“The grass withers and the flowers fall,
but the word of our God endures forever.”
Isaiah 40:8
Where I live, the beginning of Spring is marked by a flood of beautiful wildflowers almost everywhere with enough dirt for them to grow. They mostly blue and orange flowers, but there are also a sprinkling of yellows, pinks, and reds too. In the open spaces, where there is a lot of room for the flowers to grow, there are fields full of beautiful, breathtaking color. There’s nothing quite like it.
Just a few weeks later, as the days get longer, the sun gets hotter, and the soil gets dryer, the colors start to fade. After a couple of months, there is no sign that the flowers ever existed. The beautiful colorful fields are replaced by patches of brown-green grass for the rest of the year.
This verse from Isaiah calls attention to the fleeting nature of our lives, and even more so, the material things in our lives. Just the same as the wildflowers dominating the landscape as far as the eye can see, and disappearing only weeks later, so we walk this earth and live our lives, all of us a constantly growing, bustling mass of people, only to disappear, making way for a new generation, and then another, and then another. Within two centuries, only a tiny fraction of a single percent of us will still be remembered.
Sounds a little bit sad, but it’s not. It’s a good thing. It’s a great thing, actually. It’s so important to remember and constantly live with according the understanding that this life is not our end-all be-all. This life is just a fleeting moment in eternity.
We have a wonderful opportunity with our time on earth to build the Kingdom of God, to experience the glory of his creation, to learn to love, and to be loved ourselves. In the end, though, it’s just the blink of an eye. But God is eternal. His word, his truth has not changed from the beginning of time. He is today the same as he was two thousand years ago and as he will be another two thousand years from now. The word of God is the only enduring, eternal thing that we can grasp onto in our time on this earth. We must hold tightly to it as we fly through this life so that as we approach the end, we will enter eternity holding onto truth instead of vanity.
Everything else fades, but God remains.
Prayer:
Father,
Thank you for the life we have on Earth, however short it may be. Thank you for all of the things you allow us to experience. I pray, however, that we not get caught up in fleeting things, things that are not of eternal importance. I pray that instead, we will cling to your word, to the eternal truth that you have given us. I pray that we may all spend eternity with you one day when our short time on this Earth is through.
In Jesus’ Name,
Amen.
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