Today would be my grandfather’s 96th birthday if were alive. He passed away in 1995 when I was fourteen years old. Looking back on those fourteen years, I see snapshots of the times I spent with him and my grandmother (who passed away in 2009, just after we had moved here to Jackson). They are snapshots of joy and laughter, a number of which cluster around Christmas. Wednesday will mark the nineteenth consecutive Christmas that I have not been able to celebrate with my grandfather, and the fifth consecutive Christmas that I have not been able to celebrate with my grandmother.
Christmas has a tendency to make me nostalgic. It stirs up so many memories of the past that make me long for the joys I knew at Christmas as a child. But those are days I can never have back. If nothing else, the normal processes of growing up, of seeing your kids grow up, and of saying goodbye to loved ones will cause every Christmas to be different from the Christmas before it.
When you gather with your families this week to celebrate the birth of our Savior once again, and you stir up shared memories of the past, tell stories, and feel the tug of nostalgia once again, I want to encourage you not only to look with fondness upon the past, but to look with hope to the future. Let the occasion orient you, not only to the mighty work of God in sending his Son for our redemption, but also to the necessary corollary of the Son’s finished redemptive work: his return to gather us to himself. For if Christ has died and has been raised for you, then the price has already been paid, and nothing can stop him from claiming his prize and taking you to himself forever.
Psalm 102 gives us a future-oriented perspective, and in so doing, it teaches us how to pray future-oriented prayers. Scholars have puzzled over how to categorize this psalm. The first section, verses 1-11, and the last section, verses 23-28, read like an individual lament, that is, the prayer of an individual to God about his own personal distresses. If you lifted the middle section out (verses 12-22), the psalm would sound very much like the numerous individual laments you find throughout the Psalter. But in that middle section the psalmist’s individual distress fades from view as he looks to the future hope of the restoration of Zion (which in turn seems to indicate a setting at the time of the exile when Jerusalem was in ruins). And so this psalm appears to find a home both among the individual laments, which focus on the individual, and among the psalms of Zion, which focus on the city of Jerusalem and the nation as a whole. But that is fitting, for the hope of the individual lies in the future of the city and people of God. Your hope and mine, through all of the personal distresses we face in this life, lies in the Jerusalem above, which will one day come down from Heaven to earth. As we walk through this psalm today, we will focus on the first section, and then the last, and then we will come back to the middle and see how the whole gives us instructions on how to pray. In doing so, we will note three lessons for praying future-oriented prayers.
The first lesson is that we must
We must pray as those who believe that Paul’s words in Romans 8:18 are true: “For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us.” If that is the case, then no affliction of this present age should have the power to rob us of the ability to pray. The psalmist did not have Paul’s letter to the Romans, but he knew enough of God’s character and promises to pray undeterred by his own afflictions.
I will come back to verses 1-2 in a moment, but first we should note what verses 3-11 tell us about the psalmist’s situation. He is a very sick man. So sick, in fact, that he says in verse 3, “my days pass away like smoke, and my bones burn like a furnace.” The image indicates that his life is fleeting, his death is imminent. Verse 11 confirms, “My days are like an evening shadow; I wither away like grass.” As the sun sets in the west, evening shadows stretch out just before they disappear. And grass is a notorious symbol throughout Scripture for something that is here today, and gone tomorrow. The psalmist laments that his life is coming to an end.
He is the portrait of physical and emotional weakness, according to verses 4-5: “My heart is struck down like grass and has withered; I forget to eat my bread. Because of my groaning my bones cling to my flesh.” He cannot eat, and according to verse 7, he cannot sleep. He has been reduced to skin and bones. Verses 6-7 compare him to different kinds of birds. The ESV says, “desert owl,” “owl,” and then “sparrow,” though the identification of some of these species is uncertain. Nevertheless, the overall point seems to be clear: like these birds, the psalmist is alone. His enemies taunt him in his weakness (v. 8), perhaps because they view his suffering as a sure sign of divine disfavor and now feel the freedom to mock him for it.
Although the psalmist cannot eat food, there is one thing he can eat, according to verse 9: “For I eat ashes like bread and mingle tears with my drink.” In other words, the rituals of mourning (ashes and tears) have become so common to him, that he will not even interrupt them for meals. Ashes and tears are like his daily food and drink. He is utterly absorbed in sorrow.
