The best teacher and little by little

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

Consider the sort of request to make – to be taught. The verse begins Teach us. This sort of thing comes up often in the psalms. A request for teaching assumes ignorance on our part and that is right. By nature we don't know how to live. We need to learn how to do that. Who better to teach us that than God himself. When serious people who know what they are doing go off to university, they find out who are the best teachers and apply to those universities. The best teacher of all is God himself. Go to him and learn. Here then is something we need to learn, something we need to learn from God. It may well not come easy but we must learn it anyway. God is able to teach us.

Understand what it is that Moses wants God to teach us – to number our days. So what is it that Moses wants to learn from God? He asks that we will learn to number our days. We learn to count when we are very young. We start with addition then substraction then move on to multiplication and division. Next come fractions and equations. The highest mathematics there is, is learning to number your days. We need to learn to number our days. What does that mean? He has spoken about death and the brevity of life and the regular manifestations of God's wrath against the people. Every person has only a limited time here on this earth. We may live 70 years or 80. However old we get, we die. What Moses requests then, and it is something that we should all seek, is that we may be able to have the right approach to our lives. It is not that we forget about the past completely but that we focus on the day ahead. He is not asking to know how long he has left but to be able to discern how quickly the days pass, the fact that death can come at any time and that life on earth will certainly end at some point. No doubt he also has in mind that judgement that follows death. If we are to number our days as we ought to then we'll be aware of the coming judgement and we'll order our days in the light of the coming judgement. You read sometimes of people who have managed to lose millions. They once were rich but now they are poor. How does it happen? Probably not overnight. Usually it is little by little. In the same way, we learn to live wisely little by little, day by day. Here is a good prayer for all of us. Ask God to teach you, to help you understand how to live – not thinking we have all the time in the world but realising life passes by quickly and death can call at any time. Ask him to help you prepare for the coming judgement in the right way.

From everlasting to everlastig God

Psalm 90:2 and 4 Before the mountains were born or you brought forth the whole world, from everlasting to everlasting you are God. ... A thousand years in your sight are like a day that has just gone by, or like a watch in the night.

Think of mountains. Some of you have been up Snowdon or Ben Nevis. You have heard of Scafell Pike or the Alps or Kilimanjaro and K2 and Mount Everest. They have just always been there. You know that silly joke about Mount Everest. What was the world’s highest mountain before the discovery of Mount Everest? It was still Mount Everest (it doesn’t matter whether it had been discovered or not!). It's like the world itself. It feels like it has always been around. Of course, as Moses shows us in Genesis, the mountains and the earth had a beginning. Now before all that, he says, God was there. From everlasting to everlasting you are God which means that God has no beginning and he has no end. He is eternal. He is the God of the ages. And because he is eternal, for him a thousand years is just like a day gone by or a watch in the night. Moses records the ages of the early men. Before the flood some reached quite amazing ages. Methusaleh was famously 969. None lived a thousand years though. But for God it is like a day gone by. If you are up at night, the hours can seem to drag but when you sleep a watch or two can appear to go by very quickly. For God that is like a thousand years or more slipping by.

One way to think of it is if you think of the long years like a long line of cars. Say each car in the jam represents 10 years. Then a thousand years would be represented by a hundred cars. If you are in car 50 then you can only see so far back and so far forward but if you are up in a helicopter you can see all the way to the front and all the way to the back. That is something like how it must be for God. He can see it all in one moment.

Astronaut Food

You know that the Bible is to be read in many ways like you would read any other book – begin at the beginning and read on to the end. However, because it is also a very special book there are certain places where we find what we might call astronaut food – concentrated rations – or nuggets of gold in the ground or cherries in a Genoa cake. I refer to the way that certain texts can be isolated and great truths can be seen in them. Not all verses of the Bible lend themselves to such a treatment by any means but many do, (Examples John 3:16, Romans 3:23, Galatians 2:20, etc).

Three Rs of sin - recognition, repetition, reputation

1. Recognition. If you have never realised that a certain thing is a sin then you are not likely to feel convicted.

If you don't know that it is a sin to worry or a sin not to keep the Lord's Day special then your conscience will not convict you. It is only when you see such things are sins that you are likely to come under conviction.

2. Repetition. Even when we know something is sinful, we may not feel convicted about it because we have done it so many times so much so that we are hardly aware we are doing it.

