Our Eternal Home

We all have an address, even several addresses.

If someone wants to send you a letter, they just need to put your address on an envelope, stick on a stamp, and throw it in a mail box, and no matter where in the world they do that, sooner or later the letter will arrive in your mailbox.

Your email address is even quicker—instantaneous.

If you move, you need to change your address.

It used to be a real nuisance because you had to fill out cards and mail them to all your contacts.

Today it is easier since you can do most of your address changes online or by email.

You can set up a redirect with Canada Post.

But it is still a both.

One of the nuisances of moving.

After you move, you hope that not too much mail ends up at your old address.

Loved ones, all of that is temporary.

Mailboxes, civic addresses, email addresses—all temporary.

As Hebrews 13:14 says, here we have no lasting city.

We have no lasting city here, but do we have a lasting city elsewhere?

Yes, we do.

As Hebrews 13:14 goes on (and I hope to preach on that Sunday morning): We seek the city that is to come.

So, later on, in the future, we will have a lasting city.

But what about in the mean time?

The villages, towns, and cities we living in here and now are temporary, but do we have a secure place today?

Yes we do, loved ones; we have a dwelling place.

Our dwelling place is the Lord.

As I reflected upon this Psalm, I saw three main thoughts emerge:

1. the eternity of God compared to our transience (vv 1-6);

2. the anger of God against our sin (vv 7-11);

3. the grace of God towards us, his people (vv 12-17).

1. Moses, the man of God, the human author of this psalm, said that we have a fixed address.

In the midst of life’s anxieties—our frailty, illness, and death; in the face of God’s anger against sin—we have a fixed address, a permanent home.

It is the Lord.

The first word of the psalm is “Lord.”

“Adonai” in Hebrew.

Adonai means the one who rules history and creation.

The God who is King and governor over all things in heaven and on earth—he is our dwelling place.

He is the eternal God.

He was there before the world was made.

Before he said: “Let there be” and called the mountains and the whole earth into existence, he was there.

From everlasting before history began to everlasting after future history as we know it has passed, God was, is, and will be.

This Lord who exists for all time and eternity, this Lord is our dwelling place throughout all generations.

Think about what it meant for Moses to have said that.

The Children of Israel had spent 430 years in Egypt, a foreign land, and most of those years in slavery.

They were children of Abraham who himself had been called away from a permanent address, Ur of the Chaldees, to live as an alien resident in the land of Canaan.

Moses wrote this while he and the Israelites were wandering in the desert.

Despite the fact they had no permanent address on earth, despite that they were wanderers and children of a wandering Aramean (as Abraham called himself), yet he said: the Lord’s people had a dwelling place, a permanent address: the Lord, the eternal God.

Our earthly address is temporary, but that is ok because the Lord is our eternal dwelling place.

His permanence is as sure as is our transience.

That we are here only for a little while is well illustrated by our deaths.

From dust we are and to dust we return.

Man was meant to live forever and to eat from the Tree of Life.

But because he ate rather from the forbidden fruit, he is condemned to return to the dust from which he came.

Even those live a long time—think of Methuselah who lived 969 years—even they returned to the dust.

But a thousand years?

Methuselah’s many years—969?

To the eternal God those years are like yesterday is to us.

When you think of yesterday, it only takes you a moment to remember what you all did.

Like yesterday is to you that’s what a thousand years is like to God.

Like a day that has just gone by, or, says Moses, like a watch in the night.

A night watch lasted three hours.

Imagine one such watch, say the time between 3 AM and 6 AM, when you are fast asleep—or perhaps just waking up at 6 AM.

You have no real sense of the passage of those three hours.

No profound sense of a slowly ticking clock.