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Perseverance in Ministry:
A Meditation on Psalm 90
by Ken Garrett
(Continued from Page 2)
As Moses prepared to depart this life, he reflected on the heartache, disappointment, and persistent failure that had apparently robbed his people – God’s people (!) – of the life of blessing and meaning they could have had. As he looked back across the decades and desert expanses, he did not see the villages, synagogues, farms, and schools that might have been built by Israel—the people of God, delivered from the bondage of slavery in Egypt. Instead, he saw . . . graves. That’s why there are no archeological remains of their forty-year sojourn in the wilderness. All they left behind were graves, forever hidden by the ever-shifting sands of the desert. For although they bore the name Israel—the redeemed, saved people of God—they resisted following God, seeming to distrust and disobey Him at every turn. Instead of beginning new lives as free men and women, they wandered as punishment for their treason against God. Instead of former slaves building a culture of learning, achievement, and witness to God’s power and mercy, they became a nation of grave diggers, as each who fled Egypt, save a faithful few, died off in the wilderness. Day by day, year by year, each life quietly made its exit like a feather blown away in the breeze—like a sigh.
As for the days of our life, they contain seventy years, or if due to strength, eighty years, yet their pride is but labor and sorrow; for soon it is gone and we fly away. Who understands the power of Your anger and Your fury, according to the fear that is due You?
A present-day monk has written, “Awareness of mortality exerts a unique power to focus the mind and heart on essentials.” As a man who has had the “percentage of survival” discussion with his doctor following a diagnosis of cancer, I can say Amen to that! As we read of Moses’ seeming grim assessment of human life, particularly in consideration of its length and experience, we must remember that this is a portion of a Psalm written by a man facing the end of his own existence. It is part of a meditation on the fleeting nature of human life as it stands in its natural state—guilty of sin and deserving of the wrath of God.
According to Moses, the quantity of our days has very little
– nothing, in fact - to do with their quality. Here,
the word pride is actually formed from a word that describes
a fight, or a battle maneuver, such as storming the wall of a city.
Moses is saying, “At the end of your life, the great battles
you have fought and, perhaps, even won, will prove more costly and less
profitable than you ever dreamed, for we all die and disappear from
the earth.” Like a startled bird, our sprits fly away from
our bodies at death, the most unnatural physical occurrence in human
experience. This is the ultimate meaninglessness and futility of a life
lived in unforgiven sin and persistent alienation from the God who is
the source of all life.
Let us remember, Moses is writing of the people of
God—those who had entered into a solemn covenant with their Maker
at Mt. Sinai. They had been delivered by the blood of a spotless lamb
and had grown up following a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of
fire by night. They had survived on manna from heaven and water from
a rock, all provided by God. They were God’s people. And yet,
while they would have certainly called themselves God’s people,
they did not really know their God. Particularly, Moses charged
them with ignorance concerning God’s anger and fury, along with
the resultant failure to render Him the reverential awe that should
have marked their lives. Because of their willful ignorance, and their
relentless pursuit of a life apart from and uncommitted to God, they
died.
In the Army, I often participated in the much-dreaded experience of “standing for inspection.” What a treat: standing at attention (a physical position that, if done correctly, results in excruciating discomfort) in the North Carolina sun along with 300 fellow paratroopers awaiting judgment! Since my eyes were fixed straight ahead, locked onto the back of the beret of the solder in front of me, my first awareness of imminent judgment was heard and not seen:
Dirt in your barrel—gigged! Thread hanging off your shirt—gigged. (Louder) What did you shine your shoes with . . . a brick and a Hershey bar?—gigged! Where ya’ from, son? Oregon! Did your dad teach you to shave, or was he Grizzly Adams? You missed a spot—gigged!
Closer and closer came the voice, down the rank, soon to be addressed particularly to me. To be “gigged” was to be found in failure of a particular military regulation, mostly having to do with standards of the uniform, one’s haircut, or the cleanliness of one’s weapon. It seemed everyone got gigged for something.
I imagine that these eleven verses leave everyone feeling divinely gigged in some fashion: Iniquities . . . secret sins . . . Gigged! Some of us, I think, hoped that entering ministry would deliver us from the persistent feelings of failure and inadequacy we have carried all our lives. How sad that no one told us (or, if we were told, we didn’t really believe) that it’s only when we’re at the end - ground down to a little nub, emotionally spent, physically exhausted, certain of failure and doom apart from divine intervention - that we really get to the good stuff in ministry. The sands of our wilderness do more than simply fill the spaces between our emancipation from Egypt and our entry into the Promised Land—they wear away our false assumptions about ministry and the tendency to depend on our own skills and resources instead of God. The failures drive us to God – or else they drive us out of His ministry.
PERSEVERANCE AND NEED-BOUND PEOPLE
In the concluding verses, Moses instructs those who would persevere in ministry to live in utter dependence on a merciful God. Such dependence begins with a desire for wisdom.
WE NEED GOD'S INSTRUCTION
So teach us to number our days, that we may present to You a heart of wisdom.
To number something is to take special note of it, to assign it a specific place of meaning and import. We may number invitations sent to a party so we can plan for how many places to set and how much food to purchase. By numbering our guests, we gain the wisdom to know how to plan for the party. Moses, of course, is writing of something much more profound. He is writing of our need to assign a specific measure of importance to each of our days in ministry here on earth.
For example, most of us number our days at least once a year when we celebrate our birthday—at least I do! My birthday is a day of introspection and reflection on years long past. But that’s a change from past years. When I was younger, birthdays had very little to do with the past (since there wasn’t much of a past to consider). Instead, my attention was drawn to the wide expanse of endless years that awaited me—my undefined, unexplored, unknowable future. Now, all things considered, my earthly life is certainly half, if not two-thirds, completed. For me, then, birthdays are a time of reflection; not on a boundless future, but on a well-defined, expanding past.
I wonder what Moses might say to me, today, if we were spending some time together - say, while I was driving to the office in rush hour traffic. I don’t know if he would appreciate Bruce Springsteen’s Darkness on the Edge of Town, so he might reach over and turn down the volume.
“Interesting music, Ken.”
“Thank you, sir,” I’d say. “I saw the Boss . . . uh, Bruce Springsteen, live before he was even famous, back in ’78.”
He’d be polite, I think, but he would eventually get around to something challenging, one way or another.
“Glad you enjoyed the concert, way back then. Now, what’s on the agenda for today, and how are you going to gain the wisdom that you need to face its challenges?”
I’d be silent, either in annoyance at having my music turned off, or in shock at seeing a 3,500 year-old man riding shot-gun.
“My point exactly,” Moses might say. “If you don’t learn from your past, by means of the explicit intervention of God Himself, it’s nothing more than an old song that plays through your life like Muzak. The days of your past are to be studied, numbered, and understood as personalized lesson plans that have been designed for you by God in order to learn how to stand before Him as a wise man, and not a fool. How have you been doing in your studies?”
