hour, even as a man in his youth has a heyday of flowery glory. I interrupt Spurgeon for a moment.
Some of you are right now in what he calls the heyday of flowery glory. You're young, you're strong, the world is your oyster, many roads lie before you, Everything's going your way and the wind is at your back. Just a quick warning for males, that's up to about 25 years of age typically. Then the slow breakdown sets in and then it speeds up and back to Spurgeon.
The scythe ends the blooming of field flowers and the dews at night weep their fall. Listen to this carefully. Here is the history of grass. Here is the history of grass, sown, grown, blown, mown, gone.
I give you the history of grass once more. Sown, grown, blown, mown, gone, he goes on, and the history of man is not much more. Natural decay would put an end to both of us in the grass in due time. Few, however, are left to experience the full result of age, for death comes with his scythe and removes our life in the midst of its verdure.
How great a change and how short a time. The morning saw the blooming, the evening sees the withering. A short journey.
A Hard Journey (vv. 7–11)
Thirdly, a hard journey, already indicated, but a hard journey. Lest we think that all this hastening on to death is merely the result of our created nature, a kind of things break down, entropy as it were. The psalmist stresses that our mortal condition is a judgment executed upon us by God himself. It's not just that you're going to die, it's going to die, you're going to die because God's your enemy.
It's a hard journey. It's not just a short one. It's one in which we are born enemies of the very God of all creation. We are born dead in trespasses and sins.
We are born under a curse and under condemnation. Look at verse seven, for we have been consumed by your anger. None of these. None of these false little statements, death's just a part of life, that is a lie straight out of hell designed as a coping mechanism for people that don't wanna face the reality that we die and it's because of sin that we do so.
Face it, face it. We've been consumed by your anger and by your wrath, we've been terrified. You can imagine Moses saying this in the wilderness in which sometimes 15 and sometimes 20,000 people were cut down by the angel of death in a day. If you think of the number of people that died in the wilderness, all of the ones 20 years and older, except for Caleb and Joshua, failed to enter the land of Canaan.
In a 40-year window, every single one of those died. You were literally digging hundreds, if not thousands, of graves every single day over that 40-year period, if our estimations of the population are even roughly accurate. Death was a daily thing. And it was punishment.
It was because they refused to go into the promised land and believe God. When they went in, they listened to the 10 spies and they didn't listen to Caleb and Joshua. Then everyone 20 and over was cut down and laid into a sandy grave in a wilderness of wandering. For we have been consumed by your anger and by your wrath, we've been terrified.
It's true that God does not change. This is true. But God does change his dealings with us, that he does set his eyes for evil against those whose hearts are against him, against those that reject his rule, against those that defy his anointed. He does set themselves against them and he deals with them in justice.
It's not just Israel though. When Adam fell, God's way toward man was generally turned into one of hostility. Return to dust, he says, not just to Adam, but to all who are in Adam. Moses certainly thinking of all those that died in the wilderness in so many breakings forth of God's wrath, extraordinary ways, but then also the ordinary breaking forth of his wrath in the day to day of death.
Hebrews chapter eight, verse nine says that of God's old covenant, that those who were in it did not continue. And it says, God says, and I did not care for them. Listen, this is mankind in Adam, that they were with God in the garden, happy, holy, dwelling with Him in His special dwelling place. And when they sinned, they were exiled east of the garden, as it were, without God in the world.
We'll talk about grace in a moment, don't despair. But this is man born outside of the holy, happy dwelling place of God, not cared for, as it were, uprooted and thrown out. Psalm 130, verse three, the psalmist asked this question, if you, O Lord, should mark iniquities, O Lord, who could stand? Look at verse 10 of our verse eight of our passage.
You have set our iniquities before you, our secret sins in the light of your countenance. Hebrews 4 says that all things are naked and laid bare before the eyes of Him with whom we have to do. That there is no hiding from God as we might hide from each other, that everything is as it were done in broad daylight. What we do in darkness, God deals with in light.
What is exposed by his light is the depravity sometimes that even we ourselves do not know. The psalmist elsewhere prays, equip me of hidden faults. You're worse than you know, and if we shine a light onto the dark corners of your soul, what we'll actually find out is motives more perverse than we might even have imagined. You have set our iniquities before you, our secret sins in the light of your countenance.
What's the consequence? The wages of sin, we all know very well, are death. Verse nine, for all of our days have passed away in your wrath. We finish our years like a sigh.
A sigh is a kind of breathing out without a breathing in, a kind of, we call it expiring. To inspire is to breathe in, to expire is to breathe out. If it doesn't get followed by another inspire, that's it, right? You know, you pull a breath in afterward, but one day you're just gonna...