But it seems that verse 10 brings this section to its climax: the psalmist tells God that he is suffering these things “because of your indignation and anger, for you have taken me up and thrown me down.” Nowhere in the psalm does the psalmist indicate consciousness of a particular sin that has led to this suffering. Perhaps he is thinking in general terms of the sins of the nation, for which they have gone into exile, and his own sufferings mirroring that larger reality. Whatever the case, the psalmist recognizes that, in some sense, God himself stands against him. This suffering that he endures is suffering that comes from the hand of God.
So let’s recap: the psalmist is facing imminent death, emotional distress, bodily weakness, inability to eat or sleep, constant mourning, loneliness, the taunts of his enemies, and all of it is occurring under the wrath of God. Now come back to verses 1-2: “Hear my prayer, O LORD; let my cry come to you! Do not hide your face from me in the day of my distress! Incline your ear to me; answer me speedily in the day when I call!” Does it strike you as odd that he feels the freedom to lament and call out for deliverance to the same God who has afflicted him? The only explanation for the fact that we have this psalm at all is that the psalmist understands that wrath is not God’s final word. Holding fast to the promises to Abraham and to David, the psalmist cries out for deliverance to the very God who stands against him, knowing that this same God is the one who is eager to come to the aid of his children.
In 1970, almost the entire football team and coaching staff of Marshall University in Huntingdon, West Virginia, including head coach Rick Tolley, were killed in a tragic plane crash on the way back home from a game. The story of the crash and of the subsequent healing of the school and its community is told in the film We Are Marshall. The movie depicts the school’s decision to press on with its football program the next year because of an outpouring of student support. They hired a new head coach, Jack Lengyel from the College of Wooster, and assigned him the task of building a new football team from scratch. With mostly inexperienced freshmen, many of whom had never even considered playing football before, to work with, Lengyel faced an uphill battle, and the team was understandably terrible in the beginning. One assistant coach, William “Red” Dawson, who had avoided the plane crash because he was on a recruiting trip, had agreed to stay on as an assistant for a year and help the new head coach build the program again, but he did so with reluctance. The situation was flooded with emotions that he had difficulty handling, as he saw how the new team was nothing like the old. In one moving scene, Coach Dawson informs head coach Lengyel of his resignation, telling him that putting such a poor football team out on the field is no way to honor the memory of those who had died. Coach Dawson had known former head coach Tolley and had heard him say many times that winning is everything. To put a losing team on the field week after week seemed to betray everything that Coach Tolley had stood for. In response, Coach Lengyel said that he agrees that winning is everything, that he himself had said so more times than he can count. But then he goes on to explain that, maybe for the first time in the history of sports, the situation is different now. Then he speaks one of the most crucial lines in the film: “It doesn’t matter if we win or if we lose. It’s not even about how we play the game. What matters is that we play the game. That we take the field. That we suit up on Saturdays and we keep this program alive.”
I am inclined to say that the most important thing to note about verses 1-2 of this psalm is not so much how the psalmist says what he says, but that he says it at all. When I go through times of suffering, my temptation is to interpret God’s heart toward me solely on the basis of what I am enduring. A dark cloud gathers over me as I begin to assume, mostly at the level of my subconscious, that God’s final word to me must be one of rejection and wrath. And that dark cloud often keeps me from calling out to the Lord, assuming that he doesn’t really want to hear from me. If he did, why would he bring such suffering into my life? Brothers and sisters, you cannot read God’s heart from your circumstances! If you want to see his heart toward you, you must see it in the manger in Bethlehem. You must see it on the cross of Golgotha. You must see it in the empty tomb in the garden. You must see it at the Father’s right hand, where your high priest intercedes for you. Do not allow your sufferings to cause you to misread God’s heart revealed in Jesus Christ and so deter you from calling out to him in prayer.
I want to move now to the last portion of the psalm to draw out a second lesson for prayer, which is this:
“Omnipotence” is just a fancy theological word that refers to God being all-powerful, and “immutability” simply refers to the fact that he does not, in fact he cannot, change, either in his nature or in his character. Having lamented his own frail, fleeting condition, he finds comfort in God’s enduring stability.
