Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Continue our prayer now seeking the Lord's illumination of His Word.
[00:00:06] Our Heavenly Father, as you have given Yourself to us in the Word, the Word inscripturated and the Word Incarnate, we ask that you would reveal Yourself to us by Your Spirit at work in us, so that we might see what we ought to see. For as we know, both we and others have blindness, blind spots, ears that have been stopped up, sometimes through ignorance, and sometimes by our own rebelliousness.
[00:00:42] And so, Lord, we come to you now asking that you would bless us with the reading and preaching of Your word that you would help us to see and hear what we ought to see and hear. That we would conform our minds and our hearts to Your word, to the truth that is there that we might live as free people as those who have joy and courage and hope. We pray this in Jesus name. Amen.
[00:01:13] Please remain standing, and let's turn to God's word in Psalm 90 tonight. Psalm 90, beginning of book four of five books in the Psalter. Psalm 90 if you were with us this morning in Two Corinthians, when I preached in Two Corinthians, chapter five, you'll hear lots of echoes and interesting things between these texts that are ripe for study and meditation.
[00:01:41] I hope that that will be a blessing to you tonight, though let's consider in particular this psalm.
[00:01:49] Let's hear God's word.
[00:01:52] Lord, you have been our dwelling place in all generations.
[00:01:56] Before the mountains were brought forth. Wherever you had formed the earth and the world, from everlasting to everlasting, you are God.
[00:02:06] You return man to dust and say, Return, O children of man. For a thousand years in your sight are but as yesterday when it is past, or as a watch in the night you sweep them away as with a flood. They are like a dream, like grass that is renewed in the morning. In the morning it flourishes and is renewed. In the evening it fades and withers, for we are brought to an end by Your anger, by Your wrath we are dismayed.
[00:02:43] You have set our iniquities before you, our secret sins in the light of Your presence, for all our days pass away. Under Your wrath we bring our years to an end like a sigh.
[00:02:58] The years of our life are 70, or even by reason of strength 80. Yet their span is but toil trouble.
[00:03:07] They are soon gone, and we fly away.
[00:03:11] Who considers the power of Your anger and Your wrath according to the fear of you?
[00:03:18] So teach us to number our days, that we may get a heart of wisdom. Return, o Lord, how long have pity on your servants. Satisfy us in the morning with Your steadfast love that we may rejoice and be glad all our days. Make us glad for as many days as you have afflicted us, and for as many years as we have seen evil. Let your work be shown to your servants and your glorious power to their children. Let the favor of the Lord our God be upon us and establish the work of our hands. Upon us. Yes, establish the work of our hands.
[00:04:01] Amen.
[00:04:02] Please be seated.
[00:04:18] Here's a recent popular book called 4000 Weeks, a book about time management. A book that asks us to think about the limited number of time that we have in this world and how we go about using it. And it is limited, isn't it? As the psalm says, 70 years, if you're particularly strong, 80. Right?
[00:04:42] And then we're done.
[00:04:45] Life is limited. And this psalm, which is something of a kind of a congregational prayer, it observes time, it considers time. It thinks about it. And it thinks about it in light of reality, in light of the Lord.
[00:05:05] I'd like to walk through it with you, this wonderful psalm, and then think about a few lessons at the end.
[00:05:13] First, in verses one and two, we have a basis for this prayer lord, you have been our dwelling place in all generations. Before the mountains were brought forth, wherever you had formed the earth and the world, from everlasting to everlasting, you are God.
[00:05:30] This is a good starting place for thinking about time, to recognize that time is not a thing unto itself, that the Lord is the only one who is completely self sufficient. Time is dependent on Him, as everything else in creation is. It's also helpful to start here, because this is, after all, a prayer. And what are we going to pray to? To whom are we going to pray to, except the Lord Himself? Right. We are not. Though we are subject to time, we are even more subject to the Lord of time.
[00:06:09] The supremacy of our Lord is expressed in these verses in powerful ways, right? Notice first of all, the power of his protection. You have been our dwelling place in all generations. It's in Him that we dwell, live, move and have our being.
[00:06:27] We see his supremacy also in his acts of creation, in his creative acts, the mountains being brought forth, the formation of the world.