And borrowing the return of Christ before that day comes, that will be it. We end our years like a sigh. Thomas Watson says, we come into the world with a cry. We go out of it with a groan.
Death, the last enemy, seems to prevail incessantly over us. Verse 10 says that even our years are cut short. The days of our lives are 70 years, if by strength they are 80. That's the three score in 10 of the old King James.
You remember that Moses lived to 120, Methuselah lived to 969. God, as it were, curtails the days. By the time we get to the time of David, 70 is the new 120, and 80 is ancient. Some of you in this room might be a little beyond that, perhaps.
You're the ancient ones, according to this Psalm. Our years are but few. Short compared to the ancients who lived long ago. His life and his place, forget him.
Look at verse 10 again. For their boast or their pride is only labor and sorrow. It's soon cut off and they fly away. I don't even know that verse 10 necessarily means, by boast and pride, I don't think it necessarily even means sinful boasting or sinful pride, but like what it's saying is all of your achievements, all the things that you did.
I told you the middle section will be grim, so here's a little bit more. Not a perfect prediction, but I'm going to hazard a guess. Time and place will forget you, and it will forget me. It will forget you, and it will forget me.
I told you that I live in this old house. It was first owned by a guy named Watson, who then sold it to his son. I know how much he sold it for, because it's in the record. 100 pounds gold in hand is what it says. That's not what I paid for it.
I don't know what that even means. I don't know if Mr. Watson was a Christian. Our house in the 19th century was called the Fulmer House.
The Fulmer family was a prominent family in our little township. I don't know if the Fulmers are in heaven or not. I don't know what Mr. Fulmer's favorite color was or whether he liked music or, you know, enjoyed watching the foxes run around the creek like I do.
I have no idea. I'm living in his house that was even named after him. It's not going to be named after me. It's not going to be the Dalzell house when I'm gone.
In fact, when I'm gone, it will forget me. Do you know the names of your great, great, great grandfathers? You actually have quite a few of them. Do you know their names?
I would lay odds that most of you don't. A few of you did that research thing and you paid for the access so the Mormons told you where you came from. So some of you know the names. I found out recently that two of my great, great, great grandfathers, one an immigrant from Sweden, one from England, both fought in the Civil War, one for the militia in Indiana and one for the one in Illinois.
I know the battle in which one of them was. I even know the name of one of them because my great grandmother grew up with him in her home when she was born in 1896, so I have a little bit of a connection. I don't know whether great-great-great-grandpa Greenberg was a Christian. I don't know if he's in heaven or not.
I know almost nothing about him. He's my blood, and it's not that far back. Your time and your place will forget you. Your life, which seems so important and so memorable, and you want there to be a sort of lasting monument and memorial to you, so little about you is remembered, if anything at all, our lives are brief, momentary, and soon to be forgotten.
Even Even your great-grandchildren may not even know your name. My children might know the names of my grandparents, but they'd have to even think about it, and they know very little else about them. They never met them. Its boast is only for labor and sorrow, soon cut off and they fly away.
The Wrath No Man Can Fathom
Verse 11, to finish up this portion. Who knows the power of your anger? As the fear of you, so is your wrath. The point is this, as the fear of you.
As the greatness and the glory of God, so is his wrath. Who can understand this wrath under which we stand? Spurgeon once more. Good men dread that wrath beyond conception, but they never ascribe too much terror to it.
Again, I interrupt him. You cannot exaggerate the holy opposition of God to sin. If somebody says, oh, surely God's not that angry at sin. He sends people to an eternal condemnation.
He is a consuming fire of holiness. It is his nature to be wholly opposed to wickedness. To understand his opposition to wickedness, you would almost need to actually comprehend his very being itself. Who can know?
Bad men, Spurgeon says, are dreadfully convulsed when they're awake to a sense of it, but their whore is not greater than it had need be. I interrupt him again. Sometimes people say, don't, you're just, you know, people are, I'm under the wrath of God, and everyone else says, chill out. Don't chill out.
If you feel yourself under the wrath of God, don't convince yourself it's not so bad, or God's just gonna kind of shrug his shoulders at it. He's not a God who can indulge sin. For it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of an angry God. Holy Scripture, Spurgeon says, when it depicts God's wrath against sin, never uses it hyperbole.
Scripture never exaggerates God's wrath against sin. He goes on, it would be impossible to exaggerate it. Whatever feelings of pious awe and holy trembling may move the tender heart, it is never too much moved. Apart from other considerations, the great truth of the divine anger, when most powerfully felt, would never impress the mind with a solemnity in excess of the legitimate result of such a contemplation."
