“We are food for worms lads. Believe it or not everyone in this room is going to stop breathing, turn cold and die . . .” These words, spoken by the character played by Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society, are biblically sound! Our lives are framed by conception and death. No matter how great the advances of medicine have been or will be, death has not, and will not, be overcome by human effort.
The brevity or our lives, poignantly portrayed by Moses in Psalm 90, can be something over which we lament. The reason for our frailty is due to our own foolishness. Humanity was warned that transgressing the command of God would prove fatal. Disbelieving, unconvinced, deceived into thinking otherwise, we ate and found out that when God speaks, he speaks truth.
But God acted to ransom us from our folly by making a way for us to once again be in fellowship with him. As a result, though our bodies might be dead because of sin, the Spirit brings life because of God-given righteousness (Romans 8:10-11). This offers a hopeful perspective on the ephemerality of our days. We need not lament. Rather, we can rejoice, for constraint prods us to action. Os Guinness asserts, “Brevity of life is like the frame of a picture, or a sports field for a game, or a term for a student. It gives the framework and focus that gives you the intensity and the motivation.” Knowing that we have only so many days we press into God for the needed grace to live them well. This is the nature of the cry that emanates from Moses’ meditation on our mortality, “teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom.” (Psalm 90:12).
The final petitions of Psalm 90 can shape our prayer as we ask God for the desired wisdom. First, we ask him to have pity on us. And he does have pity on us. As another psalm says,“he knows our frame; he remembers that we are dust” (Psalms 103:14). Then we lean into his covenant faithfulness, his “steadfast love,” asking that he get hold of us sooner rather than later that “we may rejoice and be glad all our days.” Next, we petition that his “work” and “glorious power” be made evident and comprehensible to us. Lastly, having been awed by who he is and what he has done, we beseech that his “beauty . . . be upon us, and establish the work of our hands.”
Praying for a humble acceptance of the brevity of our lives will lead to the wisdom needed to live our lives with meaning. We abandon the false standards of what constitutes significance and enter into what God is doing in the world. It is his plan for his creation, and our part in that plan, that will allow us to say at the end of our days, “I am satisfied. I am fulfilled. Life has been extraordinary!”