Verses 23-24 reaffirm the psalmist’s plight as one near death, but this time he contrasts himself with the eternity of God by addressing him at the end of verse 24 as “you whose years endure throughout all generations!” Verses 25-27 then contrast God with all of creation. In verse 25 he affirms that God is the sovereign creator of heaven and earth. This verse speaks to his omnipotence. But the main point comes in verses 26-27, here he says of heaven and earth, “They will perish, but you will remain; they will all wear out like a garment. You will change them like a robe, and they will pass away, but you are the same, and your years have no end.” Through my 33 years of life I have seen many clothes wear out. In fact, I have a few hanging in my closet now that probably need to go. Compared to a human lifespan, clothing is nothing. It lasts a couple of years until it is taken over by stains, frays, and tears. The psalmist says that creation itself, before God’s eternality, is a mere garment that wears out and has to be replaced.
Time eventually destroys even the mightiest among us. The greatest civilizations the world has ever known—Egypt, Persia, Greece, Rome—now lie in ruins. Men who have moved the world with their decisions now lie decaying in their graves. In the 1980’s Ronald Reagan was the most powerful man in the world and was one of the prime movers in the fall of the Soviet Union. About ten years ago, as his life was coming to an end, Ronald Reagan didn’t even remember that he had been President. Time took first his mind and then his body. And if the Lord tarries, time will eventually do the same to all of us. There is no escaping it. We are prisoners to a force of death and decay that will overtake us sooner or later.
We are frail, weak, and temporary. But God is not subject to the effects of time. He does not get tired or weak or sick. He doesn’t feel the pains of arthritis or suffer the effects of memory loss. He is Lord of time, God of the ages. And his lordship over time is one aspect of his absolute supremacy. It should move us to recognize how much greater than us he is, and therefore should lead us to bow down and worship him. It should affect the way that we live before him, knowing that without him, everything that we are and everything that we love means nothing because time will bring it to nothing eventually. But if we place our greatest hopes and joys in him, then we can rest in the assurance that time has no power to take him from us or to take us from him.
Do you see how this doctrine gives the psalmist confidence to pray in the time of his affliction? Although he is watching his body decay before his own eyes, even as he sits in the shadow of a wasted city of Jerusalem, he knows that nothing that he has experienced has diminished God in the least. And for that reason, even as his eyes behold a Jerusalem in ruins, he sees with the eye of faith a Jerusalem of the future whose glory outshines even the kingdom of Solomon. What has happened to Jerusalem and to his own body has not diminished, not even one iota, God’s ability to make that city what he had promised it would become. The all-powerful, unchangeable God of Israel will bring it to pass. Let us remember when we pray the one to whom we are praying, and may it give us confidence.
We have surveyed the two bookends of this psalm, the two parts that sound like individual lament. We have seen the twin biblical truths of human frailty and divine sufficiency expounded poetically for us. Now we turn to the heart of the psalm, the portion in the middle, where the psalmist widens his scope from his own sufferings to the hope of Jerusalem and the world. And we draw from it this third lesson for prayer:
Hans-Joachim Kraus says aptly of this section of the psalm: “…because the basic salvific deeds of Yahweh in history have been darkened by the exile, the petitioner…turns to the future. He comforts himself and those who hear his prayer, not with God’s deeds of the past, but with those of the future.” Here we see that the psalmist’s own individual need for healing and personal well-being suddenly fade from view as he ties his own fate inseparably to the future of Israel.
I have friends from seminary, a married couple, named Oren and Cindy. Back in 2007 they lost their first child to a miscarriage at around 18 weeks. A few months later they lost their second child a bit earlier in the pregnancy. I remember seeing Oren on campus somewhere around this time after I had hear the bad news. I told him how sorry I was for him and asked how they were doing. I don’t remember much of what he said that day, but I do remember him saying this: “These experiences have caused us to long more for Christ’s return.” It was not a perfunctory attempt to put a happy face on a sad situation. It was not pious nonsense. It was heartfelt, genuine desire. Perhaps in our best moments we share that desire, but if we are going to be honest with ourselves, can we truly say that we live in continuing anticipation of the Lord’s return? Does affliction drive us to long for him more, or does it merely cause us to seek the end of our affliction? These future realities that we just have spent a whole sermon series reflecting on from Revelation—the return of Christ, the final judgment, the purging of all evil, the new creation, the new Jerusalem—these are not the projections of wishful thinking. They are not token phrases of games we play with religious language. They are real, they are coming, and they are the bedrock of our hope in this present age. Our prayers—especially in times of affliction—should be saturated in petitions for their realization. “Come, Lord Jesus!” should be the instinctive cry of every believer’s heart. But if that is going to happen, Heaven must be real to us, more real than elections and football games and mortgages and job opportunities.
