Some items from church this morning:
A. The pastor told a story about when he was 21. He was earning money
to go to seminary and was working at an ice cream place. His position
was management-track, but he started out merely as an employee. As an
employee, he got to know the other employees who were younger than him,
and they saw him as a big brother. When the ownership of the company
changed and he became a manager, however, they stopped seeing him as a
big brother, treating him instead as the boss. They learned that he
would go to seminary, and that only amplified the problem, for they saw
him as too holy for them to be themselves around. The pastor said that
many of us are like that with God: we may see God as a friend and a
confidant, but we may also feel that God is too distant, too holy, for
us to have a relationship with him.
B. Another story the pastor told was about a Concordia basketball
game. One of the Concordia basketball players, who was going to
seminary, was blowing his top on the field. A mentor to students went up
to him and gently whispered in his ear, “Remember who you are.” His
point was that the student was a seminarian and should be an example to
others. As the pastor said, there is a “law-edge” to this. But the
pastor said that we should also remember “whose we are.” This story
stands out to me on account of the week that I had. I am glad, on these
sorts of weeks, that people do not know that I am a Christian, for I
would be giving them a bad impression of what Christians are like.
C. The Sunday school class was about Psalm 90. The Psalm is about
human ephemerality in the face of divine eternity. The human
ephemerality—-the finitude and the suffering that accompanies it—-is due
to divine judgment on the human race and on creation. In the midst of
this, however, is God’s love and mercy, and we can take refuge in that.
Something that stood out to me this morning was how, from what the
pastor was saying, it seems that Christians are experiencing different
dispensations at once. We still suffer God’s wrath because we suffer and
die. We still have to deal with God’s law because it informs us when we
are going something wrong, tries to restrain us, and tells us what we
deserve. But God’s mercy, grace, and love also exist for Christians. The
pastor talked about eternity and how it may be more of a realm than
endless time: Jesus reigns in eternity, while earth still trudges along
in sin and under wrath. Yet, in the service, the pastor was saying that
Jesus’s ascension, in a sense, makes him even more present in creation.
D. I was curious about Psalm 90:10, which places the human lifespan
at 70-80 years. How can that be, when life expectancy was low back then?
You look at the lives of the kings of Israel and Judah, and many of
them die at age 40. I looked at some commentaries. The Word Biblical
Commentary states: “Traditionally understood as a statement of the
typical life expectancy of human beings, which seems unrealistic by
normal patterns of life in the ancient world. Conditional clauses in 10a
and 10b seem more plausible. The subject of the verse is clearly the
ephemerality of even a long human life, as 10c and 10d make clear.” That
could be. I wonder, though, if the long ages that are attributed to the
patriarchs, and even to Moses, may be relevant. Back in the nebulous
old days, the thinking went, people lived for a long time; that may not
have been true, but that is what they thought. The Psalm, in this
context, may be a Mosaic pseudepigrapha. I looked at an old post
that I wrote about Psalm 90 and found this about the 70-80 years:
“Another approach is to apply Psalm 90 to God’s punishment of Israel in
the wilderness—-God’s declaration that she will wander forty years in
the wilderness, and that only her children will enter the Promised Land.
In this scenario, the Psalmist’s declaration in v 10 that people live
seventy or eighty years is Moses reflecting on how the wilderness
generation will die without entering the Promised Land. According to
this logic, much of the wilderness generation was around the age of 30
when it was cursed—-the time of adulthood—-and it died forty years
later, at age 70. Moreover, according to Mowinckel, the scribe who
attributed Psalm 90 to Moses thought that v 16’s prayer for the children
related to the children inheriting the Promised Land.”