So, I did something this week that I almost never do. I called an audible and changed the passage this week. I was asked to preach at the RTS chapel service on Wednesday and they asked me to preach on the eternity of God in fifteen minutes or less:) You could preach for fifteen years on that and never scrape the surface. And on top of that Scott Swain, a world expert on this doctrine was in the audience. So I chose Psalm 90 and began to work through it this week and I told Robert and Clark that I was kind of thinking about making this shift to this being our passage this week because the next passage in Matthew is the beginning of what the church calls Holy Week. 

 

As I worked through the eternity of God (which I’ll define more in a moment), it became increasingly clear to me that this is a great framework to have as we step into Jesus’ last week of ministry and as we ourselves prepare for Easter. The typical American Christian begins the Easter season either with Lent or Palm Sunday and the season goes something like this. We use God’s wrath and the suffering of Christ to make ourselves feel sad and afraid in order to feel happy on Easter day. But all we are doing is returning to baseline and it feels special because we have managed to get ourselves so down in the process. 

 

Now, I’m not suggesting that we ignore the wrath and suffering, that would be wrong. I’m just saying that we need to see all this in the context of eternity. Christ went to the cross for the joy set before him in eternity past. Holy week isn’t about the time that an angry and reluctant God forced himself to care about us when he otherwise wouldn’t. It isn’t Jesus swooping in as God’s plan B for humanity. It isn’t nice Jesus appeasing angry God the Father. It’s the God head choosing to endure righteous and necessary wrath in order to show mercy to people he loves. The cross is the revelation of God’s heart, not the changing of God’s heart. And that is where this connects to the eternality of God because God does not change. The gospel is consistent with the eternal, unchanging character and will of God. 

 

So, I gave my talk and I’m going back and forth on what to do and Dr. Swain said, “Man, that was really good. I hate that your church can’t hear that message.” Well, that was all I needed to hear to push me over the edge. So, this morning, I want to use Psalm 90 to define what the eternality of God or God’s eternity is and three ways it should change us.

1. What God’s eternity is. 

 

To understand God’s Eternity, we need to start, as many theologians do, with God’s infinity. Ok, we are going to have to think a bit more than usual, but I really think it will be good for all of us. The infinity of God is an incommunicable attribute of God. This means that this is true of God, but not us. And this attribute describes how he is free of any ending or boundary. Nothing encloses him in any way. This is why Psalm 145 says, “His greatness is unsearchable” and why Paul says in Romans 33 Oh, the depth of the riches and swisdom and knowledge of God! tHow unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways!

 

When you apply the attribute of God’s infinity to space, you get his omnipresence. Because he is infinite, he can be fully everywhere at all times. And when you apply the attribute of God’s infinity to time, you get his eternity. So not only is he fully everywhere,  he is fully everywhen as well. But, he is more than that. Not only is he at every point of time, time itself exists by God.  Time exists by God in the sense that all things were made in and through him. He created it. God, though, is uncreated. 

 

Time is itself a measurement of change. I was at Publix this week and the older guy at the register said, “How’s your day going young man?” I said, “Well, any day I can be called a young man is a good day.” Then, he said, “Well, you're always younger than you will be tomorrow.” That’s a perfect illustration of how time changes with every passing moment. But God does not change. He cannot be confined, defined, or measured by our standards of time. He will never be older than he is right now and he has never been younger than he is right now. This is what Psalm 90 is getting at when we read 2  vBefore the wmountains were brought forth, or ever you had formed the earth and the world, xfrom everlasting to everlasting you are God. Before time began, You Are. 

 

This is one of the reasons it is so unhelpful to think of the ‘moment’ in time that God created the heavens and the earth. It’s unhelpful because, in that same act, he also created time. It wasn’t on a larger timeline of eternity past that God created everything. He created everything including time. This is why we reject theological positions that have God making decisions like election based on looking down the corridor of time and seeing how we would respond to the gospel one day. Does your head hurt yet? 

 

For God, time does not pass too slowly or too fast. We feel time slipping away, but God does not. This is why verse four says, 4  For aa thousand years in your sight are but as byesterday when it is past, or as ca watch in the night. At RTS there is this big sign that asks ‘How Big Is Your God?’. I was a student there when Pokemon Go was first released and that sign was also a Pokemon stop. Which was so ironic to see people who may well have never been in a church in their lives on campus right below that sign asking how big is your God. He’s big enough to bring in the Pokemoners to that sign. But he’s bigger than that. He’s bigger than we can possibly get our minds around because he is infinite and eternal and we are finite and created. 

 

So, if that is a short definition of God’s eternity. How should it change us? How should it reorient us? 

