The Measure Of Our Lives

When the Lord God told Adam what the inevitable consequences of sin would be, namely “Thou shalt surely die”, or, as the Hebrew has, “Dying thou shalt die”, he instituted the greatest fact of life as we know it. We are all born to die — and that certainty, consciously or subconsciously, dominates the whole of our lives.

As the Apostle Paul says, “All our lifetime”, from cradle to grave, “we are subject to bondage, through fear of death.” And so we measure out our lives in periods which conform to the set pattern of mortal span: childhood for growth and training, youth for the beginning of toil and experience; man­hood and womanhood to make our mark, for good or ill; and age for decline until the inevitable end.

But death, as many of us have sorrowfully known, does not conform to pattern. Threescore years and ten of life are not for all, and only the fool will count upon them. This very night his soul may be required of him. Some are stricken in childhood, some in the flower of their age, and some with that “crown of thorns”, old age, resting upon their wrinkled brow. We know not when — but how bitter is the loss for those who are left! Jesus, with that great sensitivity which he had for the sufferings of men and women, was touched by the feeling of their infirmity in this also.