Our Hope in Christ - Guest Preacher Corey Salisbury
In Psalm 90, Moses describes God’s power and eternal nature. In Christ, we have the ability to be reconciled and saved from His wrath.
Transcript:
Let us pray. Dear Father, as we come before your word this morning, we pray that you would open our ears to hear it, that we might be drawn to look to you as our God, as our one and only Savior.
Father, we pray that you would work through our brother Corey as he brings your word to us, that you would fill him with the Holy Spirit and use him to speak every word that you would will him to speak to us this day. Father, we pray that you'd be glorified in all these things. We ask this in the name of Christ our Lord. Amen. You may be seated. All right. Welcome our, our brother Corey Salisbury here. Very glad to have him here this morning from Christian Hill Church.
All right. Rockland Community Church, how are you doing this morning? We're doing well this morning. Awesome. All right. Well, to introduce myself, my name's Corey Salisbury. I come from Christian Hill Community Church in West Warwick. And I just wanna say, this is an amazing opportunity that the local churches can come together and just have such an opportunity as this. So I just wanna express my gratitude for you guys welcoming me in here, express my gratitude for my family back there who came. Thank you, guys. All right. So, yeah, I just wanna begin with a, a, a word of prayer, if that isn't too redundant, before I get into this. So, Father God, we just thank you that your church is just, shown through these local expressions, Lord.
And we're just so thankful for the unity of that. That's under your direction, under your sovereignty, God. We just bow before you, and we just say thank you so much, that it's such a great opportunity to just be in your word today. So I just pray that as we go into your word, that we would just be convicted where we need to be convicted, encouraged where we need to be encouraged. But Lord, let your glory be made known to us today. In Jesus' name, amen.
All right. We live in a world that is consumed by death. We are surrounded with the reality of decay. The news that we read about is full of it. The media that we consume is stung by it. It pervades our very subconsciousness, and it is a problem. You may not even be aware of it, but right now, your body is fighting against death. Several systems in your body are all working together to make sure that your nerves are traveling, your blood is flowing, your food is digesting, and your waste is excreted. If your body gets too cold or too hot, your body will instantly, recognize the imbalance, and it'll send receptors up to the brain, where the brain will either constrict or dilate your blood vessels, which will either cause your muscles to contract spontaneously or your sweat glands to start excreting fluids.
In other words, we shiver when we get cold, and we sweat when we get hot. But why do we work so hard for all this? Why does our body work so hard in order to stop the inevitable? Medicine has advanced, and life expectancy has risen exponentially just in the past few decades, and yet we will still all face death.
Why do we try to swim in a sea that is surrounded by crashing waves? As humans, we are aware of our own demise, and we can choose to live in either one of two ways of life. We can either choose to live in fear or we can choose to live in hope. Naturally, we're afraid of the unknown of death. There's no proof of what happens after, so we tend to just avoid the question.
We just avoid the idea of it as we live in fear. But what I wanna focus on today is the aspect of living in hope. You see, the hope of life after death is found in almost every major religion, each with their own differing questions. Mankind tries to seek to answer two questions: Why are we here now, and where are we going to go after?
Now, like I said, there's differing answers from all these different people. Some will say that martyrdom is the way to go. Others will say ascetic practices will remove us from all earthly pleasures and lead us to an afterlife separate from it. But with so many people saying so many things, where can we really turn our hope?
Who has the final authority for it? Well, if we need an answer to the question of death, we should probably go to the book of life. So today, we're gonna look at Psalm 90. So flip with me there to Psalm 90.
Psalms are in the middle of the Bible, so I'm sure if you just crack that Bible right in the middle, you should be able to find it there. And once we get to Psalm 90, I just wanna provide some context for the Psalm. So when you get to the Psalm, you'll notice that at the top of the superscript, it says that this, this Psalm is attributed as a prayer of Moses, the man of God.
Now, whether or not Moses himself authored and penned down this Psalm himself when he was still alive, or if someone wrote this Psalm long after he was alive and wrote it in his honor, is still a question that's debated today. But what we can definitely know is that Moses was a man who was well acquainted with the idea of death, especially death under the wrath of God.
In the span of just 40 years, Moses witnessed the deaths of every firstborn in Egypt, the armies of Pharaoh, the kings of enemy nations, several groups of apostate Jews that were led by several different rebels, his sister Miriam, his brother Aaron, and finally himself. If any one person were to write a Psalm about death, it would definitely be Moses.