[00:06:37] But we take a step back from that with the psalmist, and we see something even more fundamental or something maybe even behind those creative acts. And that is the eternality of God Himself. God is not bound to creation. He exists self sufficiently from everlasting to everlasting, even before these things happened. You are God, our dwelling place, our protector, our Creator. And this is the starting place for thinking about our days, thinking about our time. It's a good starting place, a good ending place, too.
[00:07:19] Then the psalmist moves us into verse three through eleven, and he has us consider our time here in this world. It begins with verse three.
[00:07:30] Speaking of God, you return man to dust and say Return, O children of man.
[00:07:38] This is of course, an echo of Genesis two, one, two and three, where we are reminded that God made man out of the dust of the ground, breathed life into him and in the curse he says to dust you shall return.
[00:07:55] A couple of things are impressed here in our hearts. One is our insignificance.
[00:08:01] But dust, right? This thing that is so small and minor and ineffective is the stuff out of which we are made and the stuff to which we return.
[00:08:16] And also, beginning here, we get the sense that this is not some sort of accident, but it is the result of the Lord's judgment.
[00:08:25] Returning to dust, finding ourselves in a state of death doesn't just happen, it happens because he's angry. As the psalmist goes on to say, we die. We experience death because of sin, because the wages of sin are death.
[00:08:45] But before getting there fully, the psalmist goes to verse four and he gives us another contrast, right? On the one hand, God in his great eternality and his majesty bringing forth mountains. And there we are, the dust of mountains, the dust of the ground. A great contrast between us and God. Now, a second contrast with us and the experience of time, right? We're 70, 80 years, give or take. For Him, a thousand years are like just yesterday.
[00:09:19] Or to go a step further, a watch in the night, right? Just a portion of the nighttime. It's like a thousand years to God.
[00:09:32] The contrast between us and the Lord begins to help us to see not only Him and his greatness, his everlastingness, but also another perspective and way of seeing things.
[00:09:46] But let's go on.
[00:09:48] In verses five and six, he talks about this temporariness and he compares us to a few different things.
[00:09:56] He talks about mankind in relation to God. In verse five, in this way, first you sweep them away as with a flood.
[00:10:05] Hopefully none of you have seen a real flood, been caught in one of the canyons or something like this when the flash floods come. I've only seen something like this on YouTube videos and this kind of thing, a monsoon flood coming, this great roar. Perhaps you've seen something like this even through a video and it's just a desert, everything's there. And then you're like, that sounds like a train. And then and everything is just instantly gone.
[00:10:39] You sweep them away like a flood. Or to use another analogy, they're like a dream.
[00:10:44] You've all dreamt, had dreams, right? This sort of sense in which everything is so real, so powerful, so there in fact, your body, you may wake up acting in relationship to your dream, maybe pushing the brake really hard right on your bed covers, or crying because something is so sad and so stressful. And then all of a sudden you're like, oh, it's just a dream. My brakes do actually work and they're in the car, in the garage. I didn't actually do all those terrible things. But whatever it is, right, it was a dream and it's all gone. What was so real, so permanent was so there. There is poof, gone.
[00:11:30] The psalmist is saying that to us, to mankind, like this, to God, are like that, just there and gone.
[00:11:40] To impress it even further, he pictures us like grass. Grass that is renewed in the morning. In the morning it flourishes and was renewed. In the evening it fades and withers. We know these lessons very well, don't we, as desert people, right? Grass that pops up, oh, look, grass green. And then in a few hours later, it's dead and dying.
[00:12:04] This is like how we are. These are our lives.
[00:12:10] There's this sense of impermanence things changing so quickly and in relationship to time. Perhaps you've seen maps of sort of a timeline map in which civilizations come and rise and fall, right? Have you ever seen anything like this? Where you see one empire sweep over a map and then it's quickly replaced by another empire and this and these sort of the colors change and grow and you realize how impermanent these things are.
[00:12:39] Huge, huge empires with tons of wealth and power and control, ruling land and sea and air. And then where'd they go, what was even their name, they become flashcards, right? For our history exams, we could barely remember some of these things. And yet at one time, they were the only thing anybody ever talked about.
