Record for Future Generations
Psalm 102,
“Hear my prayer, O Lord;
let my cry come to you!
2 Do not hide your face from me
in the day of my distress!
Incline your ear to me;
answer me speedily in the day when I call!
3 For my days pass away like smoke,
and my bones burn like a furnace.
4 My heart is struck down like grass and has withered;
I forget to eat my bread.
5 Because of my loud groaning
my bones cling to my flesh.
6 I am like a desert owl of the wilderness,
like an owl of the waste places;
7 I lie awake;
I am like a lonely sparrow on the housetop.
8 All the day my enemies taunt me;
those who deride me use my name for a curse.
9 For I eat ashes like bread
and mingle tears with my drink,
10 because of your indignation and anger;
for you have taken me up and thrown me down.
11 My days are like an evening shadow;
I wither away like grass.
12 But you, O Lord, are enthroned forever;
you are remembered throughout all generations.
13 You will arise and have pity on Zion;
it is the time to favor her;
the appointed time has come.
14 For your servants hold her stones dear
and have pity on her dust.
15 Nations will fear the name of the Lord,
and all the kings of the earth will fear your glory.
16 For the Lord builds up Zion;
he appears in his glory;
17 he regards the prayer of the destitute
and does not despise their prayer.
18 Let this be recorded for a generation to come,
so that a people yet to be created may praise the Lord:
19 that he looked down from his holy height;
from heaven the Lord looked at the earth,
20 to hear the groans of the prisoners,
to set free those who were doomed to die,
21 that they may declare in Zion the name of the Lord,
and in Jerusalem his praise,
22 when peoples gather together,
and kingdoms, to worship the Lord.
23 He has broken my strength in midcourse;
he has shortened my days.
24 “O my God,” I say, “take me not away
in the midst of my days—
you whose years endure
throughout all generations!”
25 Of old you laid the foundation of the earth,
and the heavens are the work of your hands.
26 They will perish, but you will remain;
they will all wear out like a garment.
You will change them like a robe, and they will pass away,
27 but you are the same, and your years have no end.
28 The children of your servants shall dwell secure;
their offspring shall be established before you.”
Throughout human history, many philosophers and theologians have agreed that the one great and most fundamental fear of all humans is the fear of death.
That’s the fear beneath every other fear.
They claim our mortality is like a shadow that hangs over our entire lives and affects everything we do. And this way of thinking is in the Bible.
The Book of Hebrews even uses the image of imprisonment and slavery — Hebrews 2:15 says that “through the fear of death we are subject to lifelong slavery.” We have been held in bondage by the fact of our impending doom. Death is a tyrant like that.
But, this morning, I have really good news!
The Lord has looked down from his holy height — the Lord in heaven has looked down on this earth — and he has acted to set us free.He knows our need and he has come to rescue us!
And he has done it for a purpose! The purpose is so that we would praise him! So that we would declare his name! So that peoples from all over the world would worship him!
And today, because we believe this, and because we are actually gathered here to worship God, we are fulfilling Psalm 102. According to verse 18, this psalm was written for us. Y’all look at verse 18 for a minute. The psalmist says, verse 18:
“Let this be recorded for a generation to come, so that a people yet to be created may praise the Lord …”
He’s saying: I’m about to write something for future generations, for a people God will create in the future — and I’m recording it so that one day they will read it and praise him …
What exactly is he recording? What does he want us to know?
Verse 19:
“that [God] looked down from his holy height;
from heaven the Lord looked at the earth,
to hear the groans of the prisoners, to set free those who were doomed to die.”
The psalmist, from a long time ago, from an ancient generation, he recorded these words with us in mind — we are the generation to come, we are the people yet to be created, we are the spiritual children of verse 28 …
And he wants us to know that God has done what nobody else can do — God has rescued us from eternal death and everlasting judgment! And he has done this through his Messiah!
So, believe in Jesus Christ and praise God! If we do that, we have righty applied Psalm 102. That’s the psalm! … And, this psalm makes me wonder … if a past saint recorded this for future generations, what are we recording for future generations? If we think about our children and their children and generations yet to be created, what do we want them to know about God? What would we record for them?
A lot of truths probably come to mind, but looking at Psalm 102, there are three truths that stand out. So this morning, here’s what I’d like to do:
Looking at Psalm 102, I want to show you three truths about God we should record for future generations …
1. Record this: God will hear our prayers for help (verses 1–2, 17)
We see this right away in verse 1:
“Hear my prayer, O Lord; let my cry come to you!”
Notice the psalmist is asking God to hear him because he knows that God hears him. That’s the only way this make sense. The psalmist is confident that God will hear himask to be heard.
