Life is Short - Psalms 87-89

Psalms 89:46-48 (ESV)

How long, O LORD? Will you hide yourself forever?

How long will your wrath burn like fire?

Remember how short my time is!

For what vanity you have created all the children of man!

What man can live and never see death?

Who can deliver his soul from the power of Sheol? Selah

The framework for Psalm 89 is dealing with the tension between the faithfulness of God and the certain death facing all mankind.  The psalm starts out this way:

Psalms 89:1 (ESV)

A MASKIL OF ETHAN THE EZRAHITE.

I will sing of the steadfast love of the LORD, forever;

with my mouth I will make known your faithfulness to all generations.

So the writer exalts the faithfulness and steadfast love of God.   But then also makes it sound like God is his greatest adversary:

Psalms 89:38-40 (ESV)

But now you have cast off and rejected;

you are full of wrath against your anointed.

You have renounced the covenant with your servant;

you have defiled his crown in the dust.

You have breached all his walls;

you have laid his strongholds in ruins.

Then we come to the passage in 46-48.   Here we read that the writer is facing certain death.   He knows the end of his days.  He is not necessarily seeing his finality in hope.  He sees death as a bitter end.  He sees the limits of his life.  He sees the end of the clock.   His is not presumptuous about life.   Note how James frames it:

James 4:13-17 (ESV)

Boasting About Tomorrow

Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit”— yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.” As it is, you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil. So whoever knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, for him it is sin.

It is humbling to know that God cares for you but also allows trouble into our lives in order for us to see the limit of life.    Our lives are short, but He watches.  Our lives are brief, but not always pain free.   Yet, through it all, His faithfulness remains.