Let us turn to Psalm 90:1-17:
LORD, thou hast been our dwelling place in all generations. Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever thou hadst formed the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, thou art God. Thou turnest man to destruction; and sayest, Return, ye children of men. For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past, and as a watch in the night. Thou carriest them away as with a flood; they are as a sleep: in the morning they are like grass which groweth up. In the morning it flourisheth, and groweth up; in the evening it is cut down, and withereth. For we are consumed by thine anger, and by thy wrath are we troubled. Thou hast set our iniquities before thee, our secret sins in the light of thy countenance. For all our days are passed away in thy wrath: we spend our years as a tale that is told. The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away. Who knoweth the power of thine anger? even according to thy fear, so is thy wrath. So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom. Return, O LORD, how long? and let it repent thee concerning thy servants. O satisfy us early with thy mercy; that we may rejoice and be glad all our days. Make us glad according to the days wherein thou hast afflicted us, and the years wherein we have seen evil. Let thy work appear unto thy servants, and thy glory unto their children. And let the beauty of the LORD our God be upon us: and establish thou the work of our hands upon us; yea, the work of our hands establish thou it.
We have come to the end of another year. It is the close of this year and we are looking forward to a new year. Whenever we come to this time of year when the clock is ticking, when we know that there is a countdown of time, there is just a matter of hours and soon the year will be gone. The year will pass and we will never again have anything to do with this year. It will be something in our memory, something that is behind us.
This time is always a good time to look at how we lived this year—to look at our life and to reflect on what we did with our time. What did we do this year? How did we spend our time? It is right at the very end of the year. It is the 365th day, so it is the perfect time to look back and think about the previous months and the previous weeks and the previous days. This is a time to try to ponder and consider what we did with our time this year.
Some people, if they are like me, they do not have that good of a memory. It is kind of hard remembering all the days off that you had and the weekends and the vacations and your spare time, maybe in the evenings, and what you did with all of those hours. So a good way of really analyzing and considering what you did with your time is by looking at what you did with your money.
What did you do with your money this year? Why do I ask that? How do you get money? How does anyone get money—the money that is in your wallet or the money that is in your bank account? Normally, people go to work. They put time in at work. This is how most people get their money. They earn it by spending their time on the job, and the job decides that it is going to value your time by giving you so much for your time.
Let us say that someone earns $10.00 an hour. This is a nice round number that is not too hard to calculate. Let us say that they spend $100 during the year. Of course, this is not getting into taxes or into anything like that, but you can figure that if someone spent $100 on something, this represents ten hours of their time. It took this person ten hours of working in order to raise this money. What did they spend it on?
This is a good way of thinking back and looking at how you spent your time this year—where did your money go? Where did my money go? What did we spend it on? Maybe this is a little easier to remember. We can remember our purchases, and maybe it is not even the big purchases, maybe it is the little purchases every day. Does anyone have a coffee habit? Do you like a cup of coffee every day? Now 365 days later, multiply that $1.50 cup of coffee—it is up to maybe $500. $500 for coffee? That is a lot of time. That is a lot of time to spend on coffee. You can take whatever it is. Candy? Soft Drinks? Things that we really do not need. Things that do not really benefit us. Things that do not help us in the least. Yet we are dishing out the money every day and thinking, “It is only a dollar. It is only two dollars. It is only five dollars.” By the end of the year, it does add up. It adds up to, perhaps, thousands—thousands of dollars. Someone might say, “But I gave some money to faithful ministries.” How much? What is the comparison? What is the ratio? So we can examine ourselves and we can look at ourselves and we can see what we are doing with our time, as we examine how we spent our money.
It is also, I think, a truth that people who waste money normally waste it because they have a lot of it. It is nothing for some people to go and make an extravagant purchase or to be a big tipper. This is normally someone who has an awful lot of money.
If we think about this and we apply it to time, if we apply it to our days and how we live our life, when we look back, I am sure that there is not one person here who can not look back on this previous year and think, “I wasted time.” Yes, but it could be because we are not really mindful of how little time there is. We may think like someone who has a big pocketbook, someone who has a huge bank account, “What is a few dollars? What is an hour here or an hour there? What is a few hours watching T.V.? What is a little time here and a little time there spent on games and sports and enjoying myself and so forth?” But it all adds up, and it could be that we are very wasteful with time because we think that we have a lot of it.
The Bible talks about this. The Bible speaks of man, in general, who really does not think that his day is ever going to come. He never thinks that it is going to be his last day. He never thinks that he is going to die. If you talk to a man who is eighty, his hope is to get to ninety. If you speak to someone who is 90, well he is looking forward to 91 and 92. It is very, very hard, if not impossible, to find someone who actually thinks that his days are numbered and that he does not have more time. Yet the Bible paints a different picture. The Bible presents a whole different picture, and we can see this in this Psalm, in Psalm 90.
First, though, let us look at what the Bible says about God, in the first couple of verses of Psalm 90. Psalm 90:1-2:
LORD, thou hast been our dwelling place in all generations. Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever thou hadst formed the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, thou art God.
So God is eternal. He has no beginning and He has no end. He is the Alpha and the Omega, the Great I AM. He is outside of time. God is also the Creator who created the world and the world is within time. We dwell in a world that operates on the principle of time, but God is not under that same principle. He is beyond it. He is outside of it. In Isaiah 57, it says that God inhabits eternity, so He dwells in eternity itself.
It is this perspective, an eternal perspective, that we do not have. We are finite creatures. We have limitations. We are temporal beings. Our perspective is governed by time. God’s perspective goes beyond time and He can see eternity future as well as eternity past. He sees the end from the beginning. He knows that there is a Judgment Day. He knows, with every generation of man that has ever been upon the face of the earth, that they would all have a day of their death. So God deals with man from this vantage point. From the vantage point of an eternal perspective is how He writes the Bible.
God writes the Bible from this eternal perspective, so He talks and tries to explain to creatures who are limited by their tiny minds and circumstances, creatures of time, that how one lives his life or what types of material things that he can gain are not important. He tries to explain to mankind that the most important thing is where they will spend eternity. Some people have tried to explain this by using certain examples, and they are good examples but they really do not fully explain the comparison between time and eternity. If eternity is all of the sand on the seashore, then time is like one grain. This is one thing that you hear. Or if eternity is all of the water of the oceans, then time is like one drop that falls into the ocean.
You see, we are so wrapped up in the world and our everyday life that we do not spend a lot of our time focused on that eternity—on the eternity that we are all going to enter into. One day, very shortly, we all will enter into eternity—either eternal life in Heaven or eternal damnation in Hell. But God recognizes this is man, so He speaks to us and tries to explain, as here in Psalm 90:4:
For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past, and as a watch in the night.
That is from God’s eternal perspective. What is a thousand years to God? Nothing. What is a “watch in the night”? To us, it is ten lifetimes. To God, it is nothing. What is 13,000 years to God? Nothing. Nothing. He created the world. He has allowed the world to continue on because he wants to work out His salvation plan. It has continued up until the present, which is a little past 13,000 years, and it has all been hardly any time at all to God because He is outside of time.
So God, I think, would want us to realize and to have this perspective, and here we are looking at the passing of another year. Time is moving. Time is flowing. Time is progressing on. It is going on to its destiny, to its final end, to the Last Day. Nothing is going to interrupt the passage of time and God’s plan for this world, which is quickly coming to a close.
Let us turn to 2 Corinthians 4:17-18:
For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory; while we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal.
Do you see how God is summing it up? Remember, God is the One who moved the Apostle Paul to write this down. This is God’s eternal perspective. What is your whole life? What is your whole life if you have diseases, if you have physical ailments and people are persecuting you? If you live the Christian life of affliction and persecution, what does it all come down to? It comes down to a momentary affliction. It comes down to a moment. How fast is a moment? How quick is a moment? You see, God is using language that we can understand. He is trying to explain to us in earthly language that we are familiar with.
Let us turn to 1 Corinthians 15, where God uses that word “moment.” We read in 1 Corinthians 15:51-52:
Behold, I show you a mystery; We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump…
This is God’s definition of a “moment.” It is “the twinkling of the eye.”
I looked up the word “twinkling,” and I am not exactly sure as to what it is referring to. Sometimes the light catches someone’s eye and you can see a little twinkle. It is hard to say, but it is a quick, fluttering movement, either of the eye or the lash; it has something to do with the eye. It is that fast. It is “in the twinkling of the eye.”
In this passage, God is just explaining that when He returns, do not look for a long drawn out end of the world. Do not look for some kind of dramatic, over the course of days, end-time experience. It is going to be “in a moment” and you are going to be equipped with a new resurrected body, if you are a child of God. Or it will be “in a moment” and you will be standing before Him to be judged for your sins, if you are not a child of God.
It is all going to happen so quickly, and this is the word that God uses to sum up the life of a Christian, a child of God who is living in this world. Yes, there is suffering. There is no getting away from it, but what is your suffering? And we are talking about the worst kind of suffering imaginable—whatever terrors can come to your mind—what man can do unto you.
Men have done things to Christians in times past and Christians have suffered. What is that suffering in comparison to an “eternal weight of glory”? God is saying that there is no comparison, because eternity goes on and on and on. Long into eternity, you are going to have your tears all wiped away. There will be no more pain or suffering, and you will be experiencing eternal love and joy and peace forevermore.
Can you imagine what it would be like if you could remember what was happening in these days? You would probably look back, and so would I, with shame that we dared to complain or that we dared to murmur about our state and our lot in life. “I have this great bliss forevermore, yet I could not have just accepted a few lousy days of having bunions in my feet,” or whatever it might be? “I could not accept having the least bit of physical discomfort? I could not have accepted the world reviling me?”
You see, we would be ashamed. We would really be ashamed, and this is what God wants us to keep in mind. He wants us to have this eternal perspective. This is the perspective of the Bible. He wants us to look beyond time, to look beyond whatever age we are, whatever our situation is. He wants us to look to the real future. The real future is not next year in the new year. That is part of the future, but the real future, as far as the reality of existence, will occur when you enter forevermore into a new Heaven and new earth, or if you are not saved, into eternal damnation.
Let us return to Psalm 90. We read in Psalm 90:5-6:
Thou carriest them away as with a flood; they are as a sleep: in the morning they are like grass which groweth up. In the morning it flourisheth, and groweth up; in the evening it is cut down, and withereth.
God is likening us to the grass. He actually does this in many different places. For instances, in Psalm 103:13-17, we read:
Like as a father pitieth his children, so the LORD pitieth them that fear him. For he knoweth our frame; he remembereth that we are dust. As for man, his days are as grass: as a flower of the field, so he flourisheth. For the wind passeth over it, and it is gone; and the place thereof shall know it no more. But the mercy of the LORD is from everlasting to everlasting upon them that fear him…
Again, we have this contrast. We have the contrast of God’s salvation plan, which encompasses eternity; and we have man’s life on earth, which can be said to be no more than as the grass and the flower of the grass.
The flower of the grass would include all of the glory and honor and all of the riches of man. Man looks beautiful. He looks healthy in his prime, but what happens soon? The flower fades, the petals fall off. It begins to wither and then the wind comes along and the grass is no more.
God uses this picture in several places in the Bible. He also uses it in Job 14:1-2:
Man that is born of a woman is of few days, and full of trouble. He cometh forth like a flower, and is cut down: he fleeth also as a shadow, and continueth not.
Also, in 1 Peter 1:24-25:
For all flesh is as grass, and all the glory of man as the flower of grass. The grass withereth, and the flower thereof falleth away: but the word of the Lord endureth for ever. And this is the word which by the gospel is preached unto you.
God gives us His eternal Word that will continue on without end. In contrast, on the other hand, stands the world, mankind, and all of the things that we can behold with our eyes.
God is trying to reason with mankind. He is trying to speak to us, even though He knows that we are dead in sin. Even though He realizes that man has a sort of madness about him, where he goes after the temporal and the pleasures of sin for a season, rather than going to God and His Word and beseeching Him for salvation and crying out to Him for all that He is worth. Even if a man would spend all of his time beseeching the Lord, it would not matter because he is not missing anything in this world. Whatever sinful pleasures there are, they are going to pass in a flash; they are going to be gone in a second.
So what am I really missing? What am I depriving myself of if I go to God on my knees and I just determine, “You know, here comes a new year. Do you know what I am going to do? Do you know what my New Year’s resolution is going to be for this year? I am going to read the Bible this year. I am going to pray to God this year. I am going to cry out for His mercy this year. I am not going to determine anything else. I am going to leave it all up to God whether or not He will have mercy upon me. But I know one thing. He is a merciful God and He delights in mercy, so I am going to go to Him and I am going to just try to read the Bible, because faith comes by hearing and hearing by the Word of God. This is how God will save if He intends to save anyone, so I am going to immerse myself in the Bible. In so doing, I am going to pull myself away from many other things of the world.” This would be, I think, an excellent New Year’s resolution for anyone who is doubting their salvation or for anyone who is wondering if they are saved or for anyone who knows that they are not saved.
Let us also consider one other thing. God speaks to man and He tells us the truth of the matter. Our life is but a moment. We are like the grass of the field. I am sure that there are many other Biblical pictures that God paints. But why is it that people do not like to hear about the passing of time? People do not like to mark the passage of time.
I do not think that this is a coincidence. A lot of times, it is more like a joke, but it is typically said of women that they do not like to admit that they are getting older. They do no like to admit that they have reached a certain age. Why is that? I have also seen people from work and in other situations, when they reach a certain age, people give them black balloons. Have you ever seen this? They hang black balloons around, because they have turned forty or fifty or something like that.
In doing this, it is making light of the situation, but there is also a certain truth that people are conveying. They are recognizing that the passing of time is not something that they want to admit to or something that they want to recognize; it is something that they really do not want to face. “I really do not want to face getting older. I really do not want to face the fact that the years are going by and passing right before my eyes.”
There is one other point that I wanted to make concerning the end of another year, which is New Year’s Eve itself. If I asked anyone, “What is the number one thing that people do on New Year’s Eve?” What do most people do? They drink. It is a time of drunken revelry, is it not? It is a time of great drunkenness. This is the way it was when I was a teenager and it is still this way today. You can go to many places in the world, and you are going to find parties and drinking until drunk. Even people who maybe drink a little lightly during the year save it up for the holidays and they really go all out on New Year’s Eve. Why?
When you become a child of God, you begin to look at the world differently and you just do not accept things as you used to accept them. You think about things, like why are they singing the lyrics to that particular song? Whereas before, you would just kind of go along and not even think about it.
So why are so many people going to go out and drink themselves drunk tonight? I think that we can find the answer back in Proverbs 31:4, where it says:
It is not for kings, O Lemuel, it is not for kings to drink wine; nor for princes strong drink:
This is a Law of God that applies to believers. It also applies to literal kings and princes. It would have application on the moral or on the physical level to kings and princes. It is not for a king to drink, nor is it, spiritually, for those who are prophets, priests, and kings. It is not for us to drink, and God gives the reason for this in verse 5:
Lest they drink, and forget the law, and pervert the judgment of any of the afflicted.
What is the Law? The Law is the Bible. It is tough enough trying to come to truth in the Word. It is tough enough trying to hold God’s Word in your mind and to consider what it says without putting a substance in your body that really causes you to have foggy thinking. So how are you going to hold onto the Word of God when you have been drinking?
Lest they drink, and forget the law, and pervert the judgment of any of the afflicted.
Look at what God says in verses 6-7:
Give strong drink unto him that is ready to perish, and wine unto those that be of heavy hearts. Let him drink, and forget his poverty, and remember his misery no more.
So God has provided alcohol for the world so that they can forget their poverty. Why then are so many people who have good jobs and nice bank accounts going to be there drinking? Because God is not talking about physical poverty. He does not have that in mind.
Turn over to Proverbs 10:15:
The rich man’s wealth is his strong city: the destruction of the poor is their poverty.
The poverty of man is that they are under the wrath of God and they are going to be destroyed. They have God’s abiding wrath upon them. They are subject to spend an eternity in Hell, and they know this deep down.
Man knows that there is a God. He knows that he is in trouble. So time begins to pass. New Year’s is really the marking of one year going and another year coming. On one hand, men drink to celebrate that the world is still here and that God did not destroy us, that we are still continuing on. But on the other hand, they drink to celebrate, to quench, and to squash the intuitive understanding and subconscious knowledge that they are in trouble with God, that they have to stand before this God, and that they have to give an account for their sins.
Turn over to Ecclesiastes 8. Remember that Proverbs 31:5 said:
Lest they drink, and forget the law, and pervert the judgment of any of the afflicted.
And in Ecclesiastes 8:6, we read:
Because to every purpose there is time and judgment, therefore the misery of man is great upon him.
“Time and judgment.” Man is drinking and he is going to drink so much that he may not even remember anything. He is drinking and this is his purpose for drinking—this is the whole idea. He drinks to forget the destruction of the poor, his poverty, and that there is time and judgment, his misery. “I am drinking to forget that someday soon, either I am going to die or the world is going to be destroyed. Christ will return and I am going to have to answer for all of my sins.” So this is the reason, deep down, why there is so much drinking going on during New Year’s Eve—because another year has come and gone.
Another year has passed, yet the child of God does not concern himself with this. It is not for kings to drink. Why? This is because we do not have poverty. We are saved, by God’s grace. We have the riches of Christ in receiving the gift of salvation, as Christ has given us this wonderful grace through His faith.
As God has removed us out of misery, He even declares to us and gives to us an understanding of time and judgment so that we know the day that we are living in. We can begin to see that not only would our own life have an end if Christ tarried, but through the teaching of the Bible, we can begin to see the day that we are living in and that we are very close to the return of Christ.
Let us go back, once again, to Psalm 90. We read in Psalm 90:9:
For all our days are passed away in thy wrath: we spend our years as a tale that is told.
Again, we are spending time. This is an interesting way of putting it. How did you “spend” the weekend? You “spend” like it is coming out of your pocket. We “spend” time, and God gives us a very right-to-the-heart-of-the-matter verse in Romans. In Romans 13:11-12, we read:
And that, knowing the time, that now it is high time to awake out of sleep: for now is our salvation nearer than when we believed. The night is far spent, the day is at hand: let us therefore cast off the works of darkness, and let us put on the armour of light.
Is this not the truth? “The night is far spent.” If we consider the world had its day and it has had 13,000 years of history, I am not a mathematician but if we only have four or five years left, how much of a tiny percentage will that be of the whole history of man? We are down to the very end of all things, so this verse takes on even greater significance, even though it has been true for the last 2,000 years—that “the day is at hand” and “it is high time to awake out of sleep,” because Christ is shortly to return.
Going back to Psalm 90, and I just want to get these last couple of verses in before we close. We read in Psalm 90:10:
The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away.
Again God is indicating, what is 70 or 80 years? Is that our hope? Is that our goal? Our goal is to only live another 30 or 40 or 50 years? That is all we want?
I am sorry to say, but this is a very sad goal. This is a very tiny, miniscule goal. Would it not be tremendous to live forever? Would it not be tremendous? And God is making that comparison and He is saying, 70 or 80 years? Even the rare person who lives to 90 or 100, so what? So what? What if you were like Methuselah and could live to 969? Or like Noah, 950? Or like Adam, 930? So what? Where are they? Noah, we know that he was a believer and is in Heaven, but where is his body? Where are those men’s bodies? They are in the ground. After 900 years and it went just like that, like “a watch in the night.”
God says in Ecclesiastes 6:6:
Yea, though he live a thousand years twice told, yet hath he seen no good: do not all go to one place?
Where is that “one place”? That “one place” is the Judgment Seat. All men go there, whether they live to be 10 or whether they live to be 900 and some years. All men go to the Judgment Seat. So what does it matter, when you come right down to it, how many years you lived upon this sin-cursed earth, in a sin-cursed body, in a sin-cursed world? What does it matter?
Look at Satan. Is he greatly privileged because he has existed in this world for 13,000 years? He was in the Garden and he is still operating today. Is that any kind of a blessing? It is no blessing at all. The blessing comes in the hereafter, in an eternity to come. That is where God’s focus is and this is where our focus needs to be. I think that it is just obvious that we are not going to live the Christian life and we are not going to sacrifice and we are not going to give up the things of the world, if our focus is on the world and if we are looking at the things of this life rather than the things to come.
Then we read in Psalm 90:11-12:
Who knoweth the power of thine anger? even according to thy fear, so is thy wrath. So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.
This is the key. Let us not overlook or ignore or suppress or avoid our age. Let us not overlook the age of the earth and the time that we are living in and that we can number our days. Is that not interesting? “Teach us to number our days,” and it so happens that there is a Biblical calendar of history that is right in the Bible that has numbered the days of man and that has outlined the whole history of the human race, up until the present, and it is seems very likely that the history of man will come to a close very shortly.
This kind of information should really affect us—each one of us. It has to affect us. It must affect us, because we now know that there is a limit and that there is a set day and hour that God has determined in which to judge the world. So we ought to apply our hearts unto wisdom in this matter.
I just want to close with one last verse. In Ephesians 5:15-16, we read:
See then that ye walk circumspectly…
And whenever the Bible talks about walking, it has to do with walking in God’s commandments.
See then that ye walk circumspectly, not as fools, but as wise, redeeming the time, because the days are evil.