 

1. How God’s eternity reorients us. 

 

First, it should reorient the way we look at our pain. If this Psalm is by Moses, and I believe it is, the historical setting is probably Numbers 20 which includes the death of Moses’ sister, Miriam, Moses sinning by striking the rock in the wilderness, which kept him from entering the promised land, and the death of Moses' brother, Aaron in. That’s a lot for one person. So, put a pin in the historical context for a minute. 

 

Let’s think for minute about how sometimes time seems to go by too slowly. When children are young, it feels like Christmas is never going to come! Maybe the students in the room feel like Spring Break just can’t come fast enough. But, it’s especially true when we are in pain. When we are suffering. We want to be past the pain. We want our bodies to get better faster. We want the relationships to be healed or restored, but it’s just not happening on the timeline we want. 

 

Or, the opposite can be true. We can feel like time is moving too fast. I’m old enough now to look back at family photos and feel like time is slipping away with my kids. It’s crazy to me to think that I just have two years left with all the kids in my house. I just have about eight years left with any kids in my house. Or I look at my aging parents and inlaws and wonder how many Christmases we have left together. 

 

Back to the historical context. I think this gets to the heart of verses four, five, and six. Moses is likening our lives to grass that would grow on arid landscapes in the morning and be wiped out by the sun before the end of the day. His point is that while time passes fast, maybe too fast for us, that is not the case with God. Even if we were to live for a thousand years, it is only like taking one watch of the night for God. 

 

And I know it might feel impossible to connect something as painful as the death of a loved one with something as abstract as the notion of God's eternity, but clearly Moses thinks there's comfort here! This is exactly what he’s doing. He’s connecting his pain and God’s eternity. And didn’t God comfort Job in much the same way? When Job's grief seemed so large that it looked as if it would never end and that it would swallow him up entirely, God reminds him that he is before and after Job's pain. The infinity of God means that he is big enough to utterly consume and swallow up the biggest and most terrifying experiences like death, and suffering, and despair. 

 

And this should encourage us because even though we may experience loss on this earth, even though we may feel like there is not enough time to do what we want, even though we may regret the past…God who always is in every moment present for us and with us in the utter fullness of his being will not abandon us, change his disposition toward us, or run out of time to meet us where we need him the most. God’s eternality teaches us that every moment of our life is pregnant with the fullness of God. 

 

And if God is the object of our joy, our satisfaction, and our hope, then his eternality guarantees us that that joy will last forever. God had no beginning so he will have no end and neither will our satisfaction in him. 

 

The 19th and early 20th century theologian Herman Bavinck said, “In hell, there is not eternity, but only time.” Do you hear that? Hell is going on enduring irretrievable losses and unrealized hopes without the joy of the eternal God. But we who are in Christ have the joy of the eternal God in our moments of pain, but we also have the guaranteed hope that one day we will be with him fully experiencing his glory without any of the pain of this world for all of eternity. 

 

Then, the second thing this passage should do is reorient our theology. Theology, of course, means the study of God. I remember in my first class with Dr. Swain, he put a small dot on the white board and said, “If that white board is everything to know about God, this dot is what the Bible tells us about God.” And I’m sure Swain would acknowledge that his illustration was far from scale. Really, if I put a dot in the middle of this room and this whole earth is all there is to know about God, that would be closer to accurate, but would still fall woefully short of scale because God is infinite and eternal. The dot vs the earth would be closer in scale to the dot vs the whiteboard than it would be to reality. 

 

The most learned theologian only has his or her toes in the edge of the oceans of the knowledge of God. And if this is true, it means that in terms of truly understanding God, the most theologically educated person in this city is much closer to the most ignorant person in his or her church than they are to truly understanding God. So, should that make us just want to give up? Not at all. This means that the riches to gain in our understanding of God are unending. Theology becomes a great journey or pilgrimage. And because of that, it should also make us humble. It should stop us from looking down on people that might not have as much theological training, or who might be ignorant and desire for them to enjoy the riches that God has allowed us to see.

 

It was interesting thinking about this passage the Monday after the Super Bowl and the aftermath of the He Gets Us commercial. Now, all my cards on the table, I don’t have strong feelings about that commercial. I know some of you do and that’s fine. But, I’d like to poke at one of the many responses that commercial got. I want to argue that we saw many Christians get upset because they misunderstood God’s eternity. It’s interesting that when posed with a commercial about God’s love for all people, we would so quickly appeal to his wrath for sin. Well, God’s love is an eternal attribute. There has never been and will never be a time when God is not love because God is eternal and does not change. Love is what he is. It is who he is. 

