Read Psalm 90:1-4. 1Lord, you have been our dwelling place in all generations. 2Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever you had formed the earth and the world, from everlasting to everlasting you are God. 3You return man to dust and say, “Return, O children of man!” 4For a thousand years in your sight are but as yesterday when it is past, or as a watch in the night.
No psalm does a better job than this one at defining the relationship between God and man after the Fall of Genesis 3. God is the everlasting and sovereign creator Lord over life and death, and us?
We are dust.
You are dust and to dust you shall return. These are the curse filled words God spoke to Adam in the garden. By the time of Psalm 90’s writing, nothing had changed that reality. Everyone still dies, and God continues to call us to return from whence we came – to the earth, the clay, the mud.
These verses (and the ones to come) should remove all human pride while adding a new divine perspective to time and space. We are bound to time and space in our mortality. God is not. God is timeless. In fact, thousands of years are mere moments to God.
Your life, the one you are so worried about, the one you’ve filled up with so many things, the one you’ve centered your whole identity upon, and found all your pleasure and pain within, it is a speck on the eternal timeline. Almost nothing. Vapor. Sun burnt grass mowed down by the gardener.
And O what good news this is. The pressure is off, for what could we ever hope to accomplish for an eternal God with so transient a life? Rather, meaning in life is found when our millions of specks are joined to the everlasting life of Christ. When he becomes our dwelling place. And when we choose the simple joy of to live is Christ.
You: How do you typically process your own mortality? Do you even think about it?
You in Christ: How does union with Chris give our vaporous lives meaning?
Christ in you: How can you live for Christ today but not from pressure?
Prayer. Father, you are from everlasting to everlasting. You have replaced my decaying life with Jesus’ timeless life of love. May I dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my eternal life. Amen.
To Live is Christ 