Think of a person who feels guilty about swearing or making rude jokes at first but gets so used to it that 

he does not notice it any more. The same with gossip, lying. and other sins.

3. Reputation. As for reputation, we are ashamed of some sins just because we know what others will think of us.

A person may be quite happy to steal or to do something spiteful or malicious to another or to cheat on his wife – as long as no-one else knows about it. The very fact that he may be found out often stops a person from committing a sin and when he does, the reaction of others to it can bring deep conviction.

A great clean up of stumbling blocks

Zephaniah 1:2, 3 "I will sweep away everything from the face of the earth," declares the LORD. "I will sweep away both man and beast; I will sweep away the birds in the sky and the fish in the sea-- and the idols that cause the wicked to stumble." "When I destroy all mankind on the face of the earth," declares the LORD, 

(1. Who is going to bring about this judgment? The LORD himself)

2. What will be its chief characteristic?

You notice the repeated idea of sweeping away. It begins "I will sweep away everything from the face of the earth," declares the LORD. Then there is some itemisation "I will sweep away both man and beast; I will sweep away the birds in the sky and the fish in the sea - and the idols that cause the wicked to stumble." If there is any doubt about what such sweeping away by God entails, the phrase "When I destroy all mankind on the face of the earth," declares the LORD makes it clear.

Just as when someone takes a brush and sweeps the rubbish up across the floor so God will come one day and he will sweep away all unrighteousness. It's a great clean up.

When I was a child my mother would have a big clean up in the house, which was fine but sometimes there were things that I treasured that she would throw away because they were cluttering up the house. It is something like that when God is at work.

In doing what he says he will do, God will destroy the whole earth including the unrighteous, consigning them to hell. The New Testament speaks of this (2 Peter 3:10) But the day of the Lord will come like a thief. The heavens will disappear with a roar; the elements will be destroyed by fire, and the earth and everything done in it will be laid bare.

3. What will be swept away?

In verse 3 Zephaniah enumerates who will be swept away. It is like Genesis 1 in reverse. There we read of the creation of man and before that of the beasts and before that the birds and the fish. Here he says I will sweep away both man and beast; I will sweep away the birds in the sky and the fish in the sea …. All of creation is going to be swept away when this great day of judgment comes. He adds - and the idols that cause the wicked to stumble. On the fourth day God made the sun, moon and stars, which people have made idols of. But they also will be destroyed.

These idols that cause the wicked to stumble really are stumbling blocks. They get in the way of true worship and cause people to fall into sin. When someone trips over something in the street we say he has hit a stumbling block. That literal thing is a picture of the way idols get in the way and cause people to fall. But they will not last.

It all reminds us of Jesus's own words in Matthew 13:40, 41 As the weeds are pulled up and burned in the fire, so it will be at the end of the age. The Son of Man will send out his angels, and they will weed out of his kingdom everything that causes sin and all who do evil.

The whole thing may sound negative but in fact it is very positive for this will mean the end of idolatry and all the wickedness associated with it when God judges all the earth. This drive against idols has already begun but it will be completed when Jesus comes again.

(4. How ought we to react? Be holy)

Knowing the truth is only half the battle.

Knowing the truth is important but it's only half the battle. A medical expert may know all there is to know about a certain disease but it is of no use if he misapplies his knowledge. If he treats you with all his expertise but you have some other disease not his speciality, it will do you no good. Rather, it may do you harm. So it's not enough to know that God is just, we need to know how that justice is worked out – and we have to say that it's not always as straightforward as we may expect. We must believe God is just – it is a core biblical doctrine. However, it will not always be obvious that God is being just in the way that he acts towards individuals.

A theological argument against worrying - God's omniscience

Luke 12:30 ends and your Father knows that you need them (food, clothes, etc). What a powerful argument that is. If only we could remember that whatever we are worrying about, God knows exactly what the need is, how he will meet it and every other circumstance. God is omniscient – he knows everything. To worry about things really makes no sense at all. It is like a young child in the UK lying awake at night worrying about whether his parents will remember to give him breakfast or whether they will remember to put clothes on him. Of course they will! (Certainly in nearly all the cases we know anything about). In a similar way, we need not fear that God will ignore us or neglect us. He will do everything that needs to be done.