Mortality and Eternity, Part 1 (Various Scriptures)

Phil says the philosophies that are becoming more and more prevalent in the American evangelical community can be described by the following terms:

1. Subjectivism - The Bible is no longer objectively true, but rather the individual believer determines the truthfulness and relevance of the biblical text.  It is often verbalized with words like, “What does this mean to me?”

2. Irrationalism - If what you think is true, and what I think is true, contradict each other, neither one of us is wrong.  There is no such thing as false.

3. Superficialism - That is when style becomes more important than substance.  Drama, music, and various forms of amusement become primary and the Word of God itself becomes secondary or even non-essential.

4. Anti-Intellectualism - This is the belief that there is something inherently unspiritual about using our minds to think about spiritual matters.  It is more spiritual to feel and emote about God rather than to teach sound doctrine.

5. Inclusivism - This is the belief that salvation is no longer by faith alone in Christ alone.  There are other means by which a person can enter Heaven than believing the Gospel.  This is the same as saying there will be non-Christians in Heaven.

Since these are the dominant convictions of Evangelicals in America today, I have decided that I am now a Counter-Evangelical.  If that is Evangelicalism, I don’t want to be one.  I believe the Bible is true and authoritative.  If you disagree with the Bible, you disagree with God, and you are wrong.  I believe there is such a thing as truth and error.  I believe what we preach and teach is infinitely more important than how we preach and teach it.  I believe God wants us to use our minds to think about Him, to ponder His greatness and to consider with great seriousness the truths in His infallible Word.  And I believe faith in Jesus Christ is absolutely the only means by which anyone will ever be delivered from the condemnation of their sins and justified in the sight of God.  Otherwise the death of the Lord Jesus was unnecessary and pointless.

Those who believe the things I have just mentioned are becoming more and more Counter-Evangelical.  That is actually a good thing.  And today, I am going to be decidedly counter-evangelical because I am going to address a subject that would cause multitudes to cringe and feel uncomfortable.  It has nothing to do with felt needs, and as you know, I’m never very entertaining even when I want to be.  So I invite you to be a counter-evangelical and turn with me to Psalm 90.

1 <<A Prayer of Moses the man of God.>>  Lord, You have been our dwelling place in all generations. 2 Before the mountains were brought forth, Or ever You had formed the earth and the world, Even from everlasting to everlasting, You are God. 

3 You turn man to destruction, (or “dust”) And say, "Return, O children of men." 4 For a thousand years in Your sight Are like yesterday when it is past, And like a watch in the night. 5 You carry them away like a flood; They are like a sleep.  In the morning they are like grass which grows up: 6 In the morning it flourishes and grows up; In the evening it is cut down and withers. 

7 For we have been consumed by Your anger, And by Your wrath we are terrified. 8 You have set our iniquities before You, Our secret sins in the light of Your countenance. 9 For all our days have passed away in Your wrath; We finish our years like a sigh. 10 The days of our lives are seventy years; And if by reason of strength they are eighty years, Yet their boast is only labor and sorrow; For it is soon cut off, and we fly away. 11 Who knows the power of Your anger?  For as the fear of You, so is Your wrath. 

12 So teach us to number our days, That we may gain a heart of wisdom. 13 Return, O LORD!  How long?  And have compassion on Your servants. 14 Oh, satisfy us early with Your mercy, That we may rejoice and be glad all our days! 15 Make us glad according to the days in which You have afflicted us, The years in which we have seen evil. 16 Let Your work appear to Your servants, And Your glory to their children. 17 And let the beauty of the LORD our God be upon us, And establish the work of our hands for us; Yes, establish the work of our hands.

Many years ago, Sharon and I chose that last verse for what we called our life verse.  We wanted that verse written over our lives as a prayer to God that we would not spend our lives for nothing.  Whatever we do, however we spend our lives, we want God to cause our lives to count for the sake of His Kingdom.  “You, Lord, establish the work of our hands.  You cause it to stand, to last, to be of some eternal value far beyond the days of our lives.”  

That is a summary of this Psalm.  This is a prayer of Moses.  When we read through it with the understanding that a very old man wrote this, it tends to make more sense.  Moses was somewhere between 80 and 120 years old when he penned these words.  It was during a time when God was judging Israel for their unbelief.  During this 40 year period, God caused an entire generation of the children of Israel to die in the desert.  A multitude of the Jews never left the Sinai Peninsula.  God determined that that entire population of Jewish adults would be buried there.

It may be obvious, but consider that God outlived all His Hebrew critics.  When God was ready to give them the Promised Land, the land He swore to give to the descendants of Abraham, the spies whom Moses sent into the land came back with a bad report and encouraged the people to not trust the LORD.  “ . . . All the children of Israel complained against Moses and Aaron, and the whole congregation said to them, ‘If only we had died in the land of Egypt!  Or if only we had died in this wilderness!  Why has the LORD brought us to this land to fall by the sword, that our wives and children should become victims?’” (Numbers 14:2-3a, NKJV).

