Remember how short my time is!
For what vanity you have created all the children of man!
What man can live and never see death?
Who can deliver his soul from the power of Sheol?

Ps. 89:47, 48 ESV

This week a brother-in-arms passed away. Ferd and I served as elders in the same church in the 1980s. His departure is a real blow to his family. And we who knew him as a friend and brother are also grieving. Amid the grief, there rises a sense that his death was just wrong. In the foreground of one of the family’s last pictures of Ferd is Lysa TerKeurst’s book, “It’s Not Supposed to Be This Way.”

Isaac Watts in his masterful metrical Psalms translates the latter part of Psalm 89 this way:

Remember, Lord, our mortal state;
How frail our lives! how short the date!
Where is the man that draws his breath,
Safe from disease, secure from death?

Lord, while we see whole nations die,
Our flesh and sense repine and cry; 
Must death forever rage and reign?
Or hast Thou made mankind in vain?

Watts well expresses the Psalmist’s frustration: “Must death forever rage and reign? Or hast Thou made mankind in vain?” It’s not supposed to be this way.

God the Father answered this question in his own Son. “Christ Jesus is the one who died– more than that, who was raised.” (Rom. 8:34 ESV) He defeated sin and death for us. He released us from its rage and reign. He did not make us in vain. And death is naught but the passage into God’s presence because of Jesus.

Here is Judy Hauff’s beautiful setting of Watt’s metrical psalm sung by Bella Voce: