Life’s Sorrows

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Your eye may be able to fall upon the verse to see if I’ve got it right and also to be able to get a clearer view of what the Word of God is saying. We come today in Psalm 90 to verses 11 and 12. I think these are 2 of the most powerful verses in the psalm. One is a question, a rather rhetorical question to which I think the psalmist is wanting to give the answer, nobody. And the other is a request to God that He will do something for us in the light of it.

Here then is the question, verse 11 of Psalm 90: Who considers the power of thy anger, and thy wrath, according to the fear of thee? Who considers it? And I have a shrewd suspicion that the psalmist is saying, well, really nobody. Nobody has time to think about it. Nobody is considering it.

And then the request to God in the light of that: So teach us. Please teach us to number our days, to understand the meaning of our existence, that we may get a heart of wisdom and cease to be fools. There’s a beautiful balance here, I think. If we don’t consider the power of God’s anger, verse 11, then I don’t think He’ll begin to teach us. But even if we do start to consider it, and it’s my earnest hope that many will be starting to consider it just because they’ve been coming on Tuesdays lately.

If we do start to consider it, then God will most certainly teach us. And without that teaching, of course, we shall never understand it. For in matters of God and of the spiritual life, we’re all thick as 2 boards and we need teaching by the Holy Spirit. So I pray that God will teach us today, but He will only begin to do so as we consider the power of His anger. Let me go back on one thing about these psalms that I want to make clear.

They are ordained to be a kind of two-way traffic. We often think of the psalms as being a vehicle for man’s worship to God, and we use it like that on a Sunday morning. But the psalms are not only a vehicle by which we may respond to God, but they are also a means by which God may speak to us. They are just as much a part of his teaching as any other part of the Bible. I mentioned Luther last week.

I’ll mention him again. The young Martin Luther in his monastery had often used the Psalms in the daily round of worship in the monastery. Over and over again, no doubt, the monks chanted these Psalms. But it was when he began to study rather than to sing the Psalms, to study them in order to be able to teach them to his students, that he began to learn about God and faith and what real Christianity was for the first time in his life. These psalms then are not just pretty poetry.

It’s not like walking through a city after dark and admiring the lights of the West End or whatever it may be. This is more like a flashing light when you’re at sea, coming perhaps from a lighthouse or from another ship, carrying a very vital message if you’re to avoid shipwreck. The light, the beauty of the psalm is there all right, and and we can admire the poetry and the language, but it’s much more than that. It’s a very urgent message. It’s one of the key Bible passages actually on the anger of God.

God doesn’t want to speak continually about His anger. His mercy, if you like, is the greatest theme of the Old and New Testament, the mercy of God in Christ and His love for us. But there are these comparatively rare but very important passages which give us a balancing view of God. And this is one of them where it speaks of his anger. The psalm actually is in 2 parts.

So different are they, verses 1 to 12 and 13 to the end— we come on to the second part next week— that some commentators have said there must be 2 different psalms that somehow wandered around and got stuck together. When you hear people say that it’s a counsel of despair, I think it just means they haven’t understood the psalm. But I think you will see the difficulty if you look at verse 10 and read a sentence like this, talking about our lives. It says they are but toil and trouble. And then you look at the second part of verse 14 and we are told that we are to rejoice and be glad every day.

Very difficult to keep that tension, isn’t it? Which are we to choose? Which is it to be? Or again, if you look at verses 3 to 11, the wrath of God is mentioned, if you count it up, at least 5 times. Yet when we come to the second part of the Psalm that is to be our subject next Tuesday and the Tuesday after, in verse 13 to the end, it’s all about the grace and mercy and favour of God that we are to revel in.

Well, what is the truth?

One commentator has suggested that the first part is us before our conversion, before that change of heart when we become wise men, because we turn to Christ and trust him. Whereas the second half is the joy of the newborn Christian. Well, I’m afraid that won’t do. It’s altogether too simple and superficial. Are we really to say that all our non-Christian friends groan under toil and trouble all day?

No, many of them are very happy people. Many of them say that because they are so happy they don’t want to become a Christian. They say, we don’t do it miserable like you. Now we can’t just say of our non-Christian friends that all is but toil and trouble. That would be unreal, wouldn’t it?

And we can’t just say of the Christian, can we, that he rejoices all his days. There is sorrow in the Christian life. There is toil and trouble. We can’t avoid these things. So it’s altogether too superficial to say that once upon a time we were under the darkness and blackness and then we came into the full sunshine.

As though that were a true account of life and conversion and so on. I think many people hearing that kind of superficial teaching react against it and leave the church and feel that it doesn’t deal with the depth of human existence. I want to say that this psalm goes right to the depth of human existence. What he is doing in this first half, I think, is this: he is giving us a picture of life as it is in a fallen world. World.

And his verdict is this, that existence as a whole— he’s not in this psalm celebrating the joys of life, he does that in other psalms— he’s saying existence as a whole is under the wrath of God because of man’s rebellion, and that we shall recognise that fact by certain symptoms. Some of you will know how Paul works this out in Romans 1. He says that the wrath and anger of God is not something that belongs just to the last day, the end of time and the judgement day. He says that God’s wrath has been visited all the time on any society where people refuse to know him and acknowledge him as God. And Paul has a very simple but a very frightening message in Romans 1.

He says, if you refuse to recognise that relationship up that way, if you cut yourself off from the knowledge of God, and you refuse to worship him as God, then God’s punishment will be precisely this— because God’s punishments always fit the crime— that he will dislegate and destroy your relationships with one another. If you won’t acknowledge that relationship that way, then he’ll destroy your relationships that way. Now I leave you to work that one out, but it seems to me very significant that in our culture, in our British culture, where for 2 generations we have rejected the knowledge of God, it is very significant that our human relationships get worse and worse. Family, marriage relationships, industry— doesn’t matter where you look, men are finding it very difficult to live with other men. We’re finding it very difficult to sort out our relationships.

We don’t even know the difference between masculine and feminine. We spent a whole weekend with Elizabeth Elliot, the great American teacher and returned missionary, on that very subject this weekend. It’s one of the symptoms of our day that people have got this all mixed up. And God says that that is a sign of his anger on a society that won’t acknowledge him. Now exactly the same is true here.

The psalmist is not being gloomy. He’s trying to be realistic. He’s trying to get us away from that variety of religious feeling that you can only call Christian Scientist. It’s not in the least scientific, of course, and it’s not in the least Christian, but it’s a very popular way of thinking because it simply relegates all these difficult things to the realm of fantasy. They’re not really there.

Look away from them. Believe, and you can avoid them. It’s from that kind of superficial but popular thinking that emerged, I suppose, what is the most popular limerick ever written concerning the faith healer of Deal who said, although pain isn’t real, when I sit on a pin and it punctures my skin, I dislike what I fancy I feel. Everybody knows that and everybody laughs at it. And yet there are many of us who are trying to fancy that the pinprick isn’t there and that we can ignore it and that it doesn’t have to be considered.

You see, what the psalmist is saying in verse 11 is this: who considers these things? Who’s taking them seriously?

Now let me, if I may, list 3 symptoms that are in the psalm. I haven’t time to locate them in each verse because of the shortage of our time in the lunch hour, but I can assure you that this is the best I can do by going over verses 3 to 11 over and over again. It seems to me that they’re speaking of 3 things that are always true of life and human existence as we experience it today. The psalmist then goes on to say that they are actually signs of the wrath of God on human society. Now you may not at the moment believe that.

That’s his explanation. What I don’t think you can dispute is that these symptoms are everywhere to be seen. First, frustration and futility, sense of futility. Now the psalmist seems to link that with this shortness of life theme that goes right the way through the first part of the psalm. He goes on and on again talking about the brevity of existence.

Verse 4: It’s like a watch in the night. Verse 5: It’s like the grass that grows in the morning and flourishes and dies in a day. Verse 9: It’s like a A sigh, a little dream comes to an end, so transitory. Verse 10, 70, 80 years, yet soon gone, and we fly away, and so on. He goes on and on about this, and he’s not so much talking about time but about the sense we have that life just isn’t long enough or deep enough or good enough to satisfy these eternal longings.

