A message on the mysteries of pain and time and the hope of healing
“23 In the course of my life He broke my strength; He cut short my days. 24 So I said: “Do not take me away, O my God, in the midst of my days; Your years go on through all generations.
25 In the beginning You laid the foundations of the earth, and the heavens are the work of Your hands. 26 They will perish, but you remain; they will all wear out like a garment. Like clothing You will change them, and they will be discarded. 27 But You remain the same, and Your years will never end.
28 The children of your servants will live in Your presence; their descendants will be established before You.”
”
Time is about the strangest thing there is. Just try to explain it to someone. The more you think about it, the more complicated it becomes. It’s like making a bridge long enough to reach Mars—the more you think about it, the more complicated it becomes.
Was there time before, “in the beginning God made the heaven and the earth”? Just try to wrap your mind around the idea of you existing for eternity. Try to live in the now, as they say, and you’ll find it’s always become the past and the future at the same time.
We can measure time but that’s as far as we’ve gotten. We live in time. As far as we can tell, we’re the only creatures who know we have a limited amount of it. We try to come to terms with that. That’s what we see this man doing in our last study in Psalm 102. He concludes that time and his times are in the Lord’s hands. That’s the claim of this sermon: time and our times are in the Lord’s hands.
We will study this in three points. First: short on days. Second: our time and the Lord’s time. Third: a legacy. First, in verses 23-24, short on days. Second, in verses 25-27, our time and the Lord’s time. Third, in verse 28, a legacy.
This man sees his time slipping away. That’s our first point: short on days. We’ve seen this man’s troubles. He’s a conquered captive and he’s terribly frustrated about it all. He’s so frustrated that he sometimes forgets to eat. He has trouble sleeping. Last week we saw that he remembered the Lord. We saw how that helped. We saw hope return to this man. Now we the afflictions resurface; verse 23, “In the course of my life He broke my strength; He cut short my days.”
We ended last week on a supremely hopeful note. We begin this week supremely deflated. This Psalm is an emotional roller coaster. The man starts low, he remembers the Lord’s love and power, and then it’s as if his frustrations got the upper hand again. This man wrote this way because that’s exactly how life goes. It’s a battle for the mind.
It’s worth remembering this battle for this man’s mind is occurring in the middle of his pain. This whole Psalm is headed by the words, “A prayer of an afflicted man. When he is faint and pours out his lament before the Lord.” He was faint and poured out his lament before the Lord in verse 7, “I lie awake; I have become like a bird alone on a roof.” He was faint and poured out his lament before the Lord in verse 16, “the Lord will rebuild Zion and appear in His glory.” He’s still faint and still pouring out his lament. It’s very possible to be truly helped by the truth of what God is doing and remain faint and continue to lament. People are not simple.
This man’s particular resurfacing frustration is quite understandable. “In the course of my life He broke my strength; He cut short my days,” as verse 23 puts it. This man was likely in the middle of the most productive years of his life. He was in the full strength of manhood, but rather than making something magnificent out of all that vigor, he was devoting his giftings to whatever the Babylonians wanted.
Many people have a taste of that with what’s called the mid-life crisis. We wonder if we’ve spent our strength in vain. “Was it worth it to sacrifice so much for this business? Does anything that I do make a difference to anyone—really?” People in that situation recognize that they have less vigor ahead of them than behind and they want to make sure they use whatever they’ve got left in the tank well. This man was burning inside because it seemed like his life was being wasted. Some of us might know what that is like in situations that this man would find downright enviable.
This man was wise enough to recognize that God had something to do with it all. God is the “He” of verse 23; “In the course of my life He broke my strength; He cut short my days.” It’s not outside of the Lord’s sovereignty that this man was spending the prime of his life in Babylon. It’s not outside the Lord’s sovereignty that your father was a certain age during the farm crisis. It’s not outside the Lord’s sovereignty that the profession of journalism which you thought and still think would fit you so well started falling apart before you were old enough to start. It’s not outside the Lord’s sovereignty that so many young men in China can’t get married right now because of their society’s sad conclusions on gender. There are all sorts of frustrations that plague those of us who live in history. The message here is that the Lord is Lord over history. That’s worth remembering when you’ve got frustrations about living in 2022.
