Remembering Your Place

Last week, two famous men died—Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead and Mickey Mantle of the New York Yankees. Many have said that they died before their time, because each was so young—Garcia had just celebrated his 53rd birthday and Mantle was only 63.

There were many similarities between these two men. Both of them were substance abusers. Garcia died in a drug treatment center near San Francisco, where the Grateful Dead got their start back in the “flower-power” days of the 1960’s. He was struggling to overcome an addiction to heroin.

Mickey Mantle died of cancer—the result of 40 years of alcohol abuse. In spite of his having received a liver transplant last June, the cancer had spread to other parts of his body.

Both men were, in some ways, the idols of their generation. Each left behind millions of devoted fans and admirers.

Garcia’s band, the Grateful Dead, had become something of a cult phenomenon. It was the most successful touring rock band of all time. The Dead inspired an almost fanatical loyalty in their fans, who called themselves “Deadheads”.

Some Deadheads lived the life of gypsies, wandering around the country following the band on tour, attending literally hundreds of concerts in the process. A Grateful Dead concert was like a flashback to the Sixties, with plenty of pot, acid, and irresponsibility to go around.

But in spite of all that, Garcia was the darling of the media. His portrait appeared on the front page of both Time and Newsweek last week. His death brought the most lavish tributes. The Washington Post called him a ‘rock oracle who epitomized freedom”. The New York Times, in a front page obituary, gushed that he was “a mellow icon of 60’s idealism who embodied psychedelic optimism”.

But Rush Limbaugh may have been closer to the mark when he said that Garcia was “just another dead doper.”

Mickey Mantle’s career spanned a Golden Age in the 1950’s when baseball was without question the #1 sport in the nation. He was its brightest star in an age when television was just bringing the game into our living rooms.

Mantle took his powerful New York Yankees to an incredible 12 World Series appearances in 14 years. He won the Most Valuable Player award three times. He even won the Triple Crown in 1956, a feat that has been repeated only two times in the 39 years since.

Mickey Mantle hit 536 home runs, some of them the longest home runs ever seen—longer than Babe Ruth, longer than Hank Aaron, Willie Mays, or Ted Williams ever hit a baseball.

And he did all this while playing in constant pain. As a teenager, he developed osteomyelitis—a serious bone disease. While he was in high school, he came within an eyelash of having his leg amputated. In the big leagues, he played every game wrapped up in tape from his thigh to his toes.

I guess you might say that the Mick was one of those characters who was “larger than life”. But in the end, he died like everyone else.

And that’s what we want to talk about today. We want to talk about life and death. And to do that, we’re going to go to Psalm 90—a psalm about life and death.

Psalm 90 may be the oldest Psalm of them all. It was written, not by David, but by Moses, a man who lived 400 years before David was born. As you probably know, Moses was the leader of the Israelites as they wandered in the desert for 40 years.

(Someone has said that the reason they wandered in the desert for 40 years was that Moses—like most men—simply refused to stop and ask for directions.)

But the real reason—the reason given in the Bible—was that the children of Israel simply didn’t trust God to give them victory. When the spies went up into the promised land and came back with stories of giants, the people began to weep and wail and say “Let’s go back to Egypt.”

And because of their refusal to believe that God could give them the victory, God sentenced them to wander in the wilderness until that whole generation had died off and a new generation, who were ready to trust God, had come on the scene.

Now think of poor Moses. He’s got to spend the major portion of his career wandering in the wilderness waiting for a whole generation to die off before anything positive could happen. The numbers that are given to us in the Scriptures lead us to believe that there may have been as many as 2 million Israelites involved. That’s a lot of funerals that Moses had to go to!

So it’s no wonder that the psalm he wrote—Psalm 90—has been called the Psalm of Death, because Moses was surrounded by death.

Now Psalm 90 talks about three things:

1. God’s eternity and our mortality

2. God’s wrath and our sinfulness

3. God’s compassion and our need

1. God’s eternity and our mortality

Psalm 90:1-2 Lord, you have been our dwelling place throughout all generations. Before the mountains were born or you brought forth the earth and the world, from everlasting to everlasting you are God.

As the Israelites wandered in the desert, I’m sure that they yearned for a permanent home. If you’ve ever gone camping, you know that it can be fun for a while, but it sure is nice to come home to a solid roof over your head. Especially when it rains!