 

But, that is not true of his wrath. There certainly was a time when God was not wrathful. His wrath is the response that his eternal love has against sin. It is not an attribute like love or justice. While it's true his loving justice never changed and would have always responded to sin with wrath, that response never happened until sin came into creation. But wrath is also not the only response to sin, because he also has mercy. And he loves mercy. He takes more pleasure in mercy than in wrath according to Ezekiel 18.  So don't hear me saying anything to diminish the reality of God's righteous wrath, but hear me elevating our understanding of his eternal love. It's not a balancing of two equal realities of love and wrath in tension. It's a recognition of the difference between the perpetual relevance of his eternal love and the occasional relevance of his wrath for sin.

 

As we start to look at Holy Week, people use Jesus cleansing the temple by overthrowing the tables of the money changers as a counter to his washing of feet. And while this was a hugely significant event that we will look at, it was a pattern interrupt. 

 

The foot washing wasn't the only time Jesus showed love to sinners. He fed them, healed them, prayed for them, made wine for them, and ate with them all throughout the gospels. Washing the feet of sinners was exactly consistent with what he had been doing the whole time. 

 

Cleansing the temple with a whip was one time. It broke the precedent which is why it stands out as so significant. Everywhere else Jesus was being kind to sinners and calling them to repentance, only here does he drive them out in violence. Everywhere else he was saying "I came not to judge the world but to save it," only here was he judging and cleansing. Why? 

 

Because the Pharisees had altered the purpose of the temple. It was meant to be a house of prayer for all people. It was meant to be a place for sinners to come be reconciled to God. And they had made it something else. 

 

So using this story as an example of how God's love for sinners should always be balanced with wrath is not a good use of scripture. The wrath came because they had obscured the love of God for sinners with their greed. And people make a big deal about the foot washing only being disciples. Well, Judas got his feet washed too. 

 

Verse 9 is true when it says, For all our days pass away under your wrath; we bring our years to an end like a sigh. But it is our ‘days’ that brought God’s wrath. It is absolutely true that in wrath God cursed and punished sin ever since the fall. God is love and his love responds to repentance and faith with mercy and his love responds to unrepentant sin with wrath. And in love he predestined us for adoption as sons before the foundation of the world.  

 

So, why would we be so put off by someone emphasizing God’s eternal love and then respond to that by appealing to something more temporal? Why would we not see that, according to Mark, Jesus looked at the Rich Young Ruler ‘in love’ even as this man walked away from Jesus? Why would we not exude the humility that our finite studies of the infinite demands? 

 

Then, finally, the eternity of God should reorient the way we use the days we are given. Moses says that we may live seventy or eighty years and those years will bring us trouble, but they will soon be gone so in light of God’s wrath for the ways we use our days, teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom. What good is it to know all the math in the world if we cannot know how short our time is here? What good is it to have all the money in the world, or all the degrees, or know all the languages if we cannot see our finite lives in light of the eternal God. If we cannot see how short our time on this earth is. 

 

After my massive heart attack in December, I can tell you I do think about my days as fleeting now in a way that I didn’t in November. Two things are both oddly more true for me on the other side of almost dying. First, I’m less afraid of dying than I’ve ever been. But, second, I want to live more than I ever have. And I don’t just mean be alive, but live out my days the way God wants me to. I do think about how I use my days more now than I ever have before. But I think of them knowing that whether I die tomorrow or in forty years, my hope is not in these days, but in him who was before the days, him who is in every day, and him who will be after the days. The object of my hope, of our hope,  who never changes so our hope will never be in jeopardy. 

 

And perhaps the wildest thing to consider of all of this, is the eternal God, meaning the God full of unending and unsearchable justice and wisdom and righteousness, was given a perfect human representation in Jesus Christ. Everything that Jesus ever did or said on earth was perfectly representative of the infinite character of God. You could search the riches of the knowledge of God forever and not only would you never find their end, but you would never find them contradicting the Jesus presented to you in the gospels. The infinite God came and lived, cried, suffered, loved, and died as a man to show you on a personal level what God was really like, and to reconcile you to himself by showing mercy rather than wrath. You will never comprehend all of God, but you can know all of God today and every day thereafter in the person of Jesus. 

 

When we think about Holy Week and the days before Easter, it is not a week to go low emotionally so we can come back to baseline and feel happier than when we started. It’s a time to see the climactic moment in God’s plan in eternity past to reconcile sinners to himself through the life, death, and resurrection of the second person of the Trinity, Jesus Christ. This is when we see the reality of the fleetingness and finitude of human life, but the reality that this life is not all there is. Because Jesus did not stay dead, but resurrect, so too shall we who put our faith in him. 

 

And because of this, we can pray today verse 17 of Psalm 90 17  Let the xfavor4 of the Lord our God be upon us, and establish ythe work of our hands upon us;

yes, establish the work of our hands!