So let's read Psalm 90 and see what Moses has to say. Lord, you have been our dwelling place throughout all generations. Before the mountains were born or you brought forth the whole world, from everlasting to everlasting you are God. You turn people back to dust, saying, "Return to dust, you mortals." A thousand years in your sight are like a day that has just gone by, or like a watch in the night.
Yet you sweep people away in the sleep of death-- they are like the new grass of the morning: In the morning it springs up new, but by evening it is dry and withered. We are consumed by your anger and terrified by your indignation. You've set our iniquities before you, our secret sins in the light of your presence. All our days pass away under your wrath; we finish our years with a moan. Our days may come to 70 years, or 80, if our strength endures; yet the best of them are but trouble and sorrow, for they quickly pass away, and we fly away. If only we knew the power of your anger! Your wrath is as great as the fear that is your due. Teach us to number our days that we may gain a heart of wisdom. Relent, Lord! How long will it be? Have compassion on your servants. Satisfy us in the morning with your unfailing love, that we may sing for joy and be glad all our days. Make us glad for as many days as you have afflicted us, for as many years as we have seen trouble. May your deeds be shown to your servants, your splendor to their children. May the favor of the Lord our God rest on us; establish the work of our hands for us-- yes, establish the work of our hands.
So from the start, you'll notice that Moses kind of pushes his focus away from the topic here. He doesn't really focus on death, which is interesting for the Psalms because most of the time Psalms will begin with a lament or a cry for help from their trials to God.
But rather than Moses focusing on the death that surrounds him, Moses focuses his eyes on the God that surrounds his entire situation. Moses puts his eyes to the God of life in the midst of death. In a world full of death, this is what we ought to do. We ought to seek life through it. We're so easily distracted with all the pain and suffering that death can bring.
Now, does that mean we shouldn't grieve? No, absolutely not. That's a terrible thing to preach. Grieving is a natural process that our body goes through in order to experience the full weight, the full burden of death. But we can't just simply wallow in our hurt and wallow in our pain. We need to surrender that to God's living nature.
And we hear about God's living nature as Moses describes God as a dwelling place for all, throughout all generations. Now, the idea of dwelling place is probably familiar with some of you. Pastor Tom just preached on Psalm 84 last week, and Psalm 84 says, "Better is one day in Your courts than a thousand elsewhere."
So we, we understand God's dwelling place to be a place of glory, a place of wonder. But rather than having courts in his time, Moses was not familiar with the temple mount that was set in Jerusalem. There was no set place or set dwelling place of God. But Moses was more familiar with the tabernacle. The tabernacle was almost like a predecessor to the temple. It still had the Ark of the Covenant. It still had the altar. It still had the furnishings, all of the, had God's dwelling place in there, most importantly. But rather than being a set place and a, and a set structure, the tabernacle was a tent that basically traveled with the Israelites as they were wandering through the wilderness.
So no matter where his people were, God was always among His people, and they could worship Him wherever they went. Now, God's word wasn't just for the Israelites or the early church of the past, but it's for us today and for our future generations. I think it's an interesting idea that Moses uses the phrase all generations, where Moses literally experienced an entire generation die before him and another one rise up after them.
God is present and alive and active with us. He is always at work in our lives, and we ought to learn to recognize his work each and every day of our lives. This also shows us that God is ever-present for us, no matter how many people may come in or go out of our lives. It's a sad thought that the people around you, the people most closest to you, will someday die, but God can't and God won't.
God is our constant, and this idea is expanded in the next few verses. With death, there is an end, and there's a point at which life ceases. But God is infinite. So not only is God alive and active in our lives, but He's also alive and active before in all of human existence. We see here that God was there before the earth or the mountains were, were created by Him.
So we see His, His infinite nature because God, as He explains himself in Exodus, is who He is. He's, it's just in His nature to just be God. So we see His infinite nature, and it's just incredible. So with death, there is an end, and there's a point at which life ceases for us, and we become weaker and weaker till we can't recover anymore.
But God cannot end because He hasn't even begun. You know, He, right there it says, "He is from everlasting to everlasting," which means God is from the time of everlasting until the time of everlasting, which is just a completely crazy concept for us to recognize because we're so used to things having a beginning and an end.
But it simply just isn't part of God's nature to do that, 'cause even if all else will rot and decay, God never will because God is immortal. But there's still an issue. God created us to be with Him in eternity, but yet humanity has been cursed by sin to die. In Genesis 3, after Adam and Eve sinned against God, God pronounced this judgment on all of mankind.