In this section the psalmist implicitly contrasts the Lord with the house of David in verse 12: “But you, O LORD, are enthroned forever.” The exile removed the throne from David’s house and exposed the failure of David’s line. But it is important to remember that the Davidic kings were images, earthly representatives, of God himself. Through them God mediated his rule over Israel and would, eventually, mediate his rule over creation. But the failure and temporary disappearance of the image of God on the throne of Israel says nothing about the status of the real King to whom that image points. God remains, seated on his throne, ready at any moment to restore the city (and the Davidic dynasty associated with it) which he has chosen for his dwelling place.
And so the psalmist takes on the role of a prophet. He says in verse 13, “You will arise and have pity on Zion; it is the time to favor her.” The two verbs used here, “have pity,” and “favor,” could be translated “show mercy” and “be gracious,” and in fact they are the exact same two verbs that the Lord had spoken to Moses in Exodus 33:19 when he said, “I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and will have mercy on whom I will have mercy.” In that context, the Lord reveals his name and character to Moses as the God who will, by his own sovereign grace, forgive Israel for their idolatry with the golden calf at Mount Sinai and continue to dwell among them in spite of their wickedness. The psalmist anticipates the same thing happening again for a city that lies in ruins because of its idolatry. The sovereign Lord will show grace and mercy, not because Israel deserves it (for no one deserves grace and mercy), but because that is his character, and he has already committed himself to Zion by his free word of promise.
The psalmist notes in verse 13 that “the appointed time has come” in which to favor Zion. What does he mean by the appointed time? Does he have access to God’s secret decree, by which he has discerned the precise timing of the elements of God’s redemptive plan? No. I think the “For” in verse 14 helps us understand what he means. Read verses 13-14 together: “You will arise and have pity on Zion; it is the time to favor her; the appointed time has come. For your servants hold her stones dear and have pity on her dust.” Although Jerusalem has been reduced to rubble, “stones” and “dust,” God’s people still love it. Their love for the city remains undiminished, and they continue to regard it as God’s sanctuary. They are ready for God to act in fulfillment of his promise at any time. In that sense, the appointed time has come, for God has a people ready to receive him as king when he determines to act.
And when God does act, it will have ramifications well beyond Jerusalem. There is a twofold movement of divine glory that moves through space in verses 15-17 and then through time in verses 18-21. When God builds up Zion, according to verse 15, “Nations will fear the name of the LORD, and all the kings of the earth will fear your glory.” The blessing of a new Jerusalem is not just for the benefit of Israel. As in the prophecy of Isaiah 2: “It shall come to pass in the latter days that the mountain of the house of the LORD shall be established as the highest of the mountains, and shall be lifted up above the hills; and all the nations shall flow to it, and many peoples shall come, and say: ‘Come, let us go up to the mountain of the LORD, to the house of the God of Jacob, that he may teach us his ways and that we may walk in his paths.’ For out of Zion shall go the law, and the word of the LORD from Jerusalem.” Zion is destined to become the epicenter of worldwide worship.
But God’s glory will not only extend through space to encompass the nations; it will also extend through time to encompass generations. Note verse 18: “Let this be recorded for a generation to come, so that a people yet to be created may praise the LORD.” God is King, omnipotent and unchangeable, enthroned forever over all creation. There is no way his praise will be confined to one generation.
So there is a note of both particularity and universality in this psalm. The particularity focuses on Zion. See, for example, verse 21: “that they [a future generation] may declare in Zion the name of the LORD, and in Jerusalem his praise.” And yet there is a note of universality, as the nations of the world are pictured as those gathered to Jerusalem, as in verse 22: “when peoples gather together, and kingdoms, to worship the LORD.”
