An eventful year! Who could have seen all that has happened? Who can recount all the events? God knows. Man passes through these events, and his time is soon cut off, and he flies away. The life span of mortal man is like the flicker of sparks that shoot out of the fire and fall as ash to the ground. Man’s time passes as quickly as the sparrow’s flittering and fluttering from branch to branch in the bush. Man’s days are as fleeting as a dream when he awakes. Man inhabits for a brief moment the relentless rush of time and flies away to his permanent abode, whether heaven or hell.

God’s word spoken to Adam in Eden, “Return to dust, ye children of men,” is active in the life of every one of Adam’s descendants. Everyone’s life span is laid out in its seconds, minutes, days, and years. Each person is appointed exactly so many days and not a moment longer. From the moment of conception, the seconds turn into minutes, the minutes into hours, the hours into days, and the days into years, and man is cut off and flies away.

Perhaps his days are seventy or eighty. Most are cut off long before that: the baby whose life is a few months in his mother’s womb; the child whose days are few on the earth; the young man cut off in his strength; the father whose days end while his children are yet small; the millions who perish from war, famine, pestilence, and a host of unnamed afflictions.

A man lives eighty years and boasts that he lived a good, long life. The boast is vain, for the very best of those eighty years is backbreaking labor and vanity. He labors in a world under the curse of God. Man eats his bread in the sweat of his brow, and the woman receives the sorrow of her conceptions. If man lives perfectly, he does nothing but what is required, but in reality, he only daily increases his debt. A man passes his whole life in labor and sorrow and flies away to the judgment seat of God. There his whole life is cast in the brilliant and searching spotlight of God.

Let our lives, activities, motives, purposes, and hearts be cast in the light of God’s unapproachable eternality, awesome holiness, and perfect righteousness, the terrible finality of his verdicts, and the crushing power of his wrath and anger.

Then, let us cast ourselves at the foot of the cross of Jesus Christ, who is God’s grace, beauty, and light that broke into this world of darkness and the curse. Christ took that terrible word of God, “Return to dust, ye children of men,” upon himself. He labored and sorrowed under God’s holiness and righteousness and the crushing power of his wrath. And God was satisfied with Christ’s labor, for he arose the third day. Apart from faith in his name, there is only the terrible, sorrowful, and swift passage of time, and man is cut off and flies away to an eternity of sorrow; and his house, which he supposed would last forever, crumbles to ruins.

But all who look to Christ in faith are satisfied and are made to rejoice and be glad in him. The work of their hands—Christ’s own work in and through them—God establishes for good. In Christ the afflictions we suffer during the swift passage of time are but for a moment and work a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory. For our days and afflictions are quickly cut off, and we fly away to an eternal home, fixed in the heavens, appointed to us from all eternity.