The Sacrificed Life
For my days have ended in smoke, and my bones have been scorched like a hearth. Psalm 102:3 NASB
Have ended – Legacy. Does that term bother you? Do you think about what you will leave behind? Ecclesiastes suggests that your legacy better not be money, fame, or power. Those ephemeral status symbols won’t mean much after death. Achilles’ conversation with his mother, Thetis, claims that glory and honor are proper legacies. Perhaps for superheroes, but for most of us, time erases even our best efforts. In the end, no one remembers us. After all, there is only one Messiah. When the psalmist attempts to describe the intensity of his pain, he focuses on his end. If the circumstances kill him, what will be left? Don’t jump too quickly to the Common Era answer: heaven. This man is agonizing in the ancient Semitic world. Heaven is not available. Abraham lived a long life and was gathered to his kin. Period. But what if the long life doesn’t seem possible? What if all that appears on the horizon is smoke and scorched earth? What then?
“Have ended” is the English rendition of the Hebrew kā-lu from the verb kālâ. It variously means “accomplish, cease, consume, determine, end, fail, finish.”[1] The verse is a reminder of another final event in the ancient history of Israel when only smoke and scorched earth remained. That event is Sodom and Gomorrah. The psalmist recalls a picture of utter destruction in order to impress God with the seriousness of his circumstances. It’s the day before the nuclear holocaust. What legacy can survive Sodom’s extinction? Only the report of its corruption. Is that all that’s left to the psalmist? He might have been the one righteous man in Sodom but it makes no difference. The only legacy is the bitter taste of moral failure and divine judgment.
There is another image in this verse. The use of yāqad (translated “hearth”) is really about the altar, a picture of the burnt offering. The end of that animal is smoke and scorched bones. It isn’t the result of judgment, at least not the kind of judgment that fell on Lot’s city. It’s the result of a sacrifice that brings restoration and reconciliation. The breach is repaired—but at the expense of the animal’s death. This psalm doesn’t focus our attention on the reconciliation. It focuses our attention on the sacrificial victim. Dying for a good cause is still dying. Someone else’s life might be repaired when the lamb is burned, but the lamb is still burned. You and I might find some consolation in the fact that our sacrifice means shalom for another, but it is still our sacrifice. Our ashes fertilize another’s life, but we die.
A thousand years after the psalmist wrote these words, readers might comfort themselves with the thought that their sacrificial deaths open the gates of heaven. But that idea has to wait a thousand years to germinate. For the psalmist, life ends in smoke and scorched bones. There is no consolation prize. And since no one praises YHVH from She’ol, he asks, “Why, Lord, will you let this happen? Why must it end this way? Aren’t you the God of life? So, hear me!”
Topical Index: kālâ, end, Sodom, sacrifice, yāqad, altar, Psalm 102:3
[1] Oswalt, J. N. (1999). 982 כָלָה. R. L. Harris, G. L. Archer Jr., & B. K. Waltke (Eds.), Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament (electronic ed., p. 439). Chicago: Moody Press.
