Eternity Moment

Eternity Moment

The Eternal Face of Hope and Psalm 39

Psalm 39 reads as follows from the American Standard Version of the Bible:

 

1 I said, "I will guard my ways,
that I may not sin with my tongue; I will guard my mouth with a muzzle,
so long as the wicked are in my presence."
2 I was mute and silent;
I held my peace to no avail,
and my distress grew worse.
3 My heart became hot within me.
As I mused, the fire burned;
then I spoke with my tongue:

4 "O LORD, make me know my end
and what is the measure of my days;
let me know how fleeting I am!
5 Behold, you have made my days a few handbreadths,
andmy lifetime is as nothing before you.
Surely all mankind stands as a mere breath! 
Selah

6 Surely a man goes about as a shadow!
Surely for nothing they are in turmoil;
man heaps up wealth and does not know who will gather!

7 "And now, O Lord, for what do I wait?
My hope is in you.
8 Deliver me from all my transgressions.
Do not make me the scorn of the fool!
9 I am mute; I do not open my mouth,
for it is you who have done it.
10 Remove your stroke from me;
I am spent by the hostility of your hand.
11 When you discipline a man
withrebukes for sin,
you consume like a moth what is dear to him;
surely all mankind is a mere breath! 
Selah

12 "Hear my prayer, O LORD,
and give ear to my cry;
hold not your peace at my tears!
For I am a sojourner with you,
a guest, like all my fathers.
13 Look away from me, that I may smile again,
before I depart and am no more!"

 

The psalmist is lamenting and feels forever caught in the fog of unknowing all throughout this psalm until that fateful revealing in verse 13 where the revealing happens, and he can smile again with everlasting joy.

The lead up to verse 13 is the despairing voice of the psalmist, who has lost contact with the Lord, both internally through the voice of the heart and externally is his sightings of the presence of the Lord.

In his consternation, he tries several approaches such as waiting in stone silence but the fog of seeming hopelessness by the eternal seashores doesn't seem to lift.

But the smile he speaks of in verse 13 could and does come about only as the sighting of the face of the beloved Lord occurs against what had formed into a seeming impossibility that this would ever occur.

His own smile is an outward reflection of the new found sighting of the Lord, confirming that his bitter lament was over and he was wrong about the relationship with the Lord being of a shadowy fleeting nature where he believed that he was only a passing guest. Yes the shadows where there, but the overshadowing presence of the Eternal Face of Hope had arrived and brought him safely into hope to the truth of the permanency of the relationship and this and only this could bring the smile referred to in verse 13, which represents a complete turnaround to the vision of the rest of the psalm which is lamenting the lost relationship with the Lord.

The feelings of this psalmist can be paralleled with scenes from the 2005 movie Pride and Prejudice staring Keira Knightley as Elizabeth Bennet.

In the final scenes of this movie, her mounting despair of submerged aloneness that has nonetheless capsized upon her seems to be culminating in an unhappy ending, that this die will be cast as final that she will walk the solitary walk as far as the distant horizons of the shores she has been overlooking..

She again walks the lonely walk in the beautiful coastal landscapes as she has done many times previously, her aloneness accentuated against this vast expanse of nature that seems at some levels to open up to no one and no where,  where all seems never ending as her hopes seem to dissipate with approaching finality. .

She seemed to realize the unveiled truth that the person she longed for was in fact Darcy, but she misread who he was and who he could be to what had seemingly turned to be a fleeting chance, and the mistakes she made about who he was and what his true intentions were had ended this journey of possibility.

The expanse of nature and the loneness within despite the surrounding beauty further enhanced these feelings of solemn aloneness that merged in the now empty beauty of nature, and into the higher probability that this would be the more permanent state of affairs, and that the possibility of a stable lasting love had already past her by and had been lost and all she had left was her own ability to commune with these feelings of loss, pathos and enduring aloneness both within and without far into the distance of time and space where only more of this would be waiting for her.

As the end of the story and movie approaches into moments that bring to life her truest sense of self, she goes for one more stroll at dusk  through the beautiful landscapes in the low lying fog of the morning which seemingly would never lift, in moments of this film that seem to seal her fate that all her truest underlying hopes would never be.

But the scene turns miraculously when the lost face of her beloved emerges in approaching distance.

Almost miraculously the face of her beloved approaches out of the seeming everlasting shadows seeking her and her alone.

All it took was the startling presence of his face in the distance and all was changed.

It was just like this for the psalmist.

The partial view he had seemed to overtake all for him as he had seemingly lost an everlasting footing in the loving gaze of the Lord.

He had known the Lord, but it seemed the presence of the Lord was now a history for him, that he had been but no longer was a passing guest, that the hospitality and personal presence of the Lord had waned into the fading distance of time and space, now etched  in his forever personal landscape  only as a memory of loss, and now he was just like any other solitary figure, enveloped in the ever enduring fog of not knowing, of now believing, of seeking and no longer finding, of now being lost and having lost his place in the palatial presence of the Lord, a presence never to be found again

He believed the Lord had afforded him a brief and passing view of what might have been, a passing glance into an eternity of goodness, and blissfulness that now would never be his

Suddenly in all this fog and mist, contained both outward and inward to the depths of his heart, and the felt permanency that all the goodness of the Lord would never be of a lasting nature for him, was fully reversed in that one astonishing and revealed moment, where the eternal face of the Lord came before him, even at this place of heart, mind and soul of utmost despair that he was only blink of the eye to the Lord and nothing more.

But from the depths of his seemingly vain hopes now shuttered for good and partial but read as a fully despairing view from the fog, all was reversed and now transformed forever, that the smile brought to his own face reflecting from his beholding this eternal presence, was now to be an everlasting smile.

Thankfully he was eternally wrong, he was not a passing guest at the table of the Lord but a permanent fixture of personal friendship in the eternal gaze of the loving presence of the Lord, directed to him personally both now and forever, all across what was and always would be the permanent friendship of the eternal Lord, arising to captivate his soul with loving arms and the face to face encounter both for now and forever, as he was now beholding the eternal face of hope to uttermost glory..

Indeed the psalmist David had walked alone on those dark and misty seashores, until another hope and reality had been revealed, unveiled like the mystical sounds of the seas as they reach the shores finally and with finally, the movie of life would have another ending, brightened all the way to the eternal shores of everlasting love.

Psalm 89 verse 15 from the King James version of the Bible:

Blessed is the people that know the joyful sound: they shall walk, O LORD, in the light of thy countenance.

John 15.15

15 I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master's business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you.

John 8.12

2 Then Jesus spoke to them again, saying, "I am the light of the world. He who follows Me shall not walk in darkness, but have the light of life."

Amen.

 

 

About the Author

Could our inner perception of time be dramatically affected at the moment of brain death?

If the part of our brain that regulates the (relative) perception of time were to be the first area to die of oxygen starvation, then could it be possible for the rest of the brain to place us into a lucid dream-like state for what could relatively speaking be an eternity? Thus creating the possibility that we could all create our own personal 'afterlife' in the dying mind?

It may be possible that some form of time dilation occurs however there must be a limit. Everything the brain does take a certain amount of time to perform. Even accessing memories often takes seconds. Anyone who has ever tried to write anything knows the creative process is often far less efficient. The brain can only last 4- 6mins without sustaining damage and I think it would be no more than 10 before complete brain death. So you've only got ten minutes to create the details of your afterlife and these details could only be stretched so far. If your afterlife lasted a 1000 years events would be so infrequent it wouldn't be much fun. If it lasted an eternity nothing would ever happen since the finite amount of details you have created / infinity = 0.

Eternity of moment Michael Jackson