Psalm 71 gives a lifelong perspective on faith.
“Upon You have I leaned from before my birth” (6a). “For You, O Lord, are my hope, my trust, O Lord, from my youth” (5). “Do not cast me off in the time of old age” (9a). “O God, from my youth You have taught me, and I still proclaim Your wondrous deeds. So even to old age and gray hairs, O God, do not forsake me” (17-18a).
That first quote in particular caught my attention— “from before my birth.” No matter how young you are when you come to faith in Christ, none of us can claim to have been Christians from birth. And yet, when you do meet God and grow in faith, you start to realize that He has been at work long before you knew it. As David wrote in Psalm 139, “Your eyes saw my unformed substance; in Your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them” (16). And the Apostle Paul proclaimed to the Ephesian church, that God “chose us in Him before the foundation of the world” (1:4). You might say that from God’s perspective, the saved have always been saved, even though they have not always known it. C.S. Lewis wrote in The Great Divorce:
“[B]oth good and evil, when they are full grown, become retrospective. Not only this valley but all this earthly past will have been Heaven to those who are saved. Not only the twilight in that town, but all their life on earth too, will then be seen by the damned to have been Hell. That is what mortals misunderstand. They say of some temporal suffering, ‘No future bliss can make up for it,’ not knowing that Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory... the Blessed will say, ‘We have never lived anywhere except in Heaven,’ and the Lost, ‘We were always in Hell.’ And both will speak truly” (ch. 9).
Whether or not you agree completely with Lewis’s eschatology, there is great comfort to be found in believing that God is sovereign over every day and every detail of your life. The God who created us and brought salvation to us will also sustain us to the end, and then He will also raise us to eternal life in the new creation. “From the depths of the earth You will bring me up again” (20). He will never forsake us, so we can trust Him to old age and gray hairs. With that assurance, “I will hope continually and will praise You yet more and more” (14). No matter how far along the path of life you may be, we can be witnesses to others of God’s faithfulness. “My mouth will tell of Your righteous acts, of Your deeds of salvation all the day... I will remind them of Your righteousness, Yours alone” (15-16).
May we endeavor to be faithful to that high calling.
“So even to old age and gray hairs, O God, do not forsake me until I proclaim Your might to another generation, Your power to all those to come” (18).
© 2024 Dawn Rutan. Unless otherwise indicated, all Scripture
are ESV and all images copyright free from pixabay.com. The opinions stated do
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