There are great longings, aren’t there? Somebody said to me this morning that their manager, they could never get him to do his service because he was consumed with ambition. Well, I don’t know what that really meant, but you know, those great desires within us are really in the first place the desires we have for God. And if we’ve forgotten about God, then we latch these desires onto something we see in front of us that we can touch— money or position or power, prestige. And then we get driven by these divine desires to find satisfaction in this, which is always impossible.

Which is why the more energetic type of person is always power-hungry, is always trying to get more and more, never satisfied. And it all ends up in frustration and futility. It’s very difficult to know how to describe this except that it’s on every page of the paper, isn’t it? You see the frustration and futility people feel about our economic situation, our political situation. A professor in the United States who taught politics said that the first year his students were all idealists ready to change the world.

When they graduated, they were all cynics realising that there wasn’t a hope. Now that puts it rather neatly, doesn’t it? We start off imagining that the world can be put right, and the older we get, the more we realise the utter frustration of the problems in the way. I mean, these strikes— it’s a miserable way to live, isn’t it? I don’t know if you know any ambulance men.

The only ones I’ve ever met are very fine people. I can’t imagine anybody wanting to be an ambulance man unless you were a person of a certain quality.

And yet they are on strike and the average wage of a leading ambulance man in London is £189 a week.

Now I’m quite sure that many of these ambulance men don’t want to be on strike. See, when you try to find out why it all happens, you can never actually find why it happens. There’s an endless cycle of people passing the buck, of frustration to get rid of the situation. And that’s the kind of thing that he’s talking about in the psalm. We’ve got such a short time to solve these problems, and they never seem to get solved, and every baby born into the world seems to start them all over again.

At least some of you young married couples may imagine that. Second symptom: Sorrow and trouble, verse 10. Again, it’s easier to turn our minds away from that, isn’t it, and just to enjoy life and to put on the television in order to anaesthetize us when we flop back in the chair and we get back at night. It’s very difficult to do that as a Christian, of course. I was a member of a little prayer group this morning and we heard news of a boy who has 2 weeks to live and another lad who, from a very good home, hung himself in the last 2 or 3 days.

You know the tragedy, the utter tragedy for that family of that. It’s heartbreaking, isn’t it? It’s not the way to start a morning.

What are you to say, that those are exceptions, that nothing like that happens in your town and down your street and you never meet it?

You see, the psalmist is saying that this is a symptom of life as we know it, and he’s searching for a reason for it. Frustration, one. Sorrow and trouble, two. The grim reality of fading life and cruel death, verse 6. We won’t read it again, but he’s constantly talking about it.

The difficulties of old age as friends die off and our body and mind and other things begin to fail us. And then the prospect of death. I’ve been reading this new biography of General Montgomery. It says that all his life he feared death. This remarkable soldier, this courageous man, he feared it all the time.

There’s an all the more interesting sentence. After his wife died early, very shockingly, he was left a widow with a young son to look after. I quote from page 278: I began to search my mind for anything I had done wrong that I should have been dealt such a shattering blow?

Now that’s a universal response, isn’t it? Faced with a shattering blow, we begin to search our hearts. What have I done wrong? The Bible does not encourage us to do that individually because Jesus says in John 9 that my individual sins are certainly not paid out in my individual suffering. But the Bible does encourage us nevertheless to ask this kind of question.

And to say, why do I live in a world where such shattering things happen? Why do I live in a world that’s marked by frustration and toil and sorrow and fading life and death when I seem to be made for something so much greater? And the psalmist gets on the track of that truth, of course, and it’s an old solution in verse 8. If you can think of a better solution, you come and tell me.

What does he say in verse 8? Thou hast set our iniquities before thee, our secret sins in the light of thy countenance. That’s a horrifying sentence, isn’t it? What do you set before you on your desk in the office? Nice things, I’m sure.

There’s a picture of your wife and your children looking at their best. There’s perhaps some memento that you brought back from abroad. There’s some motto, you know, the buck stops here, if you’re that kind of person. You know, these things, and there are 8 telephones to impress your friends. If that’s what you set before your face— none of them work, probably, doesn’t matter— what does God set before his face?