We face a diversity of afflictions in this present age. Some of you may be single and desire to be married. Some of you may be married and desire to have children, but you have encountered difficulties. Some of you are sick and desire to be healthy. Some of you barely make ends meet financially each month, and you desire a more comfortable lifestyle. Some of you are in a difficult marriage and want a relationship with your spouse that is more fulfilling in every dimension. Some of you are stuck in a job situation that is difficult to endure, and you want a new opportunity. Rightly so, you pray for these things. God commands us to cast our cares on him and to make known our requests. I hope God will answer all of those prayers. But we have to remember that God has not promised us any of those things. He has not promised us a spouse, or a healthy marriage, or children, or a good health, or a comfortable lifestyle, a job that we love. But he has promised this from Isaiah 62: “For Zion’s sake I will not keep silent, and for Jerusalem’s sake I will not be quiet, until her righteousness goes forth as brightness, and her salvation as a burning torch. The nations shall see your righteousness, and all the kings your glory, and you shall be called by a new name that the mouth of the LORD will give. You shall be a crown of beauty in the hand of the LORD, and a royal diadem in the hand of your God. You shall no more be termed Forsaken, and your land shall no more be termed Desolate, but you shall be called My Delight Is in Her, and your land Married; for the LORD delights in you, and your land shall be married.” Isn’t it fitting that in Revelation 21 John would see the holy city, New Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven, “prepared as a bride adorned for her husband” (Rev 21:2)? The future of Zion at the return of Christ is a certainty of God’s promise. We must place our hopes in things that God has promised, not in things that he has not. To be sure, we can and should pray for things he has not specifically promised. He commands us to do so, and when he answers, we rightly rejoice and give him praise. But when we face affliction, let us pray first for Christ’s coming, the restoration of Zion, and the gathering of the nations into the New Jerusalem to worship Israel’s God forever. Let us genuinely see these future realities as just that: realities, not pious myths that distract us from the real things of life.
I have heard it said that some people are so heavenly minded that they are no earthly good. That is a mistaken way of thinking. People who are the most heavenly minded are the most earthly good, because they are the ones who can endure suffering the longest, who can love at greatest cost to themselves, who can give away more of their possessions and store up more eternal treasure, who can worship with the most passion, who can hold on to Jesus with the most intensity, all because their hopes are firmly set on the certainties of the future, not on the uncertainties of the present. Let us call out to God in affliction, and let us do so with our eyes firmly fixed on the restoration of Zion that is to come when Jesus Christ comes for us.
It is fitting on this last Sunday of Advent to note how this psalm is used in the New Testament. In Hebrews 1:8-12, when the author is arguing for the supremacy of Jesus Christ over angels, he writes this: “But of the Son he [God] says [quoting from Psalm 45], ‘Your throne, O God, is forever and ever, the scepter of uprightness is the scepter of your kingdom. You have loved righteousness and hated wickedness; therefore God, your God, has anointed you with the oil of gladness beyond your companions.’ And [quoting from Psalm 102], ‘You, Lord, laid the foundation of the earth in the beginning, and the heavens are the work of your hands; they will perish, but you remain; they will all wear out like a garment, like a robe you will roll them up, like a garment they will be changed. But you are the same, and your years have no end.’” The verses of this psalm that have particular reference to God’s omnipotence and immutability as sovereign Creator of all things are applied to Jesus Christ the Son. It is fitting, therefore, that we should remember today that the very one who laid the foundation of the earth and formed the heavens with his own hands took to himself a human nature and was born into the world as a helpless baby in Bethlehem. He was born the rightful heir to the throne of David, the king who would restore Zion to the glory promised by the prophets of old. But his pathway to the throne went through the way of the cross, where he hung under the wrath of God for the sins of his people and died. On the third day, God raised him from the dead, and he now sits at God’s right hand, awaiting the day when he will come again, this time not as a baby, but as king and judge. One day, you will stand before Jesus Christ, and he will deliver his verdict over you. Do you desire to enter into the life of the New Jerusalem on that day with him? If so, then you must turn from your sins and turn to him in faith, trusting in his death and resurrection alone to deliver you from the wrath that is to come. And since faith is an invisible reality, Christ commands you to manifest your faith before the world by picturing your death and resurrection with him through baptism. The promise is open to you today: will you receive this Christ by faith?
If you have already declared your faith in Christ publicly and are a member in good standing with a church, we invite you now to remember Christ’s death for you at the table of the Lord today. The season of Advent is a season of waiting for the Lord to come. It is not merely a time to remember that past generations waited for the Lord to come, and then he came. It is a time to join them in the act of waiting for our Lord to come again, to deliver us from this present evil age, and to welcome us into the New Jerusalem. “For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup,” Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 11:26, “you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.” Amen.