This man seems quite godly. He was in exile because so many of his contemporaries weren’t. This man was laboring for the Babylonians rather than expanding his father’s farm because so many of his countrymen faked their faith. The godly suffer many indignities simply by virtue of living in times of godlessness. Notice that this man doesn’t fault the Lord for that. He recognizes the Lord’s hand in it, but he doesn’t fault him; you see that in verse 24, ‘So I said: “Do not take me away, O my God, in the midst of my days; Your years go on through all generations.”’
There is an art in this—recognizing the Lord’s hand without holding it against Him. It is an art we must learn. Jesus is the perfection of it. He truly was cut off at his prime. Remember, he is just as human as you. There are few delights more glorious than seeing a man of wisdom and skill excelling at his craft and Jesus of Nazareth certainly was a man of wisdom and skill. It’s been amazing to see how much he packed into so few words in our study in the beatitudes. That man is more than a genius. He also could say, “In the course of my life He broke my strength; He cut short my days.” He had it even worse this this man in Psalm 102. Neither Jesus nor this Psalmist, though, held it against the Father. Going to God without holding it against God—that’s worth considering.
This man thought he was as good as dead before his time. That got him thinking about time. Pain makes philosophers out of us all. You see that in our second point: our time and the Lord’s time. If you live here, you live by the Big Sioux River. Maybe that means something to you. Maybe you like to fish it. Maybe you don’t. Maybe you like to look at it when you cross it. Maybe you don’t. Either way, the Big Sioux was here before you and it will be here after you. People were fishing it hundreds of years before you were born. Your entire lifespan is a holiday weekend compared with the some of the rivers of this world. The Nile has seen civilizations come and go. The fall of Rome didn’t change its flow.
Oscar Hammerstein noticed that and wrote the song Ol’ Man River. It is about the Mississippi River and the hardships of life for African-Americans in the South after the Civil War. “You and me, we sweat and strain, body all aching and racked with pain, tote that barge and lift that bail, you get a little drunk and you land in jail, but I get weary, and sick of trying, cause I’m tired of living, but I’m scared of dying, but ol’ man river, he just keeps rolling along.” The message is that the river has seen it all. It was here before us and will still be rolling along after us. That’s what this man turns his attention to in verse 25, “in the beginning You laid the foundations of the earth, and the heavens are the work of Your hands.”
This man feels as life is slipping away and like the singer in Ol’ Man River, he considers what endures—what keeps rolling along. He thinks about the earth—the mountains, the rivers, the trees. He thinks about the heavens—the clouds, the sun, the stars. These last much longer than us. “Ol’ man river, he just keeps rolling along.” This Psalmist understands more than Oscar Hammerstein does though. He understands that these rivers and mountains are blips before God; verse 26, “They will perish, but you remain.” Ol’ man river will not keep rolling along forever. The Big Sioux will not be her forever. Your lifespan is as nothing compared with the Nile’s, but the Nile’s lifespan is as nothing before eternity and that’s God. He dwarfs what dwarfs you; “But You remain the same, and Your years will never end.”
The Lord is eternal. We can’t wrap our minds around that. That makes the Lord’s perception of time quite different from ours. “With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day,” as Peter puts it. That’s a reminder that the Lord is eternal and we are not and so we have very different perspectives on time. Toddlers and parents have very different perspectives on time. Parents have lived much more of it than toddler have and so their understanding of the word “soon” will be very different. The longer you live, the greater perspective you have. The message here is that we can’t imagine God’s perspective on time and our times.
It's to be expected that the Psalmist’s life and our lives won’t make much sense to us—we’ve got limited perspective. The Lord has infinite perspective and this man’s present moment as frustrating as it was and as futile as it seemed fit perfectly and purposefully into His plan. This man couldn’t see it from the Lord’s perspective. He’s acknowledging that. He’s also acknowledging his trust. Acknowledge both. Tell God that you don’t get it. Trust that He does. Trust the process. It’s His process.
God shows how very trustworthy He is by entering time. He moved into it when the Son of God entered the very limitations of life which we find so exceedingly frustrating. He was broken off in his strength. The eternal God entered time so that we might enter eternity. You become eternal by knowing God. That’s why Jesus said, “this is eternal life that they might know You, the only true God.” You become eternal by knowing God. That’s why Knowing God is on that magnet on your fridge. The Son of God entered into history so that you who were born in history might enter into that.
He did so that generations might enter in. That’s our final point: a legacy. I’ve been taking Elmwood when I go to Rock Valley. It’s a rather hilly road and as you near Rock Valley, you see why it’s called Rock Valley. The city is built in what’s clearly a valley. When you start descending, you can’t see the town in the valley. You can just see the hill on the other side of the city. It doesn’t seem like there’s anything in between. That’s how this verse and any verses in the Bible might seem at first glance—not much there. Ride through it, though, and you’ll find that like on Elmwood there’s a lot there. There’s a whole town there. People have lived their whole lives within something you couldn’t see from a distance. Riding through the verses of the Bible—that’s what we’re doing together.
In this final verse, this man turns his attention to the future; verse 28, “The children of your servants will live in Your presence; their descendants will be established before You.” This man has been thinking about his own lot in life. Now he’s thinking about a future beyond himself. This nation’s second president, John Adams did that. He said, “I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy… and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, [and] music.” Adams was thinking about a future beyond himself. This man is doing the same. Considering your own mortality will do that to you.
This man, like Adams, wants it to be better for his descendants than it is for him. He wants them to enjoy what he can’t. That’s part of why he’s praying. He’s wondering what life will be like for them. Parents and grandparents regularly wonder that. Billy Joel did. In his last album, he was thinking quite a bit about the future. “This is our moment,” he wrote, “here at the crossroads of time. We hope our children carry our dreams down the line. They are the vintage. What kind of life will they live? Is this a curse or a blessing that we give?” This man of Psalm 102 knew where the blessing was to be found; verse 28, “The children of your servants will live in Your presence; their descendants will be established before You.”
The blessing was found in belonging to the Lord. He still believed that even though he was in the middle of, “my days vanish like smoke; my bones burn like glowing embers.” While other Jews were saying, “where is the Lord in all this?” and walking away from Him, this man knew that to walk away from the Lord was to walk away from blessing. People who walk away from the Lord in pain still have their pain; they just don’t have the Lord.
This man knew that security consisted in belonging to the Lord. “The children of your servants will live in Your presence; their descendants will be established before You.” This man wanted to pass on a legacy of faith. He truly believed this life of faith is the happy life we’ve been studying in the morning and so he wanted it for his children. I remember hearing Alistair Begg say that he regularly prays that his children would love the Lord and serve the Lord and the rest isn’t nearly as consequential. That’s what this man was praying as he was suffering the consequences of others not loving and serving the Lord.
There is hope here. This man has hope for the future when he says, “The children of your servants will live in Your presence; their descendants will be established before You.” This is a promise for the future. It didn’t look good for the godly in that man’s day. It looked like it might be the end of the people of God. That’s often the case. If you read history, the obedient church regularly seems to be on the brink of collapse. This man reminded himself that the Lord would work in future generations as He has in the past. “The children of your servants will live in Your presence; their descendants will be established before You.” Now it might surprise us as to who is serving Him generations from now but someone will be serving Him. Christ is a king who always has subjects as the Belgic Confession explains. Church history will teach you that, “the good old days weren’t always good and tomorrow ain’t as bad as it seems,” to borrow again from Billy Joel. It’s easy for us to miss that because, again, we’ve got a limited perspective. God is doing much more than we can see. He’ll continue to do so.
So that’s the end of our time in Psalm 102. We saw that it’s quite a change from the Psalms that came before which were full of confidence and joy. What’s notable here at the end is that the Psalms that come after 102 are arguably even more confident and even more joyful than the ones before. Listen to 103, “Praise the Lord, my soul; all my inmost being, praise His holy name. Praise the Lord, my soul, and forget not all His benefits.”
The affliction and pain of Psalm 102 are very real, but they will soon be over. “Our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all,” as Paul put it. Your days vanishing like smoke and your bones burning like glowing embers doesn’t seem light at the time. Lying awake and feeling like a bird on a roof doesn’t seem momentary. From the perspective of eternity, it certainly is. Eternity will make sense of that it and make up for it. Time is strange that way. Amen.