But it’s about more than being heard, he wants to be helped. Verse 2:
“Do not hide your face from me in the day of my distress!
Incline your ear to me; answer me speedily in the day when I call!”
He wants God’s attention and answer. He wants God to eagerly move toward him and make a way — and more like now than later. There’s an urgency here. The psalmist is at the fork in the road. And we get this. We’ve been here before.
We’ve all been in moments where we feel stuck or overwhelmed and we don’t know what to do. We’ve come to the end of ourselves and our own resources, and we don’t have the answer.
We call this being in a troubled-heart situation.
And often, if we’re honest, being there makes us either angry or sad. Because it’s just so uncomfortable. Our default as humans is to either harden our hearts and shake our fists … or harden our hearts and give up. We either wanna fight … or quit. But, it’s in those moments, like the psalmist, when we should pray and cry out to God. Because in those moments God is especially attuned to us.
Especially Attuned
This is verse 17:
“he regards the prayer of the destitute
and does not despise their prayer.”
Now, we know that God always regards the prayers of his children, no matter their circumstances, but when I say that God is especially attuned to us in our troubled-heart situations, I’m trying to capture what the Bible tells us here: “God regards the prayer of the destitute.”
Or Psalm 9:12,
“[God] does not forget the cry of the afflicted.”
Psalm 34:18,
“The Lord is near to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit.”
Psalm 69:33,
“The Lord hears the needy …”
Jesus himself says, when you’re burdened and heavy laden, Don’t run from me, come to me.
Our destituteness — our desperate need and spiritual poverty — does not repel God from us, but it draws him near to us when we pray.
Now, look, God drawing near doesn’t mean he gives us what we want right away. It doesn’t mean he lifts the darkness right away. But he gives us himself — he’s with us, and he is at work. We want to record this. We want our children to know: God will hear our prayers for help.
2. Record this: God will outlast our suffering (verses 3–17)
This becomes clear in verse 12, but first we gotta see verses 3–11.
In verses 3–11, the psalmist, as “one afflicted,” describes his affliction in 15 statements. And they are uncommonly poetic. Eight of the 15 statements are metaphors that use the word “like.” Listen to these images:
My days pass away like smoke
My bones burn like a furnace
My heart is struck down like grass that has withered
I am like a desert owl
I am like a lonely sparrow on a roof
I eat ashes like bread
My days are like an evening shadow
I wither away like grass
The theme here is that the psalmist feels like his life is fleeting and isolated. It’s fleeting like smoke, fleeting like an evening shadow, fleeting like grass that was sprayed with Round-Up before it bakes 12 hours under the blazing sun.
We’ve seen withered grass before (or maybe weeds).
It goes from ‘green and lush’ to ‘yellow and dry’ … and soon they’re dead and gone. The psalmist says that’s his life. Fleeting.
Then for isolated, in verse 6, he’s like a desert owl. And I don’t know much about desert owls … translators are actually not sure what kind of bird this is. The King James Version translated this word as a pelican. But whatever the taxonomy of the bird is, the idea here is that it’s a loner bird. It’s a bird that is by itself in the waste places.
If you can imagine it: there’s a landfill of ruins, and nothing is living except this one bird all alone. That’s what it’s like for the psalmist. These are powerful images of suffering.
The psalmist is naming his situation well. … which is really helpful … I think the only thing worse than suffering like this is to suffer like this and not know what to call it. Suffering with awareness is at least a step in the right direction. Because that’s what sets up verse 12.
Remembering God
Notice the psalmist has described where he’s at through verse 11 — he’s looked at himself — but then in verse 12 he says:
“But you, O Lord, are enthroned forever;
You are remembered throughout all generations.”
And here in verse 12 through verse 16 he sets his mind on who God is, on what God is doing, and on what God will do. There’s a combination of present reality and future hope, but it starts here with verse 12 where the psalmist declares something foundational. He says:
God is enthroned forever and God is remembered throughout all generations.
This means first that God is eternal.
When psalmist says “God is remembered throughout all generations” he’s talking about generations past, present, and future. Long before we were ever here, and long after we’re gone, God is God, and he has been, and will be, remembered.
In the long train of human history, we’re just a tiny part, but God is eternal.
And it gets better. It’s not just that God exists eternally, but God is enthroned eternally. That means he reigns. He’s in control. And if the God who is in control is also eternal, that means that God will outlast our suffering. God is bigger and he’s gonna live longer!
So suffering does not have the final say, but instead he’s at work in it. He’s doing something through it. He’s building something through it — verse 16.
What He’s Building
And sometimes we can see it, other times we can’t, but we can rest assured it’s happening. That is the hope of the psalmist! God, enthroned forever, in his mercy and kindness, is building now what is gonna result one day in all nations fearing the Lord and all kings of the earth bowing before him.
