Cancer Blog #56
By Brian Zimmerman
Begun on July 31, 2021
Email: dyingman1@yahoo.com
My Dying Words
Entry #56 – Why Hope in Mortal Man?
September 30, 2022
[Psalm 146:3-6 NASB95] 3 Do not trust in princes, In mortal man, in whom there is no salvation. 4 His spirit departs, he returns to the earth; In that very day his thoughts perish. 5 How blessed is he whose help is the God of Jacob, Whose hope is in the LORD his God, 6 Who made heaven and earth, The sea and all that is in them; Who keeps faith forever.”
What a wonderful psalm of hope. You should get a bible and read it in its entirety. It’s only 10 verses long, but full of comfort and joy, though its warning in the verses above are not so. Here the psalmist cautions about viewing people, especially the powerful, and particularly those in government, as our hope. I believe that’s as much a temptation in our era as it was in the psalmist’s. Being overly concerned about politics invites a constant state of flux between fear and anger, and a hope in a “good prince.” But, the psalmist here steers us away from such a focus. And for one simple reason – our mortality. People die, so there can be no hope of true salvation, or even great help in this age from them. Even those we love as family and friends will leave us sooner or later, whether parents, mate, or brothers and sisters, or close friends. As we grow older, we feel more and more the weight of those deaths.
But, the psalmist moves on to point us to one who will never leave us, not even because of death, and offers us the greatest hope, the greatest dependability of our lives: the Lord our God. Somehow I think we see God as an old man because He is indeed the ancient of days, from everlasting, and has lived many millennia and more. And yet, another way to see Him is to view Him as eternally young as He never ages, as we do – He never grows old. When we are young, we go from strength to strength, but in our later years we begin a process that’s hard to accept, of going from weakness to weakness. But, God never grows weak, much less tired, and so as the psalmist lists in the verses I didn’t quote above, what ways that God can be counted on – unlike the government – to help us in our weakness: when we are oppressed (which probably comes from the government or the rich), and are hungry, imprisoned (again, likely by the government), blind, strangers, orphaned or widowed. God is our sure hope in this life and in the one to come. The government, says the psalmist, is our hope in neither.
Next: The Cure for Anxiety