The Way Back Home (vv. 12–17)
Brothers and sisters, this is not the last word in the psalm. And I come to our final consideration, the way back home, the way back home. For all of this, a hopeful note is struck in verse 12. I struggle where to put verse 12 in a sermon outline because, literarily, it really is a conclusion to the section from 7 down through 12.
But in terms of a transition, it moves us into a series of petitions that really are the hope in this psalm.
Numbering Our Days Wisely
So teach us to number our days that we may gain a heart of wisdom. And here is a little note of hope. In the middle of all this grim devastation, the possibility that you could gain a heart of wisdom or bring in a heart of wisdom is now suggested to us. Lord, give us, help us number our days that we might bring in a heart of wisdom.
And here's what I wanna say. Your life might be short and your life might be hard, but you don't have to be a fool about it. Your life might be short and hard, but that doesn't mean you gotta be a fool. You could actually live well and wisely through these few days and full of trouble.
It's possible to pass this short life well. First begins with a prayer. Teach us to number our days. It begins here.
He asked God to help him number his days in such a way that he gains or brings in a heart of wisdom. This might seem odd, given that in verse 10, he's already said, our days are few, 70 if due to strength, perhaps 80. So why in verse 12 does he say, teach us to number our days? Hasn't he already numbered them for us?
But there's numbering and there's numbering. There's counting and there's taking account. And they're not quite the same thing. Calvin rather says that because of our shameful stupidity, his words, we fail to take the brevity of life to heart.
We know the number, but we don't take account of the number. We don't even really know the number, do we? But we have a rough idea of the average lifespan of the North American male, 77. If you make it past that, you're borrowed time, as they say.
Actually, it's all borrowed time. Spurge Calvin says this, it's surely a monstrous thing that men can measure all distances without themselves, that they know how many feet the moon is distant from the center of the earth, what space there is between different planets, and in short, they can measure all the dimensions of both heaven and earth, and yet they cannot number three score and 10 years in their own case. That we could, as it were, begin to fathom the visible cosmos, but not really take an account of the perhaps 70 years given to us. No man sets out living rightly unless he knows his end.
And barring Christ's return, your end is death. Take that into account when you plan your life. I don't mean the big plans. I mean like the next words you say, the actions you undertake, that kind of planning of your life.
This should lead us to seek a better end, a prize of the heavenly calling. Numbering our days soberly and realistically should cause us to live wisely. Jesus speaks about a man who sought to be rich in this life. And he imagined that he had many years of pleasure ahead of him.
And yet he said in the parable, you fool, this night, your soul is required of you. Listen, you don't know how much time you have. Start living wisely right now. If that man had known how to number his days, he would have sought to be rich toward God rather than rich in the things of this world.
Verse three told us, he says to man, return, O children of men. This is an interesting turn here now in verse 13. The psalmist says, return, O Lord. And there's a bit of a play here going on.
Verse three, the Lord says to us, return to dust. And here the psalmist cries out, O Lord, return to us. Now, with God, there's no variation or shadow due to turning, but in terms of his manifested presence, his presence can go and the manifestation of his presence can come. And what he's saying is, Lord, come to me, shine your face upon me, make me feel your presence, your favor, your power, the consolation, the joy of knowing you and being with you.
Come back to me, O Lord. In Isaiah 63 verse 10, I won't turn there, but just mention it. We're told that in response to Israel's sin, it says of God, therefore he turned to be their enemy and he himself fought against them. Verse three is an example of that.
He said, return to dust, O children of men. It's a picture of how God is toward all of us who have rebelled in Adam. In Isaiah 63, verse 17, the prophet phrased this, return for the sake of your servants. So he turned himself to become their enemy.
Now he says, return for the sake of your servants. And in Isaiah 64, verse one, the prophet says this, oh, that you would rend the heavens and come down. Lord, come and get us. And in the context, he says, we were your children, but now it's as if we never were called by your name.
And what he's actually saying is, come again, Lord, open the heavens and call me son and call me daughter and dwell with me again. What a petition. That should be the cry of everyone who feels himself alienated from God. Listen carefully, very carefully to this.
The Petitions Answered in Christ
That prayer has been answered. Matthew. Chapter three, Jesus goes to the waters of baptism. to be baptized of his relative, John the Baptist. And we read in verse 13, when he came there, John tried to prevent him.
Verse 14, saying, I have need to be baptized by you, and are you coming to me? And Jesus answered and said to him, permit it at this time, for in this way it's fitting for us to fulfill all righteousness. And so he allowed him. And when he was baptized, Jesus came up immediately from the water.
Now listen carefully to these words. And behold, the heavens were opened, Isaiah 64, one, oh, that you would rend the heavens. It's Matthew three, verse 16. And the heavens were opened and he saw the spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting upon him.