He says, "By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken. For dust you are, and to dust you will return." Moses mentions this curse in his psalm. God is the one to turn people back to the dust from whence they came from. He is the one who sentences our time here on Earth.
He has the final say and the final act over our entire lives. God is not only active and present in our lives, but He is also active and present in our death as well, which it sounds so cruel to hold God so responsible for death. Why would God kill a life that He created to be with Him? How do we, how do we reconcile this idea?
Well, in Mark 12:27, Jesus states that God is not the God of the dead but of the living. So what I'm not saying is that God is this deathly plague that we need to avoid, and He's the cause of our death. That would be, again, a horrible thing to preach. But it is rather that by God's grace we are given life as a gift, and it is by His sovereign will that He simply reclaims what is His. We must put our faith in God's control over our lives.
Life that we can experience is from him, you know? He's, he's called the author of life, and it's by his grace that we're even able to experience the, the goodness and the beautiful gift of life. And even though we might suffer and we'll eventually die in life, I think it can provide us at least some joy to know that God has bestowed life upon us as a gift.
But another problem arises from that. Why is life so short? If God's life is limitless and there's no ceasing to it, why does he set a limit on us? Why can't we just have eternal life now? And I'm sure we've all asked this question before as well, and even Moses asks this question in the Psalm.
To God, a thousand years is like a day. He is so above time that entire millennium is relative to a meager three-hour night shift to him. To put that in perspective, the oldest fully verified person to have ever lived on Earth was a French woman by the name of Jeanne Calment. She was born in 1875 and died in 1997, living a total of 122 years.
But unfortunately for her, those 122, 122 long years of life full of experience and joy and pains and sorrows would only reach about 12% of a millennium, which, as the Psalm says, is only a single day to God. Our life is so meager and minuscule compared to God's eternity. Moreover, Moses compares the fleeting state of human nature and the way of human life to the way that grass withers beneath the sun. By the morning, it sprouts up, it's fresh and it's green, it's wet with dew, and then by the evening it's dry and withered up. And in the end, it's God who sweeps away people in the sleep of death. Our lives seem so pathetic and minuscule compared to God's eternity, but that's kind of the point of the Psalm here.
We shouldn't be seeking after our temporary life. No matter how long or how well our lives will be, we will all certainly face death. But God cannot die, and his eternal life reveals his glory. Now, that should obviously reveal to us the need for God's eternal life. We need that. If we were, if we're to have a relationship with God, we need to have his everlasting life, and that in abundance.
And without his life, we would cease to live. On our own, we're simply rotting, decaying, and, and, and fading because we are mortal. So how do we fix this? What can we do to attain this everlasting life? How can I do this? Well, the problem is we can't. No matter what we do, no matter what we say, no matter how we try to do it, when we seek life for ourselves, we can only incur God's wrath, and this is what Moses describes in the psalm next.
As I stated earlier, Moses was very familiar with witnessing to death under God's wrath. As soon as the Israelites were led out of Egypt, they instantly started to complain because they wanted to go back to their slavery over some food and water, which is absolutely crazy. But by his grace, God provided them bread from heaven and water from a rock.
Then they started to argue with Moses again against his leadership, and they started to plan rebellion against him. And yet, despite their rebellion, God's grace was still there, and he established Moses by sending many miracles by his hand. Moment after moment, grace after grace, God sought a relationship with this wicked, rebellious wilderness generation, and yet they still refused it to the point where they started to make a god for themselves, and they started to seek life for their own way, and they started to worship in their own way.
The people were guilty of sin. The verdict was set, and God sentenced them to death. We must heed the warning of this psalm. We must know the power of God's wrath against sin and against sinners. This isn't just any arbitrary temper tantrum that God throws whenever he's angry. This is God's righteous judgment.
God has a perfect reason for feeling this way against us. God's anger is righteous, and he knows the sinful state of the heart and will judge it accordingly. So we must not only flee away from sin, but we also need to condition our hearts to be sinless. So how do we do that? Well, the rest of the psalm doesn't really give us a good answer on how to do that, but it does point us into the right direction, to God.
So let's see what Moses asks of God in his final plea. Moses asks the Lord to relent from his anger and to have compassion on his servants. He asks for the satisfaction of God's unfailing love. Then he asks for gladness and retribution to the days of affliction and trouble. But most importantly, he asks that the Lord would show his deeds and his favor to the people for his sake and for his glory.
