Man's Brief Fling

Time turns all men's flesh back into the dust
And deigns not to pause at re-birth of clay,
But gnaws the crypt in which the man was thrust;
Then the stone which boasts of his living's way.
E'en the church, whose ivied walls heard him plea,
Heaves a sigh, and yields to creeper and moss;
Gibraltar sinks slowly under the sea,
Her long years of vigil forever lost.
Does aught remind of man's heroic deeds;
The wars; the loves, of billions of men?
Of his trials and trysts; his unmet needs;
Of his wars and ships; does any attend?
Nay! So bare the record of man's brief fling,
Heaven marks not his reign, nor does she sing!

We who live now and are entangled amid our lives; so zealous and active in our different quests for the various longed-for goals; so immersed in the never-ending excitement of the moment; that we cannot faintly imagine how God views our frantic comings and goings; our extreme excitements, anticipations, ecstasies, and grievings; we need to call a halt to everything; relax; meditate upon how He sees this earthly anthill.

"How then can a man be righteous before God? How can one born of woman be pure? If even the moon is not bright and the stars are not pure in his eyes, how much less is man, who is but a maggot---a son of man, who is only a worm?" (Job 25:4-5)

Jonathan Edwards, a preacher of the 17th century in Massachusetts, preached a sermon named "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God", which is remembered today as a sermon which so frightened people of God's wrath that they fainted, falling down in the pews and out of windows. Surely we don't need that kind of preaching to impress upon a people how they are thinking more highly of themselves than they ought and more lowly of their Creator and ultimate judge than they ought.

NASA sent a camera space probe (unmanned) to the outer reaches of the solar system, all the way to Pluto, which is so far from earth it took five and one-half years, at 186,000 miles per second, for any transmission it sent back to earth to reach us. The last picture it took and sent back, was of the earth itself at that distance away. The picture of earth showed just a speck, a pin-point so tiny that it was dwarfed by the other heavenly bodies nearby; remember, the picture was taken within our solar system, which, relatively speaking, is in our neighborhood. Imagine how insignificant our little planet would look to God, Who lives beyond the finite universe! Carl Sagan, the late atheistic scientist that popularized science with a television show, asked this question: If God wanted to show that He created the universe in order to provide a safe place for His creature man to inhabit, why didn't He put a 100-kilometer cross in orbit around the earth?"

"What is man, that you are mindful of him, the son of man that you care for him?" (Psalm 8:4)

Gordon Hugenberger, senior pastor of Park Street Church in Boston, answered Carl Sagan's question by saying: "A 100-kilometer cross whirling around the earth in space would be too small for God. He is so much greater than that, He would have put a cross big enough to be seen from beyond the Milky Way." Then he said, "But God wants man to have faith, not absolute proof." What we must keep in mind is that God lived long before He created the universe by one small burst of energy; He is living now and intervening in our lives; and He will live eternally after the earth, man, and this universe is a distant memory.

So drop everything that you're doing; sit down; close your eyes; and meditate on how great God is and how small man is. Work on developing patience and the knowledge that God is on His throne; "all's right with the world'.