It’s a really rather cruel sentence, isn’t it? I don’t take any pleasure in it. God sets before him our sins. You see, the psalmist is searching for an answer. Why is it that the whole of our life, our existence as human beings, seems to be set in such a dangerous world fraught with so much trial and So many sorrows, so many difficulties.

He said, we’re always knocking our heads against the wall and against one another. And the answer he gets is the answer that the Bible gives from Genesis to Revelation. Because we’ve rebelled against Him, because in our hearts we reject Him, it is not so much that His will is against us, but our will is against Him. And if we fight Him, He fights us.

And all these things— frustration and sorrow and fading life and death— are simply part of the armour of God to bring us to our senses, to say, yes, life is dislocated. I’ve not left you alone. I’ve made it happen like that because you are so stubborn, so thick, so foolish that you won’t come to a Tuesday lunch hour because you’re full of ambition. What a reason. What a fool.

That’s exactly what he says, isn’t it, in verses 11 and 12? Who considers the power of your anger? That man hasn’t got time to consider anything like that. Verse 12: So teach us to do so, that we may get a heart of wisdom.

Now I wonder if you consider these things. Who considers it in your office? Very few people consider these things because they are too uncomfortable. We don’t have time. We’d rather turn aside.

And anyhow, we don’t know any answers. But do you consider them? Do you ever ask yourself these questions? Is life as I am beginning to know it adequate for my desires? Are all those aspirations that I had as a young man or a young woman, are they all to fade?

Am I getting from life what I want?

Is this life as I know it all God has to give? What if I die?

Does life make sense? What’s my future?

And as I look at those things in the light of reality, I’m conscious of something oppressive, that I can’t find an answer, that there doesn’t seem to be a satisfying solution, and that all the clever ways in which people escape these things aren’t satisfying. You see, this I said to you, didn’t I, last week? This is frankly an escapist The psalmist knows very well he’s got to escape. What he’s trying to do is to show you you’ve got to escape and then tell you where to escape to. Verse 1: O God, you’re our refuge in all generations.

You’re the only one we can escape to with our problem. Will you please tell us what you mean by it? Why is your anger resting so heavily on your world? And then he comes to verse 13: Return, O Lord, have pity on your servants. It’s all very familiar, isn’t it?

I wonder if you heard the— I’ve just forgotten the name that they call him. I think it’s something like Mr. Greenbelt, but I’m sure that’s wrong. This actor from Z-Cars who goes around teaching school assemblies about road drill and pausing at the kerb, he was on the radio at breakfast time this morning. At least if your breakfast is as late as mine, he was. You were probably earlier to the office this morning.

And he was saying how immensely satisfying it was that the casualties for children on the roads are down 25,000 in the last few years. And a great deal of this is no doubt due to his efforts going around these school assemblies singing his jingles and rhymes and so on, and they sounded great fun. The interviewer, I think, must have got out of bed the wrong side this morning because he was in a particularly tiresome form. And he nobbled some small boy on the playground and said, why on earth do you want to listen to all this? You’ve heard it often, haven’t you?

Well, this little fellow stood his ground splendidly. He said, I have, he said, but there are lots inside who haven’t.

Now I felt, well, what a message for us on Tuesday. You see, you come here and many of you as you come in your doors you say, well, I know all this. And somebody stands up and says, why do you want to listen to this all again? You know it all, don’t you? Yes, but there are many in the city who don’t.

Who considers the power of your anger? Very few. Most of us haven’t considered it as we ought.

Well, may God give us the grace to consider these things, to realise the frightening position that we have if we live without God. And let us offer this prayer to him from our hearts: Lord, please teach me to number my days, to estimate my life, to try to understand my existence. That I may get a heart of wisdom, cease to be a fool.

Let’s pray.

So teach us to number our days, to estimate our existence, that we may get a heart of wisdom.

God, the city is full of fools, clever fools, Ambitious fools, but fools nonetheless. Likeable fools. And there are some in this church, Lord. Have mercy upon us all. Turn our hearts to consider these things, to face these uncomfortable symptoms of existence.

And then teach us, Lord. Teach us on Tuesday. Teach us week by week that we may get this heart of wisdom. And begin to enjoy Your mercy. We ask it for Jesus’ sake.

Amen.