[00:13:03] We're coming up on the end of the year.
[00:13:06] I always like looking back at those sort of things that happened in 2023 because I always forget so much. Things that were top headlines for weeks you've totally forgotten about just a few months later.
[00:13:24] Well, then we get into verses seven and eight, nine, and we begin to see what was hinted at earlier. The reasons for this, theological reasons, the relationship reasons.
[00:13:39] We are brought to an end by your anger, by Your wrath we are dismayed. You have set our iniquities before you, our secret sins in the light of Your presence our days pass away. Under Your wrath we bring our years to end with a sigh. And even these 70, 80 years that are given, they're all toil and trouble. And then verse eleven ends with this rhetorical question who considers the power of your anger and your wrath according to the fear of you? The answer is not enough.
[00:14:15] Not enough, not me enough.
[00:14:19] In all of this, we see that the reasons for this is because of sin. God is from everlasting to everlasting. He's not limited to this particular place or this particular time. Which means he sees everything.
[00:14:35] He knows it all. And what he sees is not all good.
[00:14:41] In fact, a lot of it is bad.
[00:14:45] You have set our iniquities before you, our secret sins in the light of Your presence.
[00:14:54] Those things that we hide, those dark secrets which we don't want to know or we don't want to be known, the things that we hope to avoid or not talk about.
[00:15:05] He takes the secret sins and he just puts them in a light, under a light, and not an interrogation light in a room, but the light of what? His presence.
[00:15:21] We stand before Him in our sinfulness and all is exposed.
[00:15:31] So no wonder our years pass away like a sigh. No wonder the things which seem so permanent and stable in this world disappear so quickly.
[00:15:42] Who we read again in verse eleven, who considers the power of your anger and your wrath according to the fear of you? Certainly not enough of us.
[00:15:52] Well, this call to consider in verse eleven becomes a command, a command to consider in verse twelve. Or a request, perhaps.
[00:16:03] Teach us, the prayer says, teach us to number our days, teach us to number our days, help us to get a perspective in our heads that sees things as you see them, right? That's what it's asking here. It's a call to us, a request to the Lord to help us to consider.
[00:16:23] And there's also a promise, isn't there a hope that in considering our days, in learning to believe the previous verses, verses three through eleven, about our time, our life in this world, the reasons for it, that if we receive that if we come to understand it and believe it, we'll receive something, a heart of wisdom. A heart of wisdom.
[00:16:51] Wisdom, a lot of wisdom is simply seeing things as they really are, connecting this dot of truth to this dot of truth and that dot to truth that happens in math, music, theology and life, understanding things how they really are, knowing the truth and what it really is. So much of a lack of wisdom, so much of the foolishness that's in us comes from what? Well, ignorance about the truth, how things really are, and also denial of the truth. Just I don't want to believe that. I don't want to see it, I don't want to know it.
[00:17:34] But the psalmist here calls us in these words of this prayer that we would number our days, that we would learn to see things as God sees them, that we may get a heart of wisdom.
[00:17:47] And when we do, we come to understand God not only in his eternality, not only in his judgment, but also in his grace and the promises that he has made. In time.
[00:17:59] There's a change that happens, a turn that happens. And we read about it in the following verses. Let's continue on through the psalm. So verse 13 then says, return, O Lord, how long have pity on your servants?
[00:18:16] It's a call that says as I understand things according to your perspective, don't let me fall into despair.
[00:18:23] As hard as this is, as toilsome and troubling as the things are, don't let me despair, but instead deliver me, deliver me it's a call for pity. Now, we would be right to ask on what basis could we ask for deliverance when this is how we have lived our lives, when God can expose our sins and the secrets of our hearts and the light of his presence? On what basis can we call to Him for his pity?
[00:18:51] Well, it's his steadfast love, it's his grace and his favor that has promised and been promised in time.
[00:18:59] When we come to the New Testament, we read about the Lord and Savior that he came in the fullness of time. That at this particular moment, at exactly the right time, the Lord of history comes into our world to save us.
[00:19:19] Listen to Galatians Four.
