Posted: 1st January, 2012

God, Man, Time

As we approach the close of this year and the beginning of the New Year, it is fitting for each of us to pause and reflect on where we are – where we stand spiritually in our relationship to God, where we stand interpersonally in our relationship to others, and where we stand vocationally in how we have worked and used our time.

It is so easy to forget or ignore the things that are most important, the things that are of first priority. This omission then affects every aspect of our life. For many of us, time just slips away. We simply fritter away our time. When we were kids, our parents might say to us when we were taking too long: “Do you think we have all day?” I’m not sure we even understood what those words meant when we heard them. In our minds, there was always lots of time. “Time was on our side, yes it was.” Those, by the way, were the words of the Rolling Stones’ song, “Time is On My Side.” The subtitle (so to speak) of the song is “Yes it is.” I would love to ask Mick Jagger, who made that song famous in 1964, a question: “Do you still think that time is really on your side?” The photos of the Rolling Stones today do not agree with the song. Time has ravaged some of them, and destroyed one of them. The drugs, the booze, the promiscuity, have all had their terrible results. I am not saying this as a slur against the Rolling Stones. It is simply a statement of reality. TIME (in terms of its ravages, along with its brevity, and combined with the unfailing certainty of death) IS NOT ON OUR SIDE… NO IT’S NOT! We are vain and foolish if we think that it is!

The end of a year is always a good time for each of us, young or old, healthy or ill, to consider the time that we call our life.

Psalm 90 has a powerful message for us about time. It gives this message in an ancient song. This song is one of the few songs by a composer who happens to be more well known even than Mick Jagger! In fact, there are just a handful of people who are so well known that you only have to mention the single name they go by and there is immediate recognition of whom you are speaking. There is Dylan. There is Madonna. There is Michael. There is Obama. There is Oprah. You get the idea. Included in that list of people known only by one name, there is the composer of Psalm 90, who most people do not even know wrote the psalm, but who is probably the most name recognized person in history apart from Jesus. That person is Moses. The songs of Moses were not recorded until almost 3500 years later, but he did write Psalm 90, and it is now recorded. In fact, in our church, we will be singing it in its entirety TODAY! Moses wrote this song at the end of his life, when he was around 120 years old; and he spoke of 3 realities in his song: God, man, and time.

Looking at these realities and taking the truths connected with them to heart – while working them out in our lives – will help us make every moment that we have in this life, count.

In the next installments over the next couple weeks, you will see what Moses teaches us in his song about God, man, and time; and how a right perspective about them will change your life!

As we head into the New Year, remember that it is essential to learn to live right. The only way that we will ever do this is when we do so in the face of, and in the knowledge of, God, man, and time.

That is, in order to live in a manner that is pleasing to God, we must come to understand time as it relates to God, man, and the rapidly passing moments of our life. We must come to know the eternality of God, the finitude of man, and the non-reusable moments of life that God gives us TODAY, as He calls us to “redeem the time for the days are evil” (Ephesians 5:16).