Sermon Tone Analysis

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

But the other ten gave a bad report and told 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.

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 is Eternal v. 1-6

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

We began in the dust.

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...

Isaiah says God inhabits eternity.

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.

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

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.

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?

Look at 10

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.

Over and over, Moses speaks of God’s wrath:

verse 7:

verse 9:

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.

The wisdom here is knowing that when this life is short, and eternity is forever, you seek after what is important for eternity.