[AI translation] My Christian Brothers and Sisters! When one sails across to America, one of the best experiences of the voyage is the last day's lunch. In a few hours, the ship will dock on the shores of the New World, everyone will be busy with their own business, people will be scattered. This is the last time they will sit together at the table, quietly talking about the memories of the last 5-6 days. They talk about the memories of their time together, the storms and joys they have shared, some apologise or forgive each other for the wounds they have suffered on the journey, some say goodbye, others map out their future plans for each other. Then the lunch is over, the boat docks on the other shore, and the passengers, who have shared a week's journey, a common fate, a common joy and a common sorrow: they arrive at the gateway to a new life, full of anxious hope and anticipation for the future.So here we are once again, together for the last time in the great ship of 1941, with the memories of a year's voyage in our souls. In a few hours' time, our ship will sail into the harbour of the new year, with new worries, new faces, new experiences. But before we arrive, let's sit down once more to talk about this latest journey of our lives together. Psalm 90, this psalm of the journey for travellers on their way to their destination, is particularly appropriate to remind us of the most important experiences of the past year and to answer the questions that arise from our memories.
Our first experience on this day is something of a sour, sad, helpless feeling: the reality of my own transience sinks into my soul, I am forced to acknowledge the cruel reality that "another year, God's appointed time, has passed for transience." The fact of transience is so overwhelming to the human soul that it makes even the most reprobate man cringe under its oppressive weight. Only intoxicated mirth deludes itself with the exclamation, "We shall never die!" But he does not believe himself to be telling the truth, and he speaks in this way because he wants to force himself to forget that the happy, joyful moments are running dangerously fast, irrevocably passing away.
And how we often want to stop time! How ashamed we are sometimes of the years we have spent on this earth, how we try to make everything seem as if time had not passed us by, as if the colour of our cheeks and hair were the same now as it was twenty or thirty years ago. Oh, if it were up to us, we would prefer never to think that time is passing, and with it our lives! But there are occasions, like this evening, when we are forced to make certain unpleasant observations to ourselves, as Psalm 90 says: that our life is like a dream, like the grass that springs up and blossoms in the morning and withers and withers in the evening. The days of our years are seventy years, or, if above, eighty years, and the greater part of them are afflictions and weariness, which quickly vanish away as if we were flying. Of the few years that each of us has left, we bury one again. It may well have been full of tribulation and toil, as the Word says, and it is quite certain that we shall have much tribulation and toil in the years to come. Yet we cherish these fleeting years, we cling to them convulsively, we instinctively see in them a gradual impoverishment of growing old. For one day our life will inevitably run out, like a candle with a burning candle, go out, and there will be great darkness! Oh, that darkness would cast an unbearable shadow over our life, even now, if only that were the message of this Word today. But Moses only laments the mourning song of transience so that he may rejoice all the more that God is eternal.
Brothers and sisters, do we have any idea what this Word means: God is eternal? Perhaps at such times, when we feel so helplessly impermanent, we can grasp more of the meaning of those difficult words in Psalm 90: "Before the mountains were made, and the earth and the world were formed, you are God for ever and ever. For a thousand years are as a thousand years before you, as yesterday is past, and as a watch in the night." In the life of God there is no yesterday and today, there is no present, past and future, there is no passing of time, God lives in a great "now", in the eternal present. We need to know all this, not to make our misery all the more painful, seeing the glaring difference between His eternal life and our life of death, but to know what life awaits us there, with God. For throughout the Bible, from beginning to end, God speaks constantly of how He is waiting for us there, in His eternal life. The whole work of redemption, the whole earthly life of Christ, was for the sole purpose of enabling us to pass from transience into eternity. This is what Moses is trying to express in Psalm 90 when he writes: "Return, you sons of men!" Return to me, O sons of men! But what was a hazy vision in the prophet's soul is for us a happy reality, a joyful certainty: for the death and resurrection of Christ means precisely that the way has been opened from here to there, from earth to heaven, from transience to eternity.
