The Creator, and not the creature, determines the length of life. The psalmist understood this when he wrote the words of Psalm 139. King Solomon echoed them when he wrote, “There is a time to be born, and a time to die.”
Even retailers understand the impact of this idea. A recent Sharper Image catalog advertised a “Personal Life Clock”—a marble obelisk with digital numbers that flashed the number of hours, minutes and seconds remaining in one’s statistical lifetime.
“All lives are finite,” the catalog glibly noted. “In fact, the average life lasts only 683,280 hours or 2.4 billion seconds. This new Timisis Personal Life Clock reminds you to live life to the fullest by displaying the... most profound number you will ever see.” But it could be wrong by a mile.
You see, our days are God appointed and God ordained. God’s Son, too, had an appointment with death. His cry, “It is finished” from the cross was the triumphant call of the God-man whose numbered days on earth had been fulfilled. There is a time to be born... and a time to die. And God selects them both.
MEMORY VERSE
And in thy book they were all written, the days that were ordained for me when there was not yet one of them (Psalm 139:16).
