Psalm 102

I have been preparing church services out of the Old Testament for the last few weeks, so I currently have my head filled with thoughts of Pharaoh and the ten plagues. And that may be why this verse from today’s psalm jumped out at me: “My days are like the evening shadow; I wither away like grass.” (vs 11)

We are ephemeral. (That means temporary, short-lived, transient.) We have nothing in us to sustain our lives. When we arrive on the planet, we have no idea if we’ll live to be 5 or 95. Although we all plan for a long and happy life, we actually have no clue how many days we really have left to live.

We don’t often live in that reality. We live as though we are little gods, creating and controlling our future destiny. That’s why we’re always shocked and horrified when something happens to interrupt our plans—the death of a loved one, a bad diagnosis from the doctor, the loss of a job or personal belongings. We don’t plan for any of those things to happen, and when they do, that’s how we know that we aren’t gods.

That’s how Pharaoh realized he wasn’t a god. God came to him and, in a series of ten plagues, made him realize that he had no control over all the things he thought he had control over. He realized very quickly that he wasn’t who he thought he was.

A friend recently asked me on Facebook: How does God make things whole again when something like 9-11 happens or when my child is hit and killed by a car? And the answer is, I don’t know how He makes things whole in each specific situation (although we know that He is working all things together for good). But we can know that He is in the process of making those things whole, even when we don’t understand how He is going about it; and we also know that those kinds of situations help us understand very quickly that we are ephemeral, not eternal.

We are not gods. We are not self-sufficient. The only hope we have is in something beyond ourselves—because we are dead-ends. Even the “world’s oldest living person” will die, and somebody else will claim their spot as the world’s oldest living person… until they die and get replaced by someone else, and on it goes.

In contrast to this, God stands eternal through all time. Before Him, generations rise up and pass away. And hopefully, before they are gone like grass, they have learned the important truth that they need to grab hold of something outside of themselves for life. We will all have to face this reality at some moment—that there comes a time when we can do nothing to prolong our existence.

God is eternal, and only He can turn the ephemeral into the eternal. When Adam and Eve plunged us into sin, one of the blessings they brought to us is the very real understanding that we are not eternal. It is only in our connection to God that we can hope to experience a life that never ends.

And maybe it is in that realization that God can begin to make things whole again when something like 9-11 happens or when my child is hit and killed by a car. In the hopeless moments when we are forced to face the reality that everything—and I do mean everything—in this life is temporary, perhaps the only thing we have left is to reach up and grasp the hand of the eternal.

And that’s when true life begins.