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.
To our eternal God, that is what a 1000 years is like.
We people?
God sweeps us away like a flood sweeps away everything in its path; we evaporate like a dream.
A new generation arises.
Children were born this past year in our congregation.
They are like the new grass of the morning.
But before they know it they will be swept away like grass dry and withered by the sun.
Turned back to the dust like all the children of man.
Beloved, our lives are so transient and brief.
Ask an old brother or sister about how fast life has gone for them.
They will tell you that life is a fleeting shadow.
We need a permanent home.
And we have one.
The Lord our God.
2. Yes, we have a dwelling place, but the Lord is not a God to be trifled with.
Our eternal home is a God who is angry about sin (cf. vv 7ff).
That Israel had to wander in the wilderness for 40 years was because of their sin of rebellion against God.
That all of mankind is condemned to return to the dust, and is swept away in the sleep of death like dry withered grass, is because of sin.
God is a consuming fire.
He is a terrifying God.
Our sins are in plain view to God.
Even our secret sins.
Reflect for a moment on the secret sins you have committed this past year.
Things you did that only you know about.
Our secret sins stand in sharp relief in the light of God’s presence.
He saw them all.
He sees them all.
And they anger God.
All our days pass away under the wrath of God; we finish our years with a sigh.
We live some 70 or 80 years—troublesome years spent in sorrow.
Oh, there are happy times too.
But life can be so troublesome and filled with sorrow.
So much sadness and misery.
We live a brief 70 or 80 years, and then we die.
Our souls fly away.
Our lives end with a whimper.
And it’s all because of sin.
Oh, we know that for the believer, “… death is not a payment for … sins, but it puts an end to sin and is an entrance into eternal life.”
And yet, if it had not been for the sin we committed in Paradise, there would be no death.
We would now already be eating from the Tree of Life.
But how is it now?
Man is destined to die once, and after that to face judgment (Heb 9:27).
Well did Moses ask the rhetorical question: “Who considers the power of your anger, and your wrath according to the fear of you?”
The greatness of God’s wrath against our sin ought to evoke fear in us, beloved.
Fear proportionate to God’s wrath.
Do we fear God?
Is the fear of the Lord something alive in us?
Holy fear for a holy God?
Does the wrath of God against sin evoke in us fear comparable in weight to the wrath of God?
Or have we made our God into a small, harmless and rather insignificant person?
Have we trivialized God?
The world has!
Have we?
This calls for a wise response.
When we consider the eternity of God compared to our transience, and when we consider the anger of God against our sin, it calls for a wise response.
We do well to plead upon the grace of God.
3. The grace of God.
When we plead upon the grace of God, we counter the power of sin, we flee to God whom we have offended, and we take up our permanent dwelling place in the everlasting God.
The prayer for grace Moses teaches us in the vv 12ff has several aspects to it—four aspects that are like for strong walls.
1. to teach us so that we will be wise;
2. to return to us despite our sin;
3. to satisfy us with his love;
4. to make us joyful despite troubles.
There are probably four sermons right there, but we should be brief:
First, we pray God to teach us about how limited and brief our days are.
We ask God to teach us to use the few years we live here wisely.
To graciously give us wise hearts so that we know how to live our few years in a way pleasing to him rather than in a way that evokes his wrath.
We pray for wisdom that we not squander the time he gives us but to use our days wisely.
Then, we ask God to return to us (v. 13).
It is the same word as is used verse 3: “Return to dust.”
We ask God who has condemned sinful man to return to the dust to return to us.
Moses and the children of Israel wandering in the desert asked God how long it would be and asked him to turn to them in favour and grace.
And so we, when we anger God by our sin, we ask God to turn, to return us in his grace.
To have pity on us, O Lord; forgive us our sins.
Third, we pray our gracious God to satisfy us in the morning with his steadfast love.
In v. 6, Moses had said that life is like grass that springs up fresh in the morning but withers and dies by evening.
In v. 9 he had said that all our days pass under the wrath of God.
But then (v. 14) we’re taught to counter that withering of life with a new morning filled with his love that makes us sing for joy all our days.
The grace of God transforms the morning and changes all our days.
It takes the morning that, by nature, only looks toward death, and the days that only know the wrath of God, and transforms them into mornings of optimism and days of joyful singing.
“Morning by morning new mercies I see!”
The fourth thing we pray our gracious God is that he continue to make us glad for as many days as he afflicted us, for as many years as we have seen evil.
Our lives are filled with trouble, affliction, sadness, grief and despair—all manner of evil.
We ask him to change our lives.
To make them as happy as they used to be sad.
As filled with joy as they once were replete with grief.
As filled with song and laughter as they used to be full of groaning and crying.
We pray God to preserve us in the joy of forgiveness and transformation.
This prayer and the sure answer to it are the four strong walls of our eternal dwelling in God.
He is our wisdom, our forgiveness, our transformation, and our preservation.
Moses ends with several wishes, wishes that are still prayers.
May God show us and our children his work and glorious power.
The deeds and the splendor of God are seen finally and most perfectly in Jesus Christ.
Christ came to do the work of God.
He came to obey God and to atone for the sins of God’s people.
He revealed to man the splendor, the glory and beauty of God.
May we all—old and young, grandparents, parents, children—may we all see the deeds and splendor of God from generation to generation.
The reference in v. 16 to the servants of God and their children takes us back to v. 1 where Moses said that the Lord is our dwelling place in all generations.
May we all—even the generations yet unborn—come to know the deeds and splendor of God in Jesus Christ.
May his favour rest upon us all, in the year of our Lord 2018, and always until the return of our Lord Jesus Christ, and then forever beyond.
If we make this prayer our own in the New Year, then we may trust that God will establish the work of our hands.
The Psalm ends with what can only be thought of as a mystery.
In the face of transience, death, sin, and trouble, Moses yet speaks of the work of our hands being established.
He even repeats it to give it emphasis: “…establish the work of our hands upon us; yes, establish the work of our hands.”
Here we have no lasting city, and yet there is something that lasts.
The work of our hands outlasts us.
How can that be?
You work your whole life, and then you die.
What is left of the work you have done?
Beloved, as God is your dwelling place, he will bless the work of your hands.
All the righteous endeavours you perform in the Name of God and his kingdom as you simply go about your regular duties and activities quietly performing the task of your office and calling as a prophet, priest and king—as a Christian—God will establish that work.
It will bear fruit for generations long after you are gone.
There’s another sermon there, but for tonight, it’s enough.
Soon we will enter the year of our Lord 2018.
What will it bring?
Happiness or grief?
Tears or joy?
Of one thing we can be sure: It will bring both.
By turn we will go up the house of feasting and to the house of mourning.
We will continue to live and work in a society where, technologically, the only constant is that everything changes by the day.
We will live in an increasingly immoral culture where insolent people flaunt the law of God.
But, beloved, we have a dwelling place.
We have an eternal home.
The Lord who made heaven and earth.
The Lord who rules creation and history.
He is our home.
Though we are homeless, though we’re alone, the Lord God is our home.
Whatever’s the matter, whatever’s been done, the heavenly Father is our home.
In this fearful, fallen place, He is our home.
He brings us home.
Home to our own place, in a beautiful land, he brings us home.
The Lord, our dwelling place, our permanent address. AMEN
