Cancer Blog #49
By Brian Zimmerman
Begun on July 31, 2021
Email: dyingman1@yahoo.com
My Dying Words
Entry #49 – Clemency for Brevity
August 9, 2022
[Psa 89:46-48 NASB95] 46 How long, O LORD? Will You hide Yourself forever? Will Your wrath burn like fire? 47 Remember what my span of life is; For what vanity You have created all the sons of men! 48 What man can live and not see death? Can he deliver his soul from the power of Sheol? Selah.
The psalmist here pleads with God about the rejection of His anointed because of his disobedience. But, the nature of the psalmist’s plea is most interesting and instructive. He asks for mercy and an end to God’s absence in His anger for a simple reason: the brevity of his life. He reminds God that our lives are so short that we are inextricably tied to death. Our only hope is that God will be merciful, patient with our brevity and fragility.
I have prayed this type of prayer when approaching God about my cancer, using words like these: “Please remit my sentence of death from this cancer. Remember that I am made of dust and can bear only so much.” We have seen these themes of brevity and fragility repeatedly in the scriptures. It is an echo obviously of the curse of God on Adam and his role in creation, and thus of all creation:
[Gen 3:17-19 NASB95] 17 Then to Adam He said, “Because you have listened to the voice of your wife, and have eaten from the tree about which I commanded you, saying, ‘You shall not eat from it’; Cursed is the ground because of you; In toil you will eat of it All the days of your life. 18 “Both thorns and thistles it shall grow for you; And you will eat the plants of the field; 19 By the sweat of your face You will eat bread, Till you return to the ground, Because from it you were taken; For you are dust, And to dust you shall return.”
The curse on Adam was not that he was taken from the dust. Rather, that to dust he would return. His death was the final punishment in the string of curses pronounced by God over the serpent, Eve, and now Adam.
It is surprising that the psalmist uses our cursed condition, then, as an argument for mercy. And yet, this argument reveals to us an insight into the nature of our God: He is a compassionate God. He is aware of the pain and struggle of our lives under this curse. It is a burden hard to bear, and we should be unafraid not only to remember that it is to teach us wisdom, but also to use it in our prayers as an argument to gain God’s patience and mercy. For we understand that He knows in a way that the psalmist had never imagined: the coming of God in the flesh of a doomed race to deliver them from that corruption, even from the hopelessness of the death of their flesh. For now we can not only present the brevity of our lives as a reason for mercy, but better still we can rejoice and give thanks that the immortal put on mortality, the incorruptible put on a flesh subject to corruption that our flesh of dust may one day regain the life it was created to live.
Next: Our Shortness of Life and God’s Length of Days