Time Out

Recall how fleeting I am, how futile You made all humankind.  Psalm 89:48  Robert Alter

Fleeting – How long will you live?  Probably less than 100 years.  How long is that?  Well, it’s .009 of the oldest city on earth (Jericho).  That’s a little more than 32 seconds in an hour.  What is my lifespan in comparison to the age of the earth?  Try 0.0000000022.  Not even the time it takes for the second hand on your watch to move once.  Fleeting, that’s what life really is.  So infinitesimally short.  In Hebrew, ḥeled, “duration.”  “You made my day like a few handbreadths; my life is as nothing in your presence” (Ps 39:5 [H 6]).  The biblical view of the importance of men’s lives is pretty stark.  Basically, too short to even think about. As the screen writer said, “Men are haunted by the vastness of eternity.  And so, we ask ourselves, ‘Will our actions echo across the centuries?’”  The short answer is, “Not likely.”

On the other hand, God is the God of eternity, of the entire cosmos, the vast temporal existence of all that is and has ever been.  For the non-believer, this really isn’t a problem.  We live, we die.  End of story.  But for the believer, the question that looms on the temporal horizon is this: Why?  If my lifespan is so insignificant compared to the incredible expanse of time, why did God even bother to make me?  What can my existence possibly mean when compared to all that has ever happened or will happen?  Furthermore, if God knows how short and tenuous my little life really is, why does He make it so difficult?  What is accomplished in my suffering if it is just swallowed up in the night?  It’s nothing, not even a blip on the temporal scale.  So, why does He care?

Amazingly, the Bible really doesn’t give us an answer.  Perhaps it assumes that God loves what He creates and that He intends all of creation to glorify Him, and in that process we are part of the grand symphony.  But it never really says this.  Instead, it tells us that God made a deliberate choice to create us.  It wasn’t an accident or a whim.  In fact, Man is the only true representation of God on earth.  That should shock us, and at the same time, lead us to echo David’s assertion: “We are all so temporal, so ḥeled, so fleeting.  And You, God, know this.  You made us this way.  So, take it easy on us.  Remember how short our lives are.  Be gracious.”

It’s hard to really absorb this perspective.  In the midst of the daily grind, it’s hard to remind ourselves that it’s all just a flash in the pan.  We feel time drag on, bad things cascading one after another, good times evaporating too quickly, and it’s discouraging.  Contemplating that our lives are but a tiny million millionth of the whole doesn’t take away the grind.  For us, this is all that there is.  And there are days when it’s just too much to bear.  That’s when we need to read David’s psalm one more time.  “God, you made us like this.  So ephemeral.  So fragile.  So, God, help me now.  Yes, I know in the long run what is happening to me right now might not matter at all, but I live in the short run and now is all I’ve got.  Now is when I need You to remember me.”

Topical Index: temporal, short, ḥeled, lifespan, Psalm 89:48