Moses says here “Lord, you are our dwelling place.” You are the permanent home for our souls. You are the only one in whom we will find rest and security and permanence. And as long as we are separated from you, we are like wandering nomads, living in tents.

From everlasting to everlasting, God is God. He always has been and he ever will be. The Hebrew literally means ‘from vanishing point to vanishing point.”

We traveled across the Great Plains this summer on our way to Colorado. And in the middle of Kansas, where it was completely flat with not even a tree in sight, we could look from horizon to horizon. We could look off into the distance to the point at which the road vanished. And we could look back and see the same thing. And we realized how incredibly huge the Great Plains are, and how incredibly small we were.

The eternity of God is a concept that is very difficult for us to grasp. Because we are creatures of time. Our lives are bound by time—the clock is always ticking—and we are conscious of that fact all the time. We measure our lives in birthdays. We always remember our beginning, and we sometimes look ahead to our ending.

The passing of time is an omnipresent part of our existence. Even when you go on vacation and try to get away to that unhurried, unscheduled lifestyle, you’re still thinking in the back of your mind “How much time do I have left to be on vacation? When do I have to be back?”

There is something in us that rebels against time. We want to throw off its restraints, but we can’t. And yet our hearts yearn to be able to transcend time. I think one of the reasons for the outpouring of emotion at the death of Jerry Garcia and Mickey Mantle was that their passing reminded all of us that time is passing for us, too.

The book of Ecclesiastes says that God has set eternity in our hearts. And we yearn for it. And only in the eternal God will we find it.

PS 90: 3 ff You turn men back to dust, saying, “Return to dust, O sons of men.” For a thousand years in your sight are like a day that has just gone by, or like a watch in the night. You sweep men away in the sleep of death; they are like the new grass of the morning—though in the morning it springs up new, by evening it is dry and withered.

Our lives are like grass in the hot desert sun. It springs up with lots of energy and freshness, and promise, but all too soon it wilts and withers under the onslaught of that relentless sun.

The image of being swept away in the sleep of death is also a desert image. In the desert it seldom rains. But when it does, it can be pretty dramatic. The ground is so hard and dry that the rain from a sudden cloudburst doesn’t penetrate. It just runs off and collects in dry creek beds, or as they are called in the Middle East, wadis.

And if enough rain falls, you get flash floods that sweep away trees and rocks and animals and people. That’s the image that Moses is using here. Death is like a flash flood that just suddenly sweeps us away. We are powerless to do a thing about it.

So Moses reminds us that we are mortal and God is eternal. And he goes on to remind us of something else:

2. God’s wrath and our sinfulness

Psalm 90:7 We are consumed by your anger and terrified by your indignation. You have set our iniquities before you, our secret sins in the light of your presence. All our days pass away under your wrath; we finish our years with a moan.

The length of our days is seventy years—or eighty, if we have the strength; yet their span is but trouble and sorrow, for they quickly pass, and we fly away. Who knows the power of your anger? For your wrath is as great as the fear that is due you.

We’ve already learned that God is immortal and we’re not. Now, Moses tells us, God is holy and we’re not. We are sinners. And that puts us under the wrath of God.

The wrath of God is a idea that troubles many people. They do not understand what it means. When they think of God’s wrath, they think that He is just being cranky, or spiteful, or bad-tempered. If God could just be a little more indulgent, or patient with us, then we wouldn’t have to worry about his wrath.

That is a total misconception of what the wrath of God is. God’s wrath is not something that he chooses to feel or not to feel in the presence of sin. It is an automatic reaction because of the fact that God is perfectly holy and without sin.

There is a very interesting Hebrew word that is used in the OT to describe God’s reaction to sin. It is the word “anaph”, and it is usually translated “anger” or “fierce anger”. The word is interesting because it comes from a root word that means to snort, or to sneeze, and as a noun, it refers to the nostrils or to the face. People often snort or screw up their faces when they are very angry.

Now for the sake of illustration, let’s suppose that you are one of those people who are allergic to cats. When you go into a room where there is a cat, you may be okay for a few minutes, but pretty soon, your eyes will start to water, and your sinuses will fill up and you’ll start to sneeze, and snort, and sniffle.

Why do you have that reaction? Because you are allergic to cats. Can you choose not to have that reaction? No, you don’t have any control over that reaction, because it is part of your makeup. There is something about your body chemistry that is triggered by cat hair, or cat dandruff, or cat smell, or whatever.

