The Eternality of God
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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, from everlasting to everlasting you are God.
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.
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.
The years of our life are seventy, or even by reason of strength eighty; yet their span is but toil and trouble; they are soon gone, and we fly away.
Who considers the power of your anger, and your wrath according to the fear of you?
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!
Introduction
Introduction
This Psalm is probably the oldest Psalm in the Bible, being written by Moses.
He wrote it while the people of God were wandering in the wilderness.
God had punished them for not believing His word and taking the promised land.
They had gotten to the border and sent in 12 spies to the land to scope out their prospects.
Two of the spies came back with a good report and said
And they told him, “We came to the land to which you sent us. It flows with milk and honey, and this is its fruit.
However, the people who dwell in the land are strong, and the cities are fortified and very large. And besides, we saw the descendants of Anak there.
The Amalekites dwell in the land of the Negeb. The Hittites, the Jebusites, and the Amorites dwell in the hill country. And the Canaanites dwell by the sea, and along the Jordan.”
But Caleb quieted the people before Moses and said, “Let us go up at once and occupy it, for we are well able to overcome it.”
But the other ten gave a bad report and told them
Then the men who had gone up with him said, “We are not able to go up against the people, for they are stronger than we are.”
So they brought to the people of Israel a bad report of the land that they had spied out, saying, “The land, through which we have gone to spy it out, is a land that devours its inhabitants, and all the people that we saw in it are of great height.
And there we saw the Nephilim (the sons of Anak, who come from the Nephilim), and we seemed to ourselves like grasshoppers, and so we seemed to them.”
The people of Israel listened to the bad report and became afraid.
They complained to Moses and God became angry with them. He determined to strike them down, but Moses interceded for them.
Please pardon the iniquity of this people, according to the greatness of your steadfast love, just as you have forgiven this people, from Egypt until now.”
God heard the prayer of Moses and didn’t strike them at that moment, but He would judge them.
He promised that none of the ones who had seen His glory and signs from the time they escaped Egypt would see the promised land, except for Caleb and Joshua, the 2 spies that encouraged them to take the land.
So God lead them back into the wilderness for 40 years waiting for all those that were judged by God to pass away.
It was in this 40 year time of judgement that Moses wrote this Psalm.
And in this Psalm we get one of the clearest pictures of the eternality of God.
From the perspective of the Hebrews, 40 years was a long time, but from the perspective of God, it is nothing.
And so it is with us, we become consumed by the temporary, because that is all we can see.
What matters is right now, our culture only cares about the right now, the instant.
But as believers, we have an eternity of future waiting for us, and the reality of God’s eternality helps us to see that and to live with that in focus.
God’s Eternality Is The Lens We Should View Our Lives Through
God’s Eternality Is The Lens We Should View Our Lives Through
God is Eternal v. 1-6
God is Eternal v. 1-6
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, from everlasting to everlasting you are God.
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.
We don’t have a frame of reference to begin to understand the time frame of God.
Everything we know can be described as, “from beginning to end.”
But when Moses describes God, he says from everlasting to everlasting.
There is not a time when He begun, He was not born and He will not die.
Think of a mountain. How long it has stood there.
The weather changes and the wind and rain or snow change the way it looks over the years, but often too slow for us to even notice.
The mountains that Moses had in mind, are still there after all these years.
Just standing there, while the people who run the world are born and die.
While the latest technology, becomes obsolete.
Wars, disease, tragedies all happen and fade from memory, but the mountain just stands there.
The happiest moments of the lives of men and women pass by and are forgotten, still the mountain holds firm.
And older than that is our planet.
But before that, from everlasting to everlasting, the Lord is God.
This is in total contrast to the brief, vaporous life that we have.
Verse 3 says
You return man to dust and say, “Return, O children of man!”
We began in the dust.
then the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature.
And at the word of God we will return to the dust, in a blip of time compared to the mountains or the earth.
Forty generations of man go by in a thousand years, but...
For a thousand years in your sight are but as yesterday when it is past, or as a watch in the night.
Isaiah says God inhabits eternity.
For thus says the One who is high and lifted up, who inhabits eternity, whose name is Holy: “I dwell in the high and holy place, and also with him who is of a contrite and lowly spirit, to revive the spirit of the lowly, and to revive the heart of the contrite.