It was that rebellion that provoked God to say:

28 "`As I live,' [says the LORD,] `just as you have spoken in My hearing, so I will do to you: 29 `The carcasses of you who have complained against Me shall fall in this wilderness, all of you who were numbered, according to your entire number, from twenty years old and above. 30 `Except for Caleb the son of Jephunneh and Joshua the son of Nun, you shall by no means enter the land which I swore I would make you dwell in. 31 `But your little ones, whom you said would be victims, I will bring in, and they shall know the land which you have despised. 32 `But as for you, your carcasses shall fall in this wilderness. 33 `And your sons shall be shepherds in the wilderness forty years, and bear the brunt of your infidelity, until your carcasses are consumed in the wilderness. 34 `According to the number of the days in which you spied out the land, forty days, for each day you shall bear your guilt one year, namely forty years, and you shall know My rejection.

(Numbers 14:28-34, NKJV).

Two men from that entire generation of the people of Israel survived the desert wanderings.  The 40 days the spies spent in Canaan searching out the land, were translated into 40 years of punishment, 40 years of rejection.  And once those 40 years were gone, the God whom they refused to trust was still alive and well, while every adult of that previous generation was buried.  

Bearing all this in mind, consider that Psalm 90 is a prayer of Moses, and the main topic of the prayer is that God would establish the work of the hands of men who are inherently frail, weak, and short-lived.  The first two verses speak of who and what God is.  How is it that God is a "dwelling place"?  While we think in terms of where we live our lives, Moses speaks of God as the one before whom all men live their lives.  We are ever in His presence.  There is no place we can go that He is not there.  It speaks of His omnipresence.  Wherever and whenever men have lived their lives, they have been lived in the presence of God.  He is the perpetual home, the dwelling place of all.  All generations live before His eyes, and enjoy His common grace which supplies their needs.  We live because He sustains us, and we always live subject to His plans and purposes.  He is the life of mankind.  

But secondly, Moses makes the point that God is beyond us, not like us.  Prior to the creation of the world, from everlasting years prior, until everlasting years in the future if it can even be spoken of in terms of time, God is.  The very last phrase there says, “You are God,” or literally, “You God.”  There is no word to designate past, present, or future tense.  It reminds us of God’s own statement to Moses from the burning bush, “Tell them ‘I AM’ has sent you.  God just is.  God always has been, and always will be.  God is so unlike us that we have difficulty understanding this fundamental nature of His being: He is eternal.  He is not subject to time, but beyond it, outside of it.  He didn’t come from anything, and He will never cease to exist.  He is.  He outlives everything.  He cannot die.  He can’t go away.

But man is quite different.  How do you compare the life of a man to the life of God?  How do you compare the life of the entire human race to the life of God?  Moses draws us some pictures to show the infinite contrast between what God is and what we are.  The foremost truth that illustrates the difference between God and man is that men die.  God eventually turns all men back to dust.  Moses has seen an entire generation of his peers returned to the ground.

There is no comparison between God and man.  A thousand years to God is like yesterday is to us when it is past.  What does Moses mean by that?  What is yesterday to us?  How does yesterday to us compare to a thousand years to God?  Moses even reduces it further by saying a thousand years to God is like a watch in the night, three hours.  From our perspective, yesterday no longer exists.  What can we do with it from here and now?  How does it feel to drop off to sleep, only to be awakened three hours later?  How did that three hours feel?  What do you recall from that watch in the night?

We live in time and find it extremely difficult to express ourselves without any reference to time.  We can’t comprehend life apart from time.  But Moses is making the point that with God, time is nothing.  What seems like an eternity to us, a thousand years, time enough for entire empires to rise and fall, and for nations to be built and destroyed, is from God’s perspective a non-issue.  It is nothing.

Men are turned, or as the text here says, ”returned” into dust over time.  And according to verse 5, they are carried away like a flood.  It is a steady stream of humanity that flows out of this life into the dust of death every hour.  According to one statistic (because I couldn’t find any others), approximately 150,000 people die every day globally.  In Moses’ day, as the approximately 3 million people of Israel wandered through the wilderness, they easily could have buried their dead every day.  THis is the experience that Moses is speaking of.  For forty years, there was a constant flood of death in which the people of that generation passed away.  Moses refers to it as a flood because it is unstoppable.  That is the nature of man and death.  And taxes.  But that is a topic for another day.

But why is it this way?  Why is the constant presence of death with them?  Verses 7-9  tell us: It is because of their sin.  It seems that Evangelicalism and Israel have something in common: a growing lack of faith in God and His word.  The people sinned much against God.  At Kadesh Barnea, when the spies refused to believe God and take the land, God said they had tempted Him ten times.  They exhibited a mentality and a lifestyle of unbelief and rebellion.  And just as all men live their lives in the presence of God, since God is the dwelling place, the unavoidable dwelling place of all generations, then it is easy to see that the secret sins and iniquities of Israel were before the eyes of the Lord.  Such is the case with us all.

