2016 was a strange year. Retrospectives now abound, along with advice to get your finances in order and plan for a healthy and productive new year. Look back, take stock, do better.
On New Year’s Eve, the church also calls us to a different kind of looking back. The Psalm of Moses, Psalm 90, sends us back to our origins. The God who formed the earth, and formed us from the earth, sends us back to earth, pulverized. “You return man to dust and say, ‘Return, O children of man!’”
A better translation would be, “You turn the human race back to dust, and say, ‘Return, sons of Adam!’” It is not a single man, or people as individuals, that God turns back to dust, but the entire human race. We’re all in this together, as one human family, descended from one father, Adam. Made from the earth, we shall return there.
At first, it seems like a long time before that will happen. “The years of our life are seventy, or even by reason of strength eighty.” When we are young and vibrant, that still seems far away. So Moses gives us another image, of a flower. “In the morning it flourishes and is renewed; in the evening it fades and withers.”
This is not natural. God did not create the world this way. He made us to continually receive from Him the gift of life. In communion with Him, we would not know corruption, or death. Dear brothers and sisters, you must fight against this voice of the culture all around us, which is really the voice of the devil himself, saying, “Death is natural, death is just a part of life.” What could be more evil, what could despise God more, than to connect death with God’s good gift of life? Death is not normal, death is not natural, death is the divine punishment for sin. All of us sons of Adam must feel it. From the moment you need contacts or glasses, to the point where the aging knuckle feels arthritis, all of that is a reminder that you, O human race, must return to the dust on account of your disobedience.
And that time for you is near, be it another half century, or in 2017. The Son of Man is coming at an hour you do not expect. Our time is short. The length of your life is very uncertain, and even eighty years fly by like a dream in the night that vanishes. Jerome, the fourth-century pastor who translated the Bible into Latin, writes in one of his letters about the short span of our life:
The shortness of man’s life is the punishment for man’s sin; and the fact that even on the very threshold of the light death constantly overtakes the new-born child proves that the times are continually sinking into deeper depravity. For when the first tiller of paradise had been entangled by the serpent in his snaky coils, and had been forced in consequence to migrate earthwards, although his deathless state was changed for a mortal one, yet the sentence of man’s curse was put off for nine hundred years, or even more, a period so long that it may be called a second immortality. Afterwards sin gradually grew more and more virulent, till the ungodliness of the giants brought in its train the shipwreck of the whole world. Then when the world had been cleansed by the baptism—if I may so call it—of the deluge, human life was contracted to a short span. Yet even this we have almost altogether wasted, so continually do our iniquities fight against the divine purposes. [NPNF2 vol. 6, p11]
Does that last sentence apply to you, and how you’ve spent your life so far? “Yet even this we have almost altogether wasted.”
And all of that waste, Moses says, will be set forth as evidence in the Day of Judgment. “You have set our iniquities before you, our secret sins in the light of your presence.”
For Moses, all this reflection on the shortness of life and God’s judgment upon us is a setup for this prayer: “So teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom.” We count the numbers of years, we count our birthdays and keep track of various anniversaries and milestones, but through this Psalm, we are asking God to help us with a different kind of counting: to see the passage of time as a gift, with one purpose, to gain and exercise wisdom.
In the ancient world, wisdom was often equated with knowledge. In the Scriptures, however, wisdom is knowledge of God—His holiness and justice—along with exhibiting that holiness and justice in the practical areas of your life. “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom,” and that wisdom is exercised, God’s Word says, by turning away from evil (Job 28:28). Solomon, the greatest of the Hebrew wisdom teachers, summarizes man’s life at the end of Ecclesiastes, which I think of as his book of repentance: “Fear God and keep His commandments, for this is the whole duty of man” (12:13).
You were made for a life of love, love received from God, love shared with His creatures. You number your days, you order your life in this way, whether you have many more years or just a few more hours. And when your last hour comes, when your days are numbered, you die in the strength of God’s promise: “Who shall bring any charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies. Who is to condemn? Christ Jesus is the one who died” (Epistle). Risen from the dead, He intercedes for you.
Don’t be confident in your youth or strength. Don’t despair when they fail. Don’t worry about the coming year. Live each day in the wisdom of God. Do the work of your vocation, forgive your neighbors, rejoice in Christ crucified for your absolution, rejoice all the more at His resurrection and His coming at the last day. For in His hands is every hour, day, and year, even unto the ages of ages. +INJ+