[00:19:22] But when the fullness of time four, verse four. But when the fullness of time had come I love that phrase. I'll just say it again. The fullness of time like pregnancy, right? It's full. The time is full. When the fullness of time had come, god sent forth His Son born of a woman, born under the law. Why? To redeem those who were under the law so that we might receive adoption as sons.
[00:19:51] This is what happened. Jesus says a similar thing in Mark, chapter one, verse 15.
[00:19:58] We read in verse 14 that after John was arrested, jesus came into Galilee and here's what he did, right? Remember what chapter I said? This is Mark One, right? So we're right at the beginning of Jesus's ministry here. Jesus came into Galilee, proclaiming the Gospel of God and saying the time is fulfilled. The time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God is at hand. Repent and believe the gospel.
[00:20:26] That's awesome.
[00:20:27] The time is fulfilled in the fullness of time. He came to fulfill the purpose of time. The Lord comes into this world and reveals his mercy, reveals his grace. And it's a grace that's not brand new. It had been promised throughout time, even back from the moment Adam and Eve were cursed. And he promised that one would come who would fix things, heal things and crush the head of that evil serpent, our enemy, Satan.
[00:21:00] And he does.
[00:21:02] This promise that was made then that the psalmist is holding on to is a promise that is fulfilled in Christ. And so we can look not to our sins and despair and see simply hopelessness and death, but we can look to our sins in the light of God's presence and find salvation not in our sins, but in the salvation of our sins or the salvation of us from our sins. In forgiveness, right? In redemption, in reconciliation.
[00:21:33] Verse 14, going back to the psalm, says satisfy us in the morning with your steadfast love that we may rejoice and be glad all our days.
[00:21:43] There's kind of a twist in this time and morning language which I love so much. The first time we were hearing about this, right, the grass springs up in the morning and now it dies depressing. Now when we hear about the morning, it is this call to be satisfied, to be satisfied in the morning with what not hopelessness and despair, but Your steadfast love that we may rejoice and be glad all our days, even the troubling ones, even the ones of toil, the ones that are so difficult for us.
[00:22:20] God is doing something good in this world. He is saving us.
[00:22:26] The sun goes down, things are hard, but it comes up again. And we find ourselves the result of this is what rejoicing and being glad.
[00:22:39] Now, all of a sudden, time feels a little different. The day to day, the grind of the toil on all of these things, they begin to change when we experience his steadfast love. All right, we should keep going. Verse 15 make us glad for as many days as you have afflict afflicted us and for as many years as we have seen evil. So just take all of that the prayer is take all of this evil and everything that we've experienced and just flip it over, right, like an hourglass, right? And let all of that evil, all of the trials, be turned into something else. Make us glad for as many as have passed, for as many years as we have seen evil. Flip things over, change things. And then in verse 16 show us your work. Let us see it. Let Your work be shown to Your servants and Your glorious power to their children.
[00:23:37] Let the favor of the Lord be upon us. The next verse says what do we want to see? Two things in verse 16. Your work, the work of God and his glorious power. And notice how we see them. Notice the relationship we have in verse 16.
[00:23:56] No longer are we just not random, sort of a mass of dust, right? A great humanity that just is blown around in the wind. Now all of a sudden, we are servants, children.
[00:24:11] We are people with those who have a relationship with God that is positive and known, connected to Him, serving Him, loving Him, becoming like Him.
[00:24:22] Instead of this vision of just dots on a timeline, we are people who are in communion with God.
[00:24:30] How does that happen? Through his steadfast love, through his pity, through his turning to us in time.
[00:24:38] Then finally, verse 17 ends let the favor of the Lord God be upon us. Establish the work of our hands. Upon us. Yes, it repeats, establish the work of our hands.
[00:24:51] The psalm then asks this prayer asks that the things that we do in this life, out of the people that we are, wouldn't be meaningless, pointless and just a vapor in the wind.
[00:25:06] Instead, it would be established not by our strength or our ingenuity or our great tower building, right? But by God that God would be at work in us and through us in time, so that we who are but dust would be to the praise and glory of his name, that we who are but dust would be those who are made in the image of God and bearing that image now and forever.
[00:25:35] Do it, Lord. Yes, do it. Establish the work of our hands. Establish the work of our hands. There's confidence in that and it's biblical confidence, it's righteous confidence. It's holy confidence because of who he is and what he has done.