Now in the same way, think of God as being allergic to sin. When he comes into the presence of sin, he has this reaction because of who He is, because of His makeup. His holiness burns against sin. He wants to eliminate it, to cast it out from His presence.

It’s not a question of getting God to be more tolerant of sin. That would be like trying to get fire to be more tolerant of water. The two simply cannot co-exist.

God cannot tolerate sin because of who he is. He is perfectly holy. And if he began to tolerate sin, he would no longer be God.

So if you understand this, and if you understand the fact that all of us are sinners, then you can understand the feeling of despair and anguish that Moses expresses in these verses.

We are in deep trouble as human beings. It’s bad enough that we have this yearning for eternity. But here we are in a condition of being completely unacceptable to the only one who can help us. We are odious to Him in the same way that a cat is odious to a person who is allergic to them.

So what’s the answer? What’s the solution? The answer is in verse 12:

Psalm 90:12 Teach us to number our days aright, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.

In other words, help us to remember who we are. Help us to gain a right perspective on our lives. Help us to realize how much we need you.

This Psalm would be pretty depressing if it were not for the last section of it, from verse 12 on. Because in this section, Moses teaches us about

3. God’s compassion and our need.

Psalm 90:13 Relent, O Lord! How long will it be? Have compassion on your servants. Satisfy us in the morning with your unfailing love, that we may sing for joy and be glad all our days. Make us glad for as many days as you have afflicted us, for as many years as we have seen trouble. May your deeds be shown to your servants, your splendor to their children. May the favor of the Lord our God rest upon us; establish the work of our hands for us— yes, establish the work of our hands.

The deaths of Mickey Mantle and Jerry Garcia have given rise to a lot of incredibly bizarre thinking about the meaning of life, and the destiny of the soul after death.

We’ve been asked to believe that Mickey Mantle is now arm-in-arm with Casey Stengel up there in that great “baseball diamond in the sky”. And that Jerry Garcia is now somewhere up there leading an enormous rock concert.

What incredible presumption! The Bible says that it is appointed unto man once to die and after that the judgment. We are going to appear before a holy God to answer to Him for all the deeds we have done.

And if we’re ever going to survive that judgment, it’s only as we throw ourselves on the compassion and mercy of God. His compassion is literally our only hope. And in his compassion, God has provided a Savior for us—Jesus Christ, who died on the cross to take away our sin by taking it upon himself.

It’s only in relationship with Him that our lives will have any meaning; that His favor will rest upon us, and that the work of our hands will be established.

Exactly twelve years ago this month, on a brilliant summer day, I stood over the freshly dug grave of a man I knew well. He was a committed Christian, a successful businessman, and a good athlete. He was the president of a management consulting firm. And he was heavily involved in his local church.

Yet he was struck down in his prime by a brain tumor at the age of 43. They diagnosed the tumor in May. By August he was dead.

His life was swept away in the sleep of death. I well remember the day when I stood by his bedside just watching him breathe. There was no brain-wave activity, and the only reason he was breathing was because he was on a respirator. A few minutes later, the doctors shut off the respirator, and he officially died.

He left behind a wife and five beautiful children. This man’s name was Phil, and he was my brother.

As I approach my 43rd birthday, I find myself returning again and again to the question of significance. When you get into your 30’s and 40’s, you begin to realize that you are not going to live forever. So you’ve got to make life count. You want to make sure that what you are doing, and the impact that you’re having, is of real long-term significance.

As I reflect on my brother Phil’s brief life, I think that he had found the secret of significance.

He found it because he pursued what author A.W. Tozer has called “the knowledge of the holy.” In fact, my brother gave me that book when I was just a teenager. My brother wanted, more than anything in his life, to know God and to serve Him. That’s what gave his life purpose and meaning.

And his personal experience of God’s love and compassion gave him the freedom to love and be compassionate toward others. He wasn’t worried about getting his own needs met., because his own needs were being met in his relationship with God. So he was able to give himself away to others.

That’s what gave his life significance. In just 43 years, he managed to make a tremendous impact for good and for God on countless people.

Life is short, isn’t it? Do you ever wonder what people will be saying about you after you’re gone? Will they be speaking in terms of how successful you were, or how much money you made, or the great accomplishments you achieved?

Or will they be thinking in terms of the influence you had on them—that you were a blessing to them, and that you helped them to get to know God a little bit better?