There is nothing tragic, then, about the passing of the years; there is no need to hide it or to fear that we have grown a year older again. It is not poverty to grow old: it is a way of getting closer to eternity! Who can mourn the light of a candle that has burned out when the sun rises? What need is there of a candle when the sun's rays fill the world with light?! It is well, then, to be touched today by the chilling breath of transience, but only so that we may rejoice all the more in eternity. And for what Psalm 90 says: "Teach us to number our days so that we may have a wise heart". Here it is about the wisdom we need to know that the right to eternity can be earned here on earth or played out forever. All who have accepted Christ as Saviour and Lord are entitled to eternal life.
This passing of this year, this death of a piece of your life, let us now be reminded that you do not know how many days the Lord has left, do not be out of time, yield to Christ!!!
This leads us to another question. On this day of reckoning, a dreadful Old Testament verse rings in my ears that I read in the Bible recently, and which is particularly timely on the last night of 1941. "Hear ye the word of the Lord, for the Lord hath a controversy with the inhabitants of the earth: for there is no justice, and there is no love, and there is no knowledge of God in the earth." How true what it says: there is no justice. Indeed: never have the inhabitants of the earth lied so much, never have they committed so many injustices, as now. There is no love. Indeed: with what boundless hatred can peoples and races hate one another. And no knowledge of God. Indeed: so much ungodliness is going on in the earth today that there are hardly a few who speak with their lives that they know God!
How sad, but how astonishingly true this Word is to the picture of the world in 1941! No wonder God has a quarrel with the inhabitants of the earth. What will happen here when the trial is over and God passes judgment?! That will be the real misery! But let us not trouble ourselves with the inhabitants of the earth now, how good it is that we do not have to pass judgment on them! Leave it to God, it is His trial, not ours, and He will judge the living and the dead! On this day of our reckoning, let us now look within ourselves and feel that we are unmasked: Psalm 90 continues, "You have laid our iniquities before you, our secret sins before the world of your face."
Think now, my brother, of all that the Lord knows about you! What your surroundings do not even suspect, what your spouse has never noticed about you, what your most trusted friends do not know about you, what you would rather keep secret from yourself, what would make you die of shame if it were to come to light, if it were to be known about you: all this is laid bare before the Lord! Can you sum up the sins of the past year? How many tears and sorrows you have shed, how many promises and vows you have broken? How many plans did you start the New Year with and how many failures are you ending this year with? How many times have you been angry, rude, unkind, unloving? How many times have you fallen prey to Satan's temptation in unclean speech, feeling or action? How many good opportunities have you missed to exercise love to God and man? - And who can enumerate all our iniquities and secret sins, which are all now before the face of God!
Oh, if some of our deceit or secret sins should come to light before men, and we should be able to boast of them! Shalt thou be ashamed now, when the Word reveals all the sins of a year before God? This day is a day of reckoning, and with it a day of shame: behold, how wretched I have been, how useless I have lived, and yet how God has blessed me with all good things, how he has provided for me, how he has loved me, how he has tolerated my deceitfulness and my secret sins! See this day, my Brother, how much grace God has lavished on you in the past year, and now He wants to top it all up by simply forgiving you all the sins of the past year.
I stand here now with a commission to all those who are now seriously reckoning with their sins, repenting heartily and bringing them before the Lord, to proclaim to them the forgiveness of their sins. If you are here with a repentant spirit, my brother, and if you believe in the merits of the death of our Lord Christ, let me gladly let you know that God has forgiven you. Behold, this day is not a day of transience, nor a day of reckoning, but a day of great joy and thanksgiving! Time is passing over thee: give thanks to God for it, for thus thou art drawing near to eternity! Are you ashamed of the reckoning? Give thanks for it, for your sins are forgiven!
So blessed be the holy name of the Lord for the passing of the year 1941, and blessed be the holy name of the Lord for the experience of His inexpressible grace!
Amen.
Date: 31 December 1941.
Lesson
Mik 7,1-9