Sermon Tone Analysis

I am the oldest of three brothers.

My brother Jeremy was born when I was four, and my brother Jared when I was almost ten.

I loved them both even when I was a child, but because Jeremy and I were closer in age, he annoyed me more than Jared (because he was tiny and adorable and I wanted to protect him).

It wasn’t until I was a teenager that I actually started listening, and I tried to play the game for a while, if for no other reason than to please my parents.

But at the same time as I was trying to do what a “good Christian” did and act like “good Christians” acted, I was discovering the world around me.

I had my church friends, and I had my high school friends, most of whom were unbelievers.

And quickly I discovered that my high school friends had a lot more fun than my church friends.

They lived in nice homes (my dad’s pastor salary wasn’t much, so our homes were always small and run-down), they drove nice cars (I didn’t own a new car until I was nearly thirty), and they just seemed a lot freer.

They didn’t have to worry about keeping rules or what would happen if you said a swear word just before you got into a car accident, and didn’t have time to ask God for forgiveness.

(In response to that question, one of my Sunday School teachers answered simply, “We can’t be sure.”)

In short, on the one hand I saw my church community, filled with people who were obsessed with a certain standard of living, and seemed to be living in constant fear of not being able to keep up to that standard; and on the other hand I saw the rest of the world, filled with people who seemed to enjoy their lives far more than we did.

I was, in a word, disillusioned with the idea that this life could actually be good.

That disillusionment is at the heart of today’s text.

I distinctly remember a period in my life when I realized that I was stronger than Jeremy, and that I could do things to him, and he couldn’t stop me.

We had an apricot tree in our backyard and they were always falling to the ground and rotting there.

So I once tied him to our swingset and threw rotten apricots at him.

Another time I set myself the challenge of seeing how many times I could make him cry in a single day.

It wasn’t constant—I did love my brother—but I loved feeling like I was bigger than I really was.

Ever since the beginning of our church, we’ve spent the summer in the book of Psalms.

The book of Psalms is the songbook for the people of Israel—a collection of poems, written in Hebrew, and meant to be sung by the people in the context of corporate worship.

It’s comprised of five different sub-books.

Even if not everyone is as mean as I was, we all know what this is like—this desire to feel strong, and big, and capable; the desire to be limitless.

Over the last few years, we’ve been doing a selection of psalms from each of the different books of the psalter; and this year, we’ve arrived at Book 4, which cover psalms 73 to

This is why smartphones are so successful.

We want to be omniscient, so we make machines that put all the world’s information at our fingertips.

We want to be omnipresent, so we make machines that mimic omnipresence—I can not only hear my brother’s voice, but see his face in real time, across an ocean, at the touch of a button.

This is why the idea of cryotechnologies—which could supposedly freeze the brain of a sick man and, after some further technological advancements, transplant it into a healthy body—is appealing to many people (and why shows like Altered Carbon are so enthralling to many.)

From the beginning of our existence, human beings want to be bigger than they are.

But does not allow us the luxury of this delusion.

Every year we spend the months of July and August in the book of Psalms.

Our goal in this series is always the same: to see how even those psalms which were written long before the coming of Christ actually show

The book of Psalms is a songbook, used by the people of Israel for millenia, and it is structured into five separate books.

For the last few years we’ve been going through a selection from different books of the psalter; this year, we’ve arrived at Book Four, which covers to .

So for our first summer psalm, we’ll begin at .

It’s a sobering psalm, written by Moses, a man of God (as his mini-bio above the first verse says).

And the fact that he is a “man of God” should help us trust what he says a little more.

God doesn’t content himself with telling us what we want to hear; he loves us enough to tell us the truth.

And in his hands, that truth is always our good, no matter how unsettling it seems at first.

The Eternity of God (v.

1-6)

Last week, Loanne sent me a time-lapse animation of the way scientists predict our universe will continue to evolve until its end, given what they know about gravity and the lifespans of stars and a bunch of other things I don’t understand.

1  Truly God is good to Israel,

So already our minds are in the right place.

This is not a psalm written out of depression or disillusionment.

It is a psalm written by a man who intimately knows the mind of God.

And that’s important because what he’s going to say runs so counter to natural human thinking (especially in our modern era).

Our first impulse upon reading this psalm is to find it abhorrent—for here we are confronted with truths about ourselves we’d rather not accept.

But Moses,

It’s the kind of thing I usually love; but as I continued to watch what will (theoretically) happen to the universe over the next million, billion, trillion years, I became more and more unsettled.

All life on earth ended pretty quickly, within the first three or four minutes of the thirty-minute video.

And everything that happened after that, happened in the lifeless expanse of space, devoid of all possibility of life.

It was the most effective horror movie I’ve seen in a long time.

This is how Moses sets up his psalm, only in reverse.

to those who are pure in heart.

I’m going to put a video on the screen behind me.

Key to the psalm

1  Lord, you have been our dwelling place

2  But as for me, my feet had almost stumbled,

in all generations.

my steps had nearly slipped.

2  Before the mountains were brought forth,

or ever you had formed the earth and the world,

3  For I was envious of the arrogant

from everlasting to everlasting you are God.

when I saw the prosperity of the wicked.

3  You return man to dust

and say, “Return, O children of man!”

4  For a thousand years in your sight

are but as yesterday when it is past,

or as a watch in the night.

5  You sweep them away [the years] as with a flood; they are like a dream,

like grass that is renewed in the morning:

6  in the morning it flourishes and is renewed;

in the evening it fades and withers.

So in verse 1, Moses begins with an affirmation—a necessary affirmation, given where he’s going.

He says that the Lord is the dwelling place of his people—not a refuge, which is temporary, but the dwelling place: the place where his people live.

Brutal honesty

And the reason why he can be a dwelling place for his people is because he is eternal.

Thinking about eternity boggles the mind, especially when you think of it in reverse.

Not just the fact that God will always be, but that he always has been—with no beginning, and no end.

And it is precisely for that reason that God can be a dwelling place for his people.

He is big enough to contain all that time could possibly produce, because he created all of it.

This is a comforting thought when seen in that light…but that’s not the only way to see it.

And that’s not the only way we should see it.

Last week, Loanne sent me a link to a time-lapse animation of the way scientists predict our universe will end (playing on the screen behind me).

It showed the continual evolution of our known galaxy, and then the known universe, until what they predict will be its end.

It’s the kind of thing I usually love; but as I continued to watch what will (theoretically) happen to the universe over the next million, billion, trillion years, I became more and more unsettled.

All life on earth ended pretty quickly, within the first three or four minutes of the thirty-minute video.

And everything that happened after that, happened in the lifeless expanse of space, devoid of all possibility of life.

And it was long.

Just when you thought it was going to stop, it kept going.

It started at the present, jumping forward one year every second, and then doubled its speed every five seconds; by the end of the first minute, it was at 25,000 years into the future.

At three minutes, it was at the destruction of the earth by the death of our sun, 7 billion years into the future.

The video was thirty minutes long.

It showed the end of stars and galaxies, the creation and collision of black holes, and many more things I couldn’t begin to articulate.

It’s the kind of thing I usually love; but as I continued to watch what will (theoretically) happen to the universe over the next twenty gazillion years, I became more and more unsettled.

Everything up to the end of life on earth was fine; but seeing twenty-seven more minutes of cosmic events still unfolding, with no life around to witness it, was suffocating.

All life on earth ended pretty quickly, within the first three or four minutes of the thirty-minute video.

And everything that happened after that, happened in the lifeless expanse of space, devoid of all possibility of life.

It was the most effective horror movie I’ve seen in a while.

And it wasn’t even talking about eternity—just a really, really long time.