[00:25:53] So hopefully we've been drawing lessons from this throughout. Let me list just three, perhaps rehearsing a little bit. Some of the things have already been said.
[00:26:03] Number one, we've got to tell the truth about time.
[00:26:07] We've got to tell ourselves the truth about time and each other. The truth about time.
[00:26:13] One commentator said, lack of time makes us anxious. Having a lot of it makes us bored.
[00:26:22] We just don't know how to deal with it very well, right? Time marches on, as we say, and we're in the middle of it. But we struggle so much.
[00:26:30] If we would learn to see time as that which belongs to the Lord if we would learn to see ourselves as those people that belong to the Lord and if we would learn to see the Lord as he is from everlasting to everlasting and yet also the one who enters into time and saves us from our sin. I think things become a little easier, at least in our hearts and our minds and our service toward him.
[00:27:00] The same commentator marked that the young think they're immortal the old despair because of their trouble and their shortness and the shortness of life.
[00:27:10] We need a better perspective on time, don't we? In Psalm 90, the Lord offers that to us. Here a lesson two.
[00:27:23] We need God's grace and his mercy to help us to see this.
[00:27:30] We need his grace and his mercy and his life to experience his steadfast love.
[00:27:37] Because there's a sin problem. And because there's a sin problem, there's a death problem. And because there's a death problem, there's a vanity problem, a meaningless problem. The Lord changes all of that and makes things meaningful, purposeful, having direction and hope because he takes care of our sin.
[00:27:59] So it's not just about getting the right perspective about his sovereignty over time. It's also resting in Him who offers us grace.
[00:28:10] He does this in Jesus, who entered into this world in the fullness of time, and he calls us to do what? Repent and believe the gospel.
[00:28:21] So when we feel anxiety about time, when we feel boredom about time, when we feel overly confident or overly despairing, we should give all of these thoughts, all of these feelings to the Lord of Time and to the one who entered into this world and achieved for us a resurrection from the dead, gives us bodies that are eternal. As we thought about this morning in two corinthians five.
[00:28:52] The last thing I'll mention is that in all of this, my brothers and sisters, children and servants of the Lord, when we turn to the Lord in repentance and faith, when we turn to the Lord for truth and wisdom about ourselves, about our bodies, about time and about space, you will find something really wonderful. Joy and gladness, stability and rejoicing and wisdom. This is what the Lord promises to us, among the many, many things he promises to us. And so, as you sit down tonight or tomorrow and check your calendar, think about the week ahead. Plan perhaps for something you need to plan for. Remember who you belong to. Remember the Lord of Time. Remember Him who has entered into time and then remember Him who has saved you so that you might have eternal life in the light of his presence.
[00:29:57] Let's pray.
[00:30:01] Our Lord God, we submit ourselves to you, for what else is there to do?
[00:30:08] We belong to you whether we like it or not.
[00:30:11] For you are the one true living God, supreme over all things.
[00:30:18] To you belongs all praise and glory and honor. To you belong the oceans and the mountains, the dust on our shelves and the stars in the heavens.
[00:30:32] Show us your work.
[00:30:34] Show us your power. Show us your glory. Help us to see our significance in you, that we are not random dots on a timeline, that we are not machines, that we are not random acts of things that have happened, but we are people.
[00:30:57] People who have been made in the image of God so that we might be Your children, so that we might follow after you, know you and love you.
[00:31:07] And help us to see that not only this is what we were made for, but this is what you have given to us as sons and daughters in Christ.
[00:31:18] Thank you for the adoption that you have given to us in Him. Thank you that we can cry out to you, Abba Father. Thank you for the Spirit who is in us. Testifying to us that we belong to you. And let these thoughts never leave our minds when we plan our days, when we weep over the things that are happening, when we feel the suffering in our bodies and the weakness and the struggle against sin, let us return over and over and over to you in faith and repent.
[00:31:50] In all this, Lord, we ask that you would make our lives meaningful, that you would establish the work of our hands. Yes, you would establish the work of our hands, and that you, as the One who has done the work, would be glorified now and forever. We pray this in Jesus name. Amen.