Oh, that you would rend the heavens and come down. Isaiah 64, one. Matthew three, yes. And so it is, verse 17, and suddenly a voice came from heaven.
And the voice did not say, I never knew you, depart from me. It will say that to many, don't be that one. The voice said, this is my beloved son in whom I am well pleased. Heaven has been opened and God has returned.
And as it were, pitched his tent among men again. And God has said, come, dwell with me, live with me. Listen to Jesus's words, John 14, 23. If anyone loves me, he will keep my word and my father will love him and we will come to him, listen carefully, and make our abode with him.
God is pleased having once dwelt with man, an exiled man from his presence, he is pleased to dwell with man again. The eternal dwelling place is still there and he still beckons people to come and live with him in peace, prosperity, and happiness. Oh, satisfy us, verse 14, with your mercy, that we may rejoice and be glad all our days. The prospect that you could be glad all your days, even though verses three through 11 are still true, the idea that you could walk through this brief, hard sojourn, but with joy in your heart, hope and anticipation, with gladness, is a real prospect, that we would be glad, visit us with mercy, that we would be glad all of our days.
Make us glad according to the days in which you've afflicted us, the years in which we've seen evil. And God does one much better than that. How about this? Few days full of trouble, endless life full of joy.
He doesn't give you one for one. For your little sorrows, He gives you boundless joy. For your few years of difficulty, He gives you endless years of bliss. Come back.
If you have wandered and are without God in the world and are far from Him, come back. He's an eternal dwelling place. He didn't fall down. He didn't wear out.
You can go home. You can go home. Come to Him.
Establishing the Work of Our Hands
Verse 16, we finish with a finale. Let your work appear to your servants and your glory to their children. And let the beauty of the Lord our God be upon us and establish the work of our hands. Yes, establish the work of our hands.
Matthew Henry says, God's servants cannot work for Him unless He works upon them and works in them both to will and to do. And then we may hope the operations of God's providence will be apparent for us when the operations of His grace are apparent upon us. When God's face shines upon you, when the beauty of God, as it were, brings that peace that passes all understanding and that joy that can't be just explained by the circumstances of your life. When He gives that to you, and when He works in you powerfully by His Spirit, He actually makes you to live a life worth living, and to desire desires worth desiring.
To want what is good, and to do what is good, and to work now, whatever it is that is your work or calling, heartily unto the Lord, knowing that your reward in heaven is eternal. Your work here is short, and He gives you joy and happiness in that work. Establish the work of our hands. This might be a strange way to end the psalm.
It feels like we're talking about grand and eternal things, and he ends with the work of our hands. Establish it. But here's the feeling of our lives. It feels like our lives, like our works, are just all for naught, all for nothing.
Maybe some of you work in those kinds of jobs where you work, work, work, work, and then the next guy undoes it. How do you have value and meaning in this life day by day? Our labor is in the Lord, and our labor is unto Him, and it is to Him that we give an account, not as men-pleasers, but as those that live in the joy of His presence and the approval we seek and the name that we seek is from Him and before Him, not before men. If you have a good name among men for good reason, it's good and not wrong to seek, but to have a good name in heaven given by God's grace, that's the name and that's the work worth working. 1 Corinthians 15 58.
Therefore, my beloved brethren, be steadfast and movable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that your toil is not in vain, so key, in the Lord. I can actually go to work, whatever my work is, and I can do it heartily as unto the Lord, knowing that my heavenly Father, as it were, smiles upon my work and gives value to my labor, to my life, to my breath, even now. A final text, Revelation 14, 13. And I heard a voice from heaven saying, right, blessed are the dead who die on the Lord from now on.
Yes, says the spirit, so that they may rest from their labors for their deeds follow with them. Today's work, as it were, if in the Lord and unto the Lord follows with us, not to justify us, but by way of reward and to beautify this life of grace that we receive. May God's favor rest upon us as we pass through this little life with joy of eternal glory already begun in us. Let's pray.
Closing Prayer
God, you're good and you do good, and you have done good. You have opened heaven, you've come down, you've pitched your tent among men. You, our eternal dwelling place, have called us to again dwell with you in peace through the blood of your son's cross, through the power of his resurrection, through the gift of adoption given through your Holy Spirit. Lord, for all of these things, we are profoundly grateful.
For those who have not received it, may this be the day. And for those who have, Lord, may we take inventory and careful account of all that is ours, that we would be glad and not sad, that we would be full of joy, even in a world full of trouble, because we have a joy that the trouble of this world cannot touch. We bless you for the gospel of your son, seal it to our hearts and increase our love. We pray, oh God, in Christ's name, amen.