That’s the hope of the Old Testament — Habakkuk 3:19 — “… the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.”
And that’s the hope of the New Testament — Revelation 7:9 — “a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages … [are] crying out with a loud voice, “Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb!”
We want to record this! We want our children to know … God will outlast our suffering, and that means his redemptive purposes are guaranteed. He will accomplish every good thing that he intends. Even when we feel like a desert owl, he is building something glorious.
3. Record this: God will comfort us with truth of Jesus (verses 23–28)
In Psalm 102 there’s a change that comes in verse 25, and it makes the whole psalm.
I want to show it to you, but we need to start in verse 23. In verse 23, the psalmist picks back up on his lament from verses 2–11. He says, verse 23:
“He has broken my strength in midcourse;
he has shortened my days.”
And he’s talking about God doing this. It’s just like in verse 10 when he says his suffering is because of God’s indignation and anger. The psalmist is bearing God’s wrath. The superscript already told us this is “The prayer of one afflicted.” And in the context of the Psalms as whole, this is the voice of the Messiah.
Psalm 102 is like Psalm 22 — ultimately we’re reading the prayer of the Messiah in his suffering. And so the psalmist, the Messiah, says to God in verse 24:
“O my God,” I say, “take me not away in the midst of my days — you whose years endure throughout all generations!”
And you’ll notice in your Bible that the quotation ends there with verse 24. This is what the suffering Messiah says to God. Then in verse 25 we read:
Of old you laid the foundation of the earth, and the heavens are the work of your hands.
Now get this: starting in verse 25, we are reading God’s answer back to the Messiah. The Messiah cries out to God in verses 23–24, and God answers the Messiah in verses 25–28. And we know this for sure because this is what the writer of Hebrews tells us in the New Testament, in Hebrews Chapter 1.
You don’t have to turn there, but in Hebrews Chapter 1, the writer has been describing the divine glory of Jesus, and to make his case, he quotes several verses from the Old Testament where God speaks about the Messiah.
The writer of Hebrews says that “of the Son”, or “about the Son”, God says this — and in verse 10 he quotes from Psalm 102:25.
So, according to the New Testament, God the Father says to God the Son, the Messiah:
“You, Lord, laid the foundation of the earth in the beginning, and the heavens are the work of your hands. …”
I want to make sure you get what’s happening here! In Psalm 102, verse 25, in response to the Messiah’s suffering, God the Father comforts him with the truth of who he is. The Messiah feels like a desert owl. His strength has been broken, his days are shortened. But God says to him:
Of old you laid the foundation of the earth, and the heavens are the work of your hands. They will perish, but you will remain; they will all wear out like a garment. You will change them like a robe, and they will pass away, but you are the same, and your years have no end.
Church, this is the truth of Jesus! Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever — and this was God’s comfort to Jesus himself in his suffering, and it’s God’s comfort to us today.
Remember the truth of Jesus! Remember who he is, and that because we’re united to him by faith, our future is as secure as he is.
Our hope is as alive as he is. It’s living hope. Record that! That is what we want our children to know! The truth of Jesus changes everything.
And I pray that’s something our kids are learning from us, especially in these days. I mean, we are teaching something. We are modeling something. …
Earlier this week, Melissa and I had dinner with Rob and Becca Ketterling. Rob is the lead pastor of River Valley Church here in the south metro. He planted River Valley back in 1995, so he’s been a pastor a little longer than I have, and in recent months Rob has been a friend to me — I’m so thankful for him. He and his wife took us to dinner, and for an hour and half, they just poured into us. We were sharing with them our burdens, and especially for the children of our church and our own children.
And Pastor Rob said to me, obviously, it is right to protect our families and children. But then he said to me: I know you want to make your children safe, but what if God wants to make them heroic?
What if God wants to give them heroic faith? What if God is raising up in your church right now future Daniels and Deborahs who will seek the good of these Twin Cities for his glory?
This challenged me. And I just wanna say: I’m in! Sign me up! Would that God do that!
I mean, what do we really want for our children? What do we want them to know? What are we recording for future generations?
I’ll tell you three truths from Psalm 102:
God will hear our prayers for help.
God will outlast our suffering.
God will comfort us with the truth of Jesus.
And that’s what brings us to the Table.
The Table
At this Table is when the truth of Jesus takes center stage. The bread and cup represent his body and blood that he sacrificed for us at the cross, and so when we eat and drink, we remember what he did, and we remember our union with him. By his grace, we are united to him by faith, and all of his blessings become ours. This is why this table is only for Christians. If you trust in Jesus Christ, we welcome you to eat and drink, and give him thanks!
