Scripture Daily

Context No. 464 of 4322 · Psalms

Context · Reflection

Psalms 71:17-24: in context

17God, you have taught me from my youth. Until now, I have declared your wondrous works. 18Yes, even when I am old and gray-haired, God, don’t forsake me, until I have declared your strength to the next generation, your might to everyone who is to come. 19God, your righteousness also reaches to the heavens. You have done great things. God, who is like you? 20You, who have shown us many and bitter troubles, you will let me live. You will bring us up again from the depths of the earth. 21Increase my honor and comfort me again. 22I will also praise you with the harp for your faithfulness, my God. I sing praises to you with the lyre, Holy One of Israel. 23My lips shall shout for joy! My soul, which you have redeemed, sings praises to you! 24My tongue will also talk about your righteousness all day long, for they are disappointed, and they are confounded, who want to harm me.

This is the prayer of an old man. God, you have taught me from my youth, the psalmist says, and to this day I declare your wondrous works. He has had a long life of learning who God is and what God does, decade after decade. And now, as he grows old and gray, he prays about it, and the shape of his prayer is worth noticing, because it is not what we might expect an aging person to ask for.

He does not pray simply to be comforted, or to be spared trouble, or even to live a long time for its own sake. He prays: even when I am old and gray-headed, God, do not forsake me, until I have declared your strength to the next generation, your might to all who are to come. That word until is the heart of it. His remaining purpose, the thing he wants to stay alive long enough to accomplish, is to hand on to the young what he has learned of God over a lifetime. A whole life of watching God's faithfulness has given him something to pass on, and his deepest desire in his final years is not to be cared for but to transmit. His aging has a mission attached to it: tell the ones coming after what God is like. And out of that flows the rest of the psalm, the praise, the harp and the lyre, the redeemed soul singing, the tongue that talks of God's righteousness all day long.

That is a bracing and beautiful vision of growing old, and it presses in two directions. First, it asks how I regard the elderly among me, and whether I am actually receiving the testimony they are trying to hand down before it is gone. And second, it asks about my own later years, whether I picture them as a time mainly to be comforted and looked after, or, like this psalmist, as a calling, to stay faithful and present long enough to declare God's strength to the generation coming up behind me. What has a lifetime taught me about God that I am meant to hand on, and am I living, and aging, with that transmission in view?

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