It is sin that causes us to be consumed by death.  It is sin that provokes the wrath and anger of God.  When you combine the thought that God’s wrath is upon us, and that our entire lives are but a flash, that entire generations, that a thousand years in God’s sight is equivalent to nothing, it should cause us to think better of how we spend our days.  Our days are fleeting, but they are significant.  They are all lived in the presence of a holy God whose holiness is entirely intolerant of our sinfulness.  That is what makes them important.  

Verses 10 - 12  These verses are quite Counter-Evangelical.  These are not happy, positive, feel-good-about-myself verses.  They are the Word of God, and they are here to remind us of some of the realities about ourselves that we often do not want to face.  If all goes well, we will live 70 years.  If things go exceptionally well, 80 years.  But at the end of those years, what are the things that are remarkable about such a life?  What things stand out?

Recently, a friend of mine who was 90 years old, died.  I attended his funeral and after everyone had an opportunity to present him in the best light possible, I noticed that there was nothing mentioned that was truly outstanding, or that was extraordinary.  He lived a rather common, ordinary life, for 90 years.  And now it is over.  As Moses says, my friend’s life had a fair amount of labor and sorrow.  He worked for many years.  He fought in WWII.  Labor.  Sorrow.  Those were certainly the things that described life in the desert for 40 years for Moses and his people.

These words bring us back to reality.  The vast majority of people live unremarkable lives, filled with labor and sorrow.  Then after 70 years of that, you die.  Names are forgotten.  Graveside services are short and sweet and unremarkable.  Within weeks or months at best, even the 90 year olds are seldom thought of by anyone but the closest of relatives.  But even worse, and especially for Israel, Moses says their lives were lived under the anger and wrath of God because of their sin.  God was angry with them for 40 years.  For the unsaved and the rebellious, God is angry every day. 

Therefore Moses makes this request of God in verse 12: “So teach us to number our days, That we may gain a heart of wisdom.”  What does he mean by that request?  What is he asking for from God?  As we all know, my recent experiences have been rather unsettling, to say the least.  Any time a doctor says, “You have something like cancer.  I’m sorry,” you tend to sit up and take notice.  But suppose he had said, “Keith, you have a very aggressive form of cancer and it has spread all through your abdomen and into all your organs.  There is nothing I can do.  You have about a month to live.”  

How long is a month?  About 30 days, give or take a day or two.  If you had 30 days to live, do you think you’d want to make some plans about how to spend those last days?  Moses is asking God to teach us to number the days of our entire lives like that.  Seventy, even eighty years, are like a watch in the night!  It’s really not a long time.  So if that’s all we can reasonably expect, providing all goes well in the meantime, how do you want to spend that time?  One word: wisely.  Help us to number our days so that we don’t waste them away in foolishness, but rather live them wisely and well.

Finally, in verses 13 - 17, we hear hope in Moses’ voice.  What has been mournful and reflective, now becomes hopeful and trustful.  He may be speaking these words near the end of the forty years in the wilderness.  The years of affliction and evil are almost over. The wandering is almost finished and the Promised Land is once again in sight.  So he prays in anticipation of better days filled with God’s mercy and compassion.  God’s wrath has been satisfied, and now there is reason to believe the children of Israel will receive God’s blessing upon them in a way which they have not experienced for an entire generation.  

The entire adult population of those Jews who came out of Egypt never came out of the desert.  They spent their lives wandering, waiting to die.  I liken much of American evangelicalism to Israel in the desert.  Wasted lives and wasted time wandering around doing nothing significant for the sake of the kingdom or for the propagation of the Gospel.  The only thing Israel in the desert teaches us is how not to spend your life.  Evangelicalism is spending time not being evangelical.  They do stuff that contributes nothing to the cause of Christ because so much of what that they do is devoid of the Gospel message.

Moses brings his main point home in these final verses: Don’t let us waste any more time.  Lord, establish the work of our hands.  We’ve spent the last 40 years under your frown, under your wrath, which we rightly deserved.  But now, have mercy, have compassion.  You cause our lives to count for something.  You establish, You cause the work of our hands to be established, cause it to count for something eternal, for the sake of Your great name.

I, for one, do not want to look back over my life and see nothing but an aimless wandering for no particular reason except to pass the time (the very brief time that it is in light of eternity), just to die, having accomplished nothing for Christ.  I don’t want to build a house on sand.  I don’t want to have a life that can be described as consisting of wood, hay, and stubble.  I want the work of my hands, the work of my life, to be significant.  Shouldn’t this be our prayer:  “Lord, establish the work of our hands!”  Considering how brief our time is in this world, shouldn’t we want it to count for more than, “A good time was had by all”?  

We’ll look at part two next week.