“My Days as an Handbreadth”

The writer begins this passage by calling our attention to the light—the pleasantness of the light. I am sure that we all enjoy light. There is something about darkness that is depressing.

He says “If a man live many years”; now that’s a big IF. Some of us will not live many years, but suppose we would? I wonder if any of you feel a definite assurance in your heart that you are going to live many years. I hope you will. But the next statement is something I know you will not have; I am sure of it. “If a man live many years, and rejoice in them all.” I know that you are not going to have it that way. There are going to be some disappointments, some troubles, some griefs to be borne, sorrows you will meet with, tears you will shed. “Man that is born of a woman is of few days, and full of trouble.”* (Job 14:1) God said it and that makes it so, and I just accept it that way. Now, suppose you lived many years and not a shadow came over you; never a trial, test, sorrow, or trouble crossed your path—you just rejoiced in all those years and were full of rejoicing and joy all the time, nothing ever dimmed your joy…. Now that won’t happen to you. But supposing it did, yet the writer says, “Remember the days of darkness; for they shall be many.” “The days of darkness” here refer to the days beyond this life, and they are going to be many.

I once heard Clarence Hattley bring a message in Bakersfield, California, on the subject of “Consider Your Latter End.” The text was from Deuteronomy 32:29: “O that they were wise, that they understood this, that they would consider their latter end!” When he got through and sat down, Brother Francisco got up and said, “I just want to say that your latter end is your longest end.”

If we live many years here, yet eternity is a lot longer than that. The “days of darkness” referred to here is eternity, beyond this life; and that is our longest end. David made a statement like this in Psalm 39:5: “Thou hast made my days as an handbreadth.” David was an old man—I do not know just how old, but at least he said in some of his writings, “I have been young, and now am old.”* (Psalm 37:25) I know he lived to be an old man [70 years, 2 Samuel 5:4], and in his old age he said, “My days are just as a handbreadth.”

Days is a measure of time, and handbreadth is a measure of space. If I were setting up a mathematical equation from this, it would read like this: My days compared to eternity are as a handbreadth compared to space. Now, I was thinking of space—here we have a desk that is perhaps two feet across, but that would be only one, two, three, four, five plus handbreadths across. Take the distance from here back to the door—I don’t know how far it would be, maybe forty feet—but there would be some hundred handbreadths across there. Take the distance from here [Shawnee] to Oklahoma City, approximately thirty miles. It doesn’t take long to go down there, I know, but the handbreadths between here and Oklahoma City, just a common distance that workers commute back and forth, would run into the thousands, perhaps many thousands of handbreadths. Take the distance across this continent from New York to Los Angeles. That is quite a little distance, about 3,000 miles or so, but the airplane has made such a small world out of this that now a person can eat breakfast in New York, get on a plane and eat lunch at regular lunch time in Los Angeles. The handbreadths across there would run into the millions. Now consider space. They tell us that it is some 93 million miles to the sun. Now I don’t comprehend that. I don’t know how far that is and they don’t either. But that is what they tell us, and then they say that on beyond the sun there are myriads of world and planets so distant that they measure the distance from those planets to this earth in light years. Light traveling at the rate of 186,000 miles per second, how long would it take a ray of light how many years to travel from a planet down to earth? Now put a handbreadth up beside that and what do you have? It is infinitesimal, isn’t it? You couldn’t even locate it. There is no means of comparison here. My days compared to eternity are like a handbreadth compared to space. “Thou hast made my days as a handbreadth.”

What I am telling you is this: Your latter end is your longest end, and it is so much longer that there is no means of comparison. Therefore, whatever it takes for you to save your soul, whatever sacrifices you may have to make, whatever the cost may be, whatever you may have to deny yourself, the sufferings you may have to endure in order to save your soul, what difference does it make? This life is just a little while. Eternity is a long time.

A number of years ago I was traveling in the Rio Grande Valley of Southern Texas where there were number of safety signs along the highway. One of them read, “Drive carefully big boy—death is so permanent.”

Let us think: “Remember the days of darkness; for they shall be many…. Rejoice, O young man, in thy youth; and let thy heart cheer thee in the days of thy youth.” Young people do rejoice in their youth and they are proud of their youth, but there is one thing I notice about young folks—they want to be left alone. “I am just young one time. Just let me live my life, I am just young once.” That is a good thing for us to realize if we apply it in the right way. If you think of it rightly, it is a good thing for you to realize that you are just young once. But the way the young person usually applies that and what he has in mind is, “I want to have a good time, I want to sow my wild oats, I want to go my own way. I don’t want any restraints on me. I am just young once. Let me go my own way now. Let me have a good time.” “Rejoice, O young man, in thy youth; and let thy heart cheer thee in the days of thy youth.” Then the writer says, “Walk in the ways of thine heart, and in the sight of thine eyes,” and isn’t that the way people do? In the sight of their eyes and the desires of their heart, doing anything they want to do. A common frailty of mankind, young and old, is that we can’t see beyond the end of our nose. We can’t see the effects of things, the potentials of things. We can’t see the fruit that we have borne, we can’t see the results of things. We are just looking here with the sight of our eyes and the desires of our hearts. That is what we want to do, but the writer says, “Go ahead and do that.” He knew that was the way it would go. He knew that is what they would do. He says, “But know thou, that for all these things God will bring thee into judgment.”