19. Numbering Our Days
19
Numbering Our Days1
So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.
—Psalm 90:12
All of us generally sail in the bad husbanding of time.2 We are dying before we know the purpose for which we live. Imagine a master who sent his servant to a great city with a paper containing business of great importance. The master has allotted to his servant the space of ten sandglasses3 to quickly take care of the matter. If the servant, for the space of the first nine hours, starts drinking with his drunken companions and goes up and down to behold all the novelties of the city, he will break trust. Alas! Is not this world like a great exchange? Our paper contains the business of a great kingdom up above, the honor and glory of our Lord, our redemption through Christ, a treaty for everlasting peace. The time of infancy and childhood slips by, and we do not know the purpose of our creation. Youth and adulthood are like a proud meadow, green, fair, and delightful today, but tomorrow it becomes hay, casting off blossoms and flowers. With one little stride we skip through our span of time. Yet we go through the exchange to buy frothy honor and rotten pleasure, and when our last hour has come, we scarcely read our Master’s paper.
We barter one nothing-creature4 for another, alas! It is a poor accounting that a natural man makes who can say nothing more at his death than “I have eaten, drunk, slept, waked, dreamed, and sinned for the space of sixty or seventy years, and that is all.” Time, like a long, swift, sliding river, runs through the city from the time of creation, when God first set the clock going, to the day of Christ’s second coming. This river slides through our fingers. We eat, drink, sleep, amuse ourselves, laugh, buy, sell, speak, breathe, and die in a moment. Every gasp of air is a flux of our minute’s time sliding into eternity, within a few generations…. We, whose lives are only a company of night visions, shall fly away, and “our places shall know us no more.” And though this should not be, the world is not eternal, being a great body made up of corruptible pieces, of little dying creatures that would be standing on nothing if God were to take the legs from them. At length God shall remove the passes of the watch, and “time shall be no more.” The wheels of time shall be at a stand…. Consider the afternoon of a declining sun. Within a few hours we are plunged in the bosom and womb of eternity and cannot return.
1. Sermon Preached…Lords, 7.
2. husbanding of time: To “husband time” is to cultivate or make good use of it. Rutherford is saying that most of us waste our time.
3. sandglasses: hours
4. nothing-creature: something insignificant