Now, what would we be without all of these amazing attributes of God? What would we become? If God were as relentless and as harsh as we are, then would we even dare stand before him? If God were to be as disappointing and have flaws as we are, what hope would we have of life after death? But most importantly, if God didn't display his works and his favor toward his people, we would all be dead and without hope, without life.
We would be separated from him for eternity. But it is by God's grace that we are saved. God has relented his anger on us. God has shown his compassion to sinners. His love is unfailing, and we have been offered satisfaction. God has displayed his glory and his favor in the person and work of his son, Jesus Christ.
God's grace gives us life. Our hope of life after death is found in the work of Christ. So let's see how Christ fulfills these requests by Moses. In Jeremiah 18:8, the Lord says, "If that nation I warned repents of its evil, then I will relent and not inflict on it the disaster I had planned." The first words of Jesus' public ministry is, "Repent, for the kingdom has come near."
We must turn away from our lives of sin in order to seek God's relenting. John 3:16 famously, famously says, "For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have everlasting life." God sought to reconcile us back to himself through the work of his Son, and in him, we see the, the satisfaction of the Father's wrath, which not only satisfies God, but it also satisfies our greatest need, everlasting life.
And it also goes to show that God's love is unfailing. God will never forsake us nor leave us. God so loved the world in that he sent his Son. In John 15, Jesus tells his disciples, "As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you. Now remain in my love. I've told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete."
Christ was fully God and fully man, bridging the division that was between the two. Because his work fulfilled our greatest need and has brought us back to the Father, we can experience joy now and joy in abundance. This promise sounds so amazing. It sounds so great. What did Jesus have to do in order to make this happen?
Well, in order for Jesus to give us life, he had to die. Jesus had to step down from his everlasting glory to become fully man and face the death that we deserve. He was mocked, beaten, bruised, cut, whipped, and he died an excruciating, humiliating death being hung on a cross. But death was not the end for Jesus.
Jesus had to face death so that way he could conquer it three days later, and that's exactly what he did. His defeat over death is our hope today. As Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15:57, "Thanks be to God, he gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ." So we see that here we have victory over death in Christ.
So what hope do we have? What hope do we see in Psalm 90? We see that God is immortal. In his very nature, he is eternal and has everlasting life in him. We see that we are mortal. We were created to be in everlasting covenant with God for eternity, but sin corrupts us and brought death into our world. And no matter what we do, no matter what we say, no matter how we try, we can only incur God's wrath as we seek life for ourselves. And finally, we see that God's grace gives us life. We can only incur God's wrath by seeking life for ourselves, and we must depend on his grace and mercy if we have any hope of living with him in eternity.
What I wanna leave us today is this. For us, to live is Christ. In this fleeting and passing world, we need the hope of Jesus to look forward to life after death. Now, some of us may be scared of passing this hope to others. Some of us may be experiencing the, the full burden and the full weight of death right now. Some of us may know someone in our lives who is experiencing this grievous task of, of, of, of pain and suffering. But what we need to do is share that hope of Jesus with the world, because that is the world's greatest need. In John 10:10, Jesus says, "I have come that they may have life and have it to the full." Christ offers us so much more than what we see around us now, and I pray that we would all be able to see that each and every day of our lives, and that we would be able to share that hope with the people around us.
Let me pray. God, we just thank you for the hope that you have given us in Jesus. We thank you so much, Lord, that, that death is not the end of us, Lord Jesus, that those who have faith in you will be able to conquer death in you, Lord Jesus. We thank you for the victory that you have over sin and death. And God, we just pray that you would just forgive us, that you would relent from your anger and show your compassion on us through your Son, Jesus.
We pray that we would come to you with repentance, with a heart that has turned away from death and sin in order to achieve you, in order to be just within your presence and within your dwelling. We thank you for that opportunity, and I just pray all of this in Jesus' name. Amen.
Hey there, Pastor Tom here. I hope you enjoyed this sermon offered to Rockland Community Church. Rockland Community Church is located at 212 Rockland Road in North Scituate, Rhode Island, just around the bend from the Scituate Public High School. We invite you to join us in person or virtually this Sunday as we continue our series Summer in the Psalms. It's our joy to welcome you into our community
Intro/Outro Song
Title: River Meditation
Artist: Jason Shaw
Source:http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Jason_Shaw/Audionautix_Acoustic/RIVER_MEDITATION___________2-58
License:(CC BY 3.0 US)