The generations that go by in a thousand years, the empires that rise and fall, are all like the passing of the night watch.
We are coming up on the 250th anniversary of The United States (if we make it to 2026), and relative to God’s time it is like a couple of minutes.
We stagger at this, we fail to comprehend the eternality of God.
Moses is full of illustrations of our finiteness compared to His infiniteness.
In verse 5, he uses the imagery of a flood sweeping us away.
You sweep them away as with a flood; they are like a dream, like grass that is renewed in the morning:
This reminded me of the tsunami in Japan in 2011. A magnitude 9+ earthquake took place around 80 miles off the eastern shore of the main island, and this cause massive waves of sea water to crest 18 ft sea walls and go 3 miles inland in some places.
There were several videos of the amazing power of the waves causing extreme damage to the country. Over 28,000 people lost their lives.
From the vantage point of many of the cameras, you could see cars and trucks being swept away by the waters. Whole buildings were taken down in an instant.
This is out lives. No matter how strong or sure we think we are, compared to the eternality of God, it can all be taken away in an instant.
Our lives are like a dream, like grass that fades and withers over the course of a day.
But as we look to our God for shelter and protection, we find that for eternity He will be our dwelling place.
The Seriousness of Sin is Eternal v. 7-12
The Seriousness of Sin is Eternal v. 7-12
For 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.
For all our days pass away under your wrath; we bring our years to an end like a sigh.
The years of our life are seventy, or even by reason of strength eighty; yet their span is but toil and trouble; they are soon gone, and we fly away.
Who considers the power of your anger, and your wrath according to the fear of you?
So teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom.
Remember, Moses is writing this from the wilderness.
Forty years of wandering because of the hard hearts and heads of the Jews.
After all God had done for them, and all the power He had displayed before them, they still failed to trust that He could bring them into the promised land because of a few puny giants.
They may not have been puny to them, but like a thousand years to God, they were less than ants.
So because of their sin, God turned them around and into the wilderness they went back.
And thousands of people missed out on the promised land because of their sin.
This is to serve as a warning to us. It is foolish to think that we could hide our sins from God.
You have set our iniquities before you, our secret sins in the light of your presence.
Second, that sin that we hold onto is serious.
It is so serious that all those Jews were punished to death before they could go into the land.
It robs us of our peace and satisfaction in God. It gives us toil and trouble in our lives.
We work and live under a curse because of sin.
We are not to treat it lightly, because ultimately it leads to death.
Can you imagine the Jews wandering in that wilderness until everyone that was of age had a funeral?
For we are brought to an end by your anger; by your wrath we are dismayed.
For all our days pass away under your wrath; we bring our years to an end like a sigh.
Look at 10
The years of our life are seventy, or even by reason of strength eighty; yet their span is but toil and trouble; they are soon gone, and we fly away.
As a result of sin, we get 70 or 80 years here in this life, if God wills, but Moses says the span of them is toil and trouble.
The NASB translates the word for span as “pride,” as if the best of our days here are filled with pain and hardship.
It is this way because, as eternal as God is, He is holy. And He hates sin, yet our lives are filled with it.
David Platt said,
“Why are we consumed by God’s anger? Why do we end our years like a sigh? Why do we have only a relatively small number of years on this earth—whether it’s seventy or eighty or seventeen? Why do we experience such pain and hurt and heartache through death in this world? The definitive answer the Bible gives is sin. We all die because we’re all sinners.
Do we realize how serious sin is? If sin robs us of life, and if sin results in death, then why do we treat it so casually? May God help us realize that he is eternally glorious, which means sin against him is eternally serious.”
And if that’s true, that makes the wrath of God all the more serious.
Who considers the power of your anger, and your wrath according to the fear of you?
Over and over, Moses speaks of God’s wrath:
verse 7:
For we are brought to an end by your anger; by your wrath we are dismayed.
verse 9:
For all our days pass away under your wrath; we bring our years to an end like a sigh.
In verse 11, he’s asking, “Who can imagine the power of your anger? Who can comprehend your wrath when they understand the power you have?”
When Hell is described in the Bible, several times we are told that it is forever and ever, like just saying forever is not enough. It is not a temporary place.
George Whitefield used to speak with tears in his eyes of the torment of burning like a livid coal not for an instant or for a day, but for millions and millions of ages, at the end of which people will realize that they are no closer to the end than when they first begun, and they will never ever be delivered from that place.
Hell is a real place, and we cannot even begin to understand what it’s like.
Moses considers this looking out over the devastation the wrath of God has caused on the Hebrews for their sin.
And he prays that God would teach us to understand the distance between God’s eternality and our brevity.
So teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom.
The wisdom here is knowing that when this life is short, and eternity is forever, you seek after what is important for eternity.
You don’t turn back from the promised land in fear, you follow God’s instruction and attack!
You realize that how much money you make doesn’t matter; what matters is what you do with the money you make.
You realize that the people around you are far more important than the things on your to-do list.
You realize that, as a parent, the most important thing in the lives of your children is not the clothes they wear or the sports they play or even the grades they get; what’s most important is that they know God.
In your own life you realize that knowledge of God and obedience to God are far more important than the achievements you accomplish and the positions you attain.
You also realize that every person in your life—at home, at work, in your neighborhood, in your city, and around the world—is either headed to an everlasting heaven or an everlasting hell, and the only difference is what they do with Jesus.
So you speak about Jesus. That’s how you live today for what lasts forever.
The Saving Grace of God is Eternal v. 13-17
The Saving Grace of God is Eternal v. 13-17
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!
Moses cries out to God, that He would take pity on His servants.
The shortness of their lives and the toil and burden that they go through in those lives are much to bear.
He asks that the Lord come back to His people.
How long will he have to wait? He’s not impatient, but yearning for the presence of God!
He then goes through 5 requests.
Satisfy us.
Satisfy us in the morning with your steadfast love, that we may rejoice and be glad all our days.
Give us joy.
Make us glad for as many days as you have afflicted us, and for as many years as we have seen evil.
Show us His work and power.
Let your work be shown to your servants, and your glorious power to their children.
Let us see His favor, or beauty
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!
One thing have I asked of the Lord, that will I seek after: that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord and to inquire in his temple.
God has heard Moses’ prayer and answered it in Christ.
Moses longed for something more eternal, and received it in our Lord.
All of these prayers will be answered through the eternality of God in His heaven forever.
In contrast to the eternity of punishment in Hell, all of us who follow Christ through faith, as the Hebrews did after the time in the wilderness, will be blessed forever in God’s heaven.
And just as we can’t understand fully the depths of hell, we can not comprehend the heights of heaven!
God’s greatness is eternal and His goodness is infinite.
The blessing of heaven will not be the big table or the big yard, but it will be the learning of God’s goodness forever.
The newness of the things on earth, wears out, but for whatever time period you pick for learning the goodness of God, there will still be infinitely more glory to experience and appreciate!
The excitement over a new toy for a child is strong, but it quickly fades, just like everything else in this world.
But not God. He will never fade. We will never be bored.
Stephen Charnock wrote a massive tome called The Existence and Attributes of God.
I will give you a lengthy quote from the chapter On the Eternity of God:
When we enjoy God, we enjoy him in his eternity without any flux.… Time is fluid, but eternity is stable; and after many ages, the joys will be as savory and satisfying as if they had been but that moment first tasted by our hungry appetites. When the glory of the Lord shall rise upon you, it shall be so far from ever setting, that after millions of years are expired, as numerous as the sands on the seashore, the sun, in the light of whose countenance you shall live, shall be as bright as at the first appearance; he will be so far from ceasing to flow, that he will flow as strong, as full, as at the first communication of himself in glory to the creature. God is always vigorous and flourishing; a pure act of life, sparkling new and fresh rays of life and light to the creature, flourishing with a perpetual spring, and contenting the most capacious desire; forming your interest, pleasure, and satisfaction; with an infinite variety, without any change or succession; he will have variety to increase delights, and eternity to perpetuate them; this will be the fruit of the enjoyment of an infinite and eternal God.
Conclusion
Conclusion
So, brothers and sisters, through this life of disappointment, sickness, and hurt.
Count your days and recognize the brevity that we have.
Pray that God will show you in deeper ways the future glory that He has in store for you through Jesus Christ.
Hold on tight to that truth through whatever pain, and you will find satisfaction, joy, glory, and beauty in the answer to Moses’ prayer.
Romans 15:13 (ESV)
May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that by the power of the Holy Spirit you may abound in hope.