October 20, 2008
âEverlasting Dustâ?
by Pastor George Van Alstine
When weâre kids, life seems to have no limits. Even if the death of a pet makes us feel bad, and the death of a grandparent makes us feel even worse, we donât apply the lesson of mortality to ourselves. We think we personally, will never die.
Sometime during middle age our thinking changes. We realize there will come a moment when death will become a personal challenge to us. By the time we reach retirement age, we begin to read the Obituary section of the newspaper to make sure our name is not there.
Psalm 90 expresses the sense of helplessness we have when we face these truths.
âFor all our days pass away under your wrath;
our years come to an end like a sigh.
The days of our life are seventy years,
Or perhaps eighty, if we are strong;
even then their span is only toil and trouble;
They are soon gone, and we fly awayâ? (Psalm 90:9-10)
A few verses earlier our dilemma is graphically expressed in this way:
âYou turn us back to dust, And say, âTurn back, you Mortals.ââ? (Psalm 90:3)
Think about this. We look into our future, past our remaining days of physical struggle with disease and weakness, past our experience of death, past our funeral. And what do we see? Dust! We look backward over our years of working and family building, to our childhood, even to our earliest infant memories. Beyond that, we can look through our genealogy into the shadows of the beginnings of the human race (Gen. 2:7). And what do we see? Dust! So, our lives are bracketed by dust. As the Scripture puts it,
âDust you are, and to dust you shall return.â? (Genesis 3:19)
But letâs read the part of Psalm 90 just before the depressing dust-to-dust words:
âLord, you have been our
dwelling place in all generations.
Before the mountains were brought forth,
Or ever you had formed the earth and the world,
from everlasting to everlasting
You are God.â? (Psalm 90:1-2)
A strong contrast is established. We are dust-to-dust; God is everlasting-to-everlasting!
This phrase, âfrom everlasting to everlasting,â? is found in several psalms: 41:3, 103:17, 106:48. It is a powerful statement of the radical superiority of the God who revealed himself to the biblical people over the shabby temporary gods represented by idols.
The word translated âeverlastingâ? has a root meaning of âconcealedâ? or âhidden.â? Scholars believe that in biblical times it indicated that reality which lay beyond the reach of human sight, learning, and understanding, the âvanishing pointâ? a human mind would experience in thinking about the past or future.
As awesome as this idea was to the psalm-writer, it is even more profound to us today. Modern science has demonstrated the immensity of the universe and the mind-bending relationship between time and space. So âeverlastingâ? means much more to us than to a person who lived just a few generations ago. And as challenging as it is to conceive of everlasting-future, itâs even more difficult to think about everlasting-past, before the Big Bang, before Creation, to the âIn-the-Beginningâ? where God alone existed. But this lofty phrase proclaims the idea that at any point, from everlasting-past to everlasting-future, God is the central fact of reality.
Dust seems even smaller now — just a speck. How can our lives find any significance at all, when the contrast between God and us is so radical? Actually the answer is obvious: by getting closer to the One Who is âfrom everlasting to everlasting.â? And this psalm reassures us that faith makes this possible.
âLord, you have been our dwelling place in all generations.â? (Psalm 90:1)
When dust finds a dwelling place in the everlasting, dust itself can have everlasting significance.
So this psalm ends with a faith-affirmation of dust that has found refuge in the everlasting:
âLet your work be manifest to your servants,
And your glorious power to their children.
Let the favor of the Lord our God be upon us,
And prosper for us the work of our hands-
O prosper the work of our